Myths And Tales From Adulthood: Motivation

Motivation is a myth.

Listen up big boy, I’m going to start this one strong. I don’t believe in motivation. I have a strong opinion of disbelief towards the notion of motivation. It just doesn’t exist to me anymore.

I guess the concept of motivation itself isn’t a sham but saying that you need motivation to work: bogus. It’s just a hoax, and the inkling of truth in it is not sustainable by all means.

Motivation is your overall desire to do something. And you know what you’re not gonna have sometimes? That’s right, desire.

The more sustainable, more tangible option is self-discipline.

So what is self-discipline?

Besides being something that I still struggle with personally, discipline is your ability to do something regardless of how you feel about it.

You can’t rely on motivation because you can’t possibly be motivated to do everything. Motivation won’t get you out of bed at five in the morning, motivation isn’t going to make you fit in time in your schedule to workout, and motivation certainly won’t stop you from watching the new episode of The Good Place even though you have a quiz tomorrow. That’s not weirdly specific at all.

In brief, motivation won’t change your behaviour over time in any way. It certainly didn’t mine.

Writer Samuel Thomas Davies says about self-discipline, ‘Self-discipline is about leaning into resistance. Taking action in spite how you feel. Living life by design, not by default. But most importantly, it’s acting in accordance with your thoughts not your feelings.’

I still struggle with self-discipline. I mean, I should have written this blog two days ago but I just didn’t feel like it. And that’s where we all fall. Priotirsing feeling over thought. I don’t take that as a general rule, but when it comes to work ethic ‘acting in accordance with your thoughts and not your feelings’ is how you’ll get anywhere.

I cannot count the numbers of projects I started because I was so inspired and motivated to just work, and it only took maybe a week before I inexplicably stopped working on said projects. These projects are now abandoned victims of relying on motivation to get stuff done.

Self-discipline is just one aspect of behaviour change which we all should strive for.

Thomas Frank says in this video, ‘Behaviour change [...] is the big goal for most of us, we wanna change our behaviour to be more aligned with our goals and long-term desires’.

I want to end this by saying that feeling motivated isn’t necessarily bad, as a matter of fact, it ain’t bad at all. Using it as a crutch to achieve your goal is where you’re going to break said crutch and fall face first into disappointment.

And with that, I want to direct you to the Thomas Frank video I mentioned before about self-discipline for 6 ways to start practising it in your day.

DFTBA.