The Mystery of Missing Motivation

"What motivates you to work on personal projects? How do you stay motivated to work on a project until it’s completed? I want to work on projects but I don’t feel motivated. How do I get motivated to learn?"

These are all comments and questions that I'm all too familiar with from teaching and tutoring people online. I've worked with absolute newbies through to people with multiple years of experience, though the vast majority of folks are students at high school or university. They’re young and enthusiastic. They’re willing to learn. They just lack the motivation. They can’t find the motivation to study their textbooks or start their projects. How are we going to fix that?

If you think you fit into the above demographic then the following is my advice to you, though it might not be the answer you’re looking for. Here goes...

In my opinion if you’re looking for motivation, you’re looking for the wrong thing. If you struggle to get started on projects, or you struggle to complete them. If you struggle to finish your work. You don’t need motivation. You need discipline.

What is discipline you ask? Discipline means getting up and doing it because it needs to be done. Discipline means doing it because no one else is going to do it for you. Discipline is you consistently grasping firmly onto the hand of the responsibility you have and dragging it along with you, no matter how hard it fights back.

Take a moment and think about it. When you hear the stories about how the big tech companies started, are they stories of developers and business folk taking an easy ride on a stress free golf cart whilst listening to recordings of a motivational speaker on YouTube? No. They’re stories of people working 16 hour days, 7 days a week, and sleeping in the office. They’re stories of people who worked hard to get where they are, no matter what you may think of them now. Regardless of the privilege a lot of them have, they had the discipline to keep working every day. They worked because they were the only people who could make their dream become reality.

Do you think Arnold Schwarzenegger or Andrea Shaw were motivated every single day to work out for multiple hours, to push their bodies to the absolute physical limit, and to eat colossal amounts of food over and over again? Michael Jordan, Simone Biles, Lionel Messi, and Serena Williams all have those days where everything sucks and it feels tiresome to try just like you or I, but they kept on going anyway. Discipline keeps them on track because despite the hardships, you need to keep pushing.

It doesn’t have to be that big though. You can find disciplined people everywhere. There are countless parents out there who work tiresome, dull, but relatively risk free and stable jobs knowing they’re providing a better life for their kids. There are single parents and solo-earners out there working multiple jobs to provide for their family. When they wake up they certainly won’t feel motivated to get out of bed every day of the year, but they do it anyway. Hundreds of thousands of Doctors and Nurses kept on doing their jobs through the biggest crisis of our era despite the risks to their own lives. Motivation didn’t swoop in and grab the reins to keep them going. That was their discipline. Discipline reminds them they are the only ones that can do what they are doing.

So halt the search for your missing motivation because it isn’t there for the rest of us either. Take a breath to understand the responsibilities you have, to yourself, your family, your friends, your teachers, or your employer, and get disciplined. Do things, not because you want to do them, but because you need to do them. Without you, they will not be done. It is your sole responsibility to make sure they are done.

Whatever it is you want to start doing, set some time aside on a regular basis to do it. Consistency is the key to discipline. When that time in the day comes, remove all distractions and do it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get much done in the time you set aside. What matters is that you consistently put yourself in a position to be able to do your task. The longer you stay consistent, the more you will find yourself doing. When it gets hard, you forget the excuses and keep on going, because you need to.

To summarise this whole blog post down to just 3 words, I’ll quote the great philosopher Shia Labeouf.

Seriously go do it stop reading this stupid blog post.