If you have ever googled “How to be motivated”, “How to gain motivation to lose weight”, “How to be motivated to exercise”, “How to be motivated to wake early”, How to be motivated to eat healthy”, or “How to be motivated to do any variation of X“, stop in your tracks right now.
This article will give you the only advice on motivation you’ll ever need.
It is so simple. It will save you a ton of time and stop you from procrastinating as you wait for this mystical motivation to arrive.
Get ready for it.
It is so simple, it just might not knock you off your feet. Here it is.
Stop waiting around on motivation to arrive. That’s it.
Stop making excuses and get up and do whatever is is you need to do. It is really that simple.
According to the Oxford dictionary, motivation is “the general desire or willingness of someone to do something”. YourDictionary.com defines it as “the reasons why you are doing something, or the level of desire you have to do something”.
Interestingly, the Google Books graph shows the usage of the word “motivation” to have increased sharply starting in the 1920s, hitting today’s high level of usage in about the 1980s.
“The Roaring 20s” was a time of material wealth in the United States and the growing prosperity and boom led to an eventual meltdown.
As a society moves from satisfying its more basic needs into greater wealth, the emphasis on higher psychological states such as “motivation” are bound to increase.
I’m sure the idea of being “motivated” to do something sounds quite ludicrous and self-indulgent to a worker in the rice fields of Cambodia or a Masai herdsman in the savannah of Tanzania.
Their reason to get up and do hard work everyday just exists. It’s the difference between survival and starvation.
So now to get back to the secret to motivation in today’s America. There is no such thing as a super top secret to motivation.
I am sure there are more nuanced views on this, but too much time spent navel-gazing has never achieved a significant goal.
The “secret” is all in the doing. You just have to decide you want to do something and do it.
Regardless of how you feel or how excited you are about doing it.
See my article on this here, “I don’t feel like doing it: The silent killer of success”.
If you wait around for this mystical motivation to arrive, you are missing out on valuable time to achieve your goals.
We have this belief that if we have enough reasons to do something, we magically will be able to do it. But we have seen clear evidence that this does not work for a large chunk of people.
I’ll give you an example. We all know the myriad reasons to maintain a healthy weight and all the significant benefits of exercise. We are also a fairly vain culture, and we admire the aesthetics of slim, trim bodies.
Yet a majority of Americans are overweight.
Those reasons aren’t enough for most people to be motivated to avoid the buffet and the drive thru. It doesn’t prevent us from downing ice cream, chips, pizza and cookies.
They don’t prevent us from curling up on the couch with our containers of take out while we catch up on the latest shenanigans on “The Walking Dead”.
Our “reasons” for doing things are usually never enough. In the immortal words of Nike, we just have to do it.
Motivation can be ethereal, it comes and goes, slips in and out like a ghost in the night.
Tweet ThisIf we depend solely on motivation to achieve our goals, we will likely come up short.
Sometimes, we just have to grit it out.
As humans, we have a hedonistic nature that is hard to overcome. We love to feel good.
We will often choose the easier, more pleasurable path of relaxation and indulgence, regardless of what reasons we have to do otherwise.
You may never have a general desire or willingness to run 5 miles in the morning in the dead of winter.
You may never see pleasure in waking at 5 am to exercise like professional athletes do.
You may never want to turn off your tv and spend the time cleaning and organizing your living space.
But if you never do those difficult things, neither will you see the reward of doing them.
It is the pleasure of doing, and the rewards of results that keeps us going.
If you sit around waiting for motivation to show up, you just might die waiting.