Motivation Sucks

Many of us don’t do the things we want to do or the things we know we should do because we don’t feel like it. But guess what?! We’re never going to feel like it. Thus, in order to succeed in any and all areas of our lives, we must be willing to do what’s necessary and not what we feel like doing. Most of us don’t wake up feeling like going to work, but we go it anyways. Most of us don’t feel like going to the gym, but we go anyways. You know why? Because we make them non-negotiable. Whether or not we feel like it, we do it anyways.

The waiting for motivation to live our lives make us stuck and worst of all, make us embrace disempowering personality traits such as lazy, procrastinators, unmotivated, “I can’t, that’s just what I’m like”. If we only stopped paying attention to our feelings and payed more attention to the fact that our brain is designed to make us avoid everything disturbing or uncomfortable, we’d be held hostage to motivation a lot less often. As we lack everything which we seek, if we fall in the habit of seeking motivation, we’re doomed.

Despite what many of us think, our personality and our lives aren’t determined by great accomplishments, but by the thousands of little decisions we make every minute of everyday. We all have great ideas on a daily basis and the habit of hesitating on expressing them, taking them out of our heads onto a piece of paper or executing on them immediately is where the ball starts to roll. The moment we have an idea and we hesitate our brain perks up to investigate why the hesitation is occurring. If there’s a reason for us to hesitate and hold back on sharing our idea, the brain immediately goes looking for what this reason is. This is called STRESS. As our brain is extremely powerful, if there isn’t an apparent reason for the hesitate, it will come up with some just to get us out of stress. Needless to say, that this will cause the stress to increase nevertheless and a cycle of self doubt has kicked off.

In order to inhibit this shenanigans in which we all indulge, there are two strategies I love. These strategies complement each other depending on the situation. The first one is The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins where when you have an idea or you’re drawn to do something - express your opinion, strike up a conversation with someone or get our ass our of the couch and into the gym - we count down from 5 to 1 and just DO IT. No thinking, no contemplation, no hesitation. Fuck it, do it! The second strategy is for when real shit happens - we lose a big client, a relative died, we break a limb or we’re dumped. When some monumental shit fall on us and we’re caught pants down, there’s only one thing left to do: mark 5 minutes on the clock to be pissed off, anger, frustrated, miserable, grief, punch a hole in the wall with your head, and when the alarm goes off we’re done. Whether we feel like it or not, we are fucking done with feeling negative. We just have to suck it up and start being - not acting, but being - the happiest sucker, grieving, dumped, unemployed motherfucker on earth. End of story. Obviously, 5 minutes might be 5 hours, 5 days if someone died, but it can’t be 5 months or years, or else this will drain our lives vital energy. This 5 Minute Rule can be found in great depth in the book The Miracle Equation by Hal Elrod.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1…GO DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW! Peace!

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Success is a Matter of Perspective