003 | Motivation is Overrated.
Try This Instead.
In the self-development world, there’s a common, yet pervasive lie that is completely destroying your ambition.
“You just need to get motivated.”
We frequently seek motivation by devouring TED talks, Winston Churchill quotes, and Rocky films until we can finally muster up the vigor to actually do something.
It’s talked about as a missing ingredient to a tasteless potion, or the final piece of a shapeless puzzle- as if the absence of this ‘sacred oil of life’ is the only thing keeping you stuck.
If ONLY you were motivated, so they say, everything would fall into place. You’d stay on track with your nutrition, start the business, write the novel, and stop procrastinating. You’d finally become the person you’ve wanted to be.
This is a lie. And thank goodness it is.
Not because motivation is useless, but because it’s unreliable. It’s a liquid that suddenly fills our porous spirit then drains itself without notice. Building a foundation of life atop this liquid is a guaranteed way to stay stuck.
Instead of motivation, this essay is focused on orientation. Here are three truths to keep you steady when your feelings refuse to stay upright.
In most cases, motivation only shows up after you start.
If motivation were a prerequisite to starting something new, few people would ever begin in the first place. Many people want to feel motivated first, but motivation is a reaction to action, not vice versa.
Your brain rewards forward movement. If you’re unmotivated, chances are high you haven’t actually started yet.
Action creates clarity. Clarity creates drive. Procrastination kills it.
Motivation is a feeling to be felt, not a currency to be collected.
Motivation is emotional. It’s tied to our biology and psychology- it’s a result of our mood, thoughts, sleep quality, weather, and a thousand minute details in between.
When you act off of motivation, your progress is defined by your emotional state. Some days, you’re unstoppable. Other days, you can’t even start.
If consistency is key, why would anyone let themselves be affected by something as unpredictable as emotion?
The truth is, the people who seem motivated aren’t succeeding because they constantly feel motivated, but because they don’t wait to feel anything in the first place.
The motivation you try to spend, or worse, ‘save for later’, is as logical as trying to catch water with your hands- you’ll fail every time.
Feeling unmotivated is an avoidance strategy in disguise.
Next time you say you’re “just not motivated” to do something hard, ask yourself:
Are you overwhelmed? Unsure of how to start? Afraid of failure? Unable to confront your shortcomings?
Framing this issue as a lack of motivation feels safe, and it hands your agency over to the Gods of motivation, who will strike you with a brief surge of willpower when they so please.
What’s braver, however, is to admit your resistance and do it anyway.
To combat these three truths, I’ll leave you with one strategy that takes a minute to understand, and a decade to master.
You can lower the bar, but never drop it.
When the task in front of you feels daunting, the solution is not to quit, but to shrink what’s expected so you keep showing up. Thinking in binary terms (all or nothing) is the invisible poison that kills consistency and destroys your dreams.
Do less, but not nothing, because momentum is the priority. 5 minutes of movement beats skipping the whole workout. Writing one paragraph beats the version of you that failed to pick up the pencil or open the laptop.
The best way to kill your habits is to say “I’ll just start tomorrow”. That bar will get heavier and heavier until you decide to pick it up again- so don’t drop it.
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The day I decided to write this post, I had no motivation. I knew it would be ironic and hypocritical to push my writing to tomorrow, so I gave myself no choice but to write.
I sat down and opened my laptop, and I started. In retrospect, even though the essay took two hours to write, the hardest part was opening the file. This isn’t because starting was hard, but because quitting is so easy and tempting. Don’t fall for this trap.
Looking into the long term, your progress isn’t built on a few sporadic days of heroic achievement. It’s built on a years-long, continuous streak of unsexy, unmotivated, non-zero effort.
But this tiny effort builds and compounds, and this repeated effort slowly becomes a part of your identity. Aristotle’s perspective on this idea has stood the test of time, noticing how
“we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
We build our habits, and in turn, they build us. It’s really that simple.
In short, there’s no perfect speech, World War 2 quote, or movie clip that will create real change inside you.
Change doesn’t happen by searching for motivation. Motivation fades, discipline remains.
So choose the latter, and choose it every day.
The former gets too much credit.
-KPG