Back in the Day
I used to dread doing my homework and procrastinated a lot, in fact, I was extremely lazy. However, once I started cracking into a few problems I realized it’s not that bad and actually didn’t want to stop working. I had some sort of motivation pushing me to work. I never realized the depth of this at the time, but there’s a lot of factors at work behind the scenes.
Every Decision You Make Impacts Your Next Decision
Your decisions are actually not that unique. If you took all the decisions you’ve made and analyzed yourself, it’s obvious what you’re going to do next. This point is really basic but it’s fundamental to what I’m about to explain.
Every time you take action in a direction where you don’t feel motivated, for example, let’s say going to the gym, you then have executed in the direction you want to go. This will make it easier to execute the second time, or the third time and so on, since you already have that reference experience.
I call this action taking momentum. If you fail to execute, you will then rationalize it, and create what I call excuse making momentum. This momentum will then contribute to your next decision and so on. It’s important to build action taking momentum right away, as it just makes it easier and easier to execute.
Just Start
The hardest part is actually the initial shift in gears. The first step is always the most difficult one, but it will give you the momentum for the second step. You can read my article on Habit Formation, where I go into more detail about this.
Once you start, you’ll find that you feel more motivated to continue for multiple reasons:
- You invested your time and don’t want to kill your progress
- You have already done it so you know how to do it again
- You created momentum
- Every decision you make impacts your next decision
Physical Features
If you study the body language of someone who is unmotivated, would they appear to have a lot of energy or no energy? Would they talk fast or talk slow? Would they be outgoing or calm? These are rhetorical questions. You can physically see the difference in someone who is motivated vs someone who is unmotivated. This means it starts with your physiology first!
You can see that by taking action it will change your mental state. It’s hard to be unmotivated if you’re body is doing jumping jacks, right? Basically there’s a connection between the actions you take and your thoughts. Your actions have the same impact on your thoughts as your thoughts do on your actions.
My Mindset
When I find that I don’t feel motivated to do something, I actually turn off the part of my brain that makes excuses and I just execute. I actually stop thinking, it’s become a reflex at this point.
I call this Take so much action, you shut off the thinking brain.
I view every action as either a 1 or a 0, and I try to stack as many 1’s as possible. It’s important to not look at result but the fact that you took action. Every single time you take action, it’s a 1.
Note that I said Take Action not achieve a result. Don’t judge yourself on the result, judge yourself on the fact that you executed.
Conclusion
The idea behind this article is that there is a clear connection between your actions and your motivation. There’s a huge misconception that people think you need to be motivated to take action. This is not true! You can take action to become motivated and it’s exactly how I create a lot of my motivation.
All in all, I hope you can apply this to your life and find some success with it. If you made it this far, thanks for reading this article!
I wish the best for you and good luck!
