Introduction
Picture the scene: you’re sitting on the sofa, warm, eating your favourite food. Suddenly your alarm goes off, you pick up your phone to check the alarm and…
It’s time to go to the gym.
Immediately your mind starts racing, looking for reasons to put it off another day. ‘Well it looks cloudy out there, I wouldn’t want it to rain’, or ‘I have work to do in two hours, there’s really no time for exercise’.
I know this because this is what I do, and I don’t think I’m alone.
Whenever it’s time to do something uncomfortable our minds start to think of ‘reasons’ we should put it off.
In an attempt to combat this and inspire ourselves to perform the behaviour, we look for motivation, often externally.
You know the type — the motivational YouTube videos, TED talks or our favourite Eminem song.
But this type of motivation is not sustainable. Watching a motivational video may work as a one off, but it rarely works over a longer period.
After all, how many times can you listen to the same Rocky speech?
So if YouTube isn’t the answer — what is? Discipline and the spark, the life-changing feedback loop.
A Life-Changing Feedback Loop
Everything Starts with Discipline
One of the most common reasons we struggle to find motivation is the belief that motivation is the prerequisite for success, a state of mind that is /required/ to achieve anything.
“Motivation, broadly speaking, operates on the erroneous assumption that a particular mental or emotional state is necessary to complete a task.” - Zbyhnev (Wisdomination)
But this simply isn’t true.
We can perform behaviours irrespective of whether we feel motivated.
Think back to the time you did something without needing motivation, like a university assignment the day before the deadline.
You didn’t wait all semester for motivation to suddenly appear the day before it was due. You had no choice but to do the work as the deadline approached, and so you forced yourself to be disciplined.
The good news is that you don’t necessarily have to be perfectly disciplined every second of every day, however, discipline is required to start.
Discipline is best used as a starting point because, like motivation, energy and focus, discipline diminishes throughout the day — so using it at the right time is essential for success.
If we practice discipline at the start of the day, we can use it as the spark to start the feedback loop.
The Spark
In his book The Motivation Myth, Jeff Haden proposes that motivation is not the spark, that is, the thing that kickstarts our productivity. Instead, he suggests that the completion of tasks is what motivates us, “motivation is a result, not a precondition”.
This is the feedback loop.
If discipline is what gets us started, completing tasks is what keeps us going. The more progress we make, the more progress we will make, as progress feeds motivation.
As we tick things off our to-do list, no matter how small, we begin to feel motivated — because we took action. Despite the numerous distractions pulling us from our task, we got started anyway.
This slight shift in mindset can be life-changing.
After a few hours or days of using small successes to fuel motivation, you begin to chase the dopamine hits you receive when you make progress.
Scale this over a longer period and before you know it you’re well on the way to achieving your goals, without ever thinking about them.
All you thought about were the small, day-to-day tasks you had to complete.
Instead of measuring yourself against your long-term goal, measure yourself against the work you could have done today. This is how you make consistent progress, and perhaps not coincidentally, this is also how you achieve long-term happiness.
If you compare yourself with the work you realistically could have done today, and you have done it, you are successful.
Use the opportunity of small daily completions to fuel your progress and happiness.
“The road to a target, to a goal, or to a finish line is filled with countless hours of work and determination and sacrifice… and countless opportunities to feel good about what you have accomplished, each and every day along the way.” - Jeff Haden (The Motivation Myth)
Discipline and the Spark
Arguably the hardest part of this process is finding the discipline required to start the loop, so if you take one thing away today, make sure it’s this:
Start every single day by completing a small but meaningful task, go for the low-hanging fruit. Don’t concern yourself with the long-term goal, or even other goals that day. Solely focus on one task, and use the feeling of success to carry you forward. Build the momentum.
By practising a small amount of discipline every morning you find a small spark of motivation, motivation that can be carried throughout the day — and if you find yourself struggling at any point, simply take a break, complete a small task and rediscover your motivation.
Thank You
If you made it this far thank you — I appreciate you taking the time to read my work and sincerely hope you enjoyed it. If you would like to continue reading, I’ve included a few of my most popular articles below.
Thanks again,
Rob
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