How to Get Motivated All the Day || 4 Tips To Get Motivated
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| How to Get Motivated All the Day |
We're going to learn about four simple tricks to stay motivated every single day now let's begin
Motivation is not some magical solution
to all your problems it won't guarantee you that promotion it won't stop you from failing a test a lot of people think a little motivation means success will just fall into their lap but that isn't how it works you see motivation isn't the answer it isn't the end point it's where you start think about your goals like a road trip okay finding motivation is like choosing where you want to go and why just because you pick the destination doesn't mean you'll always get there you still have to put in work by driving the long hours and paying for gas you'll still have setbacks like blowing a tire or sitting in traffic but if you pick the right destination for the right reasons you can power through any obstacle now of course it won't be easy each obstacle can leave you wondering why you took this grueling trip in the first place and at some point you'll feel like turning around you might think about even giving up you might get so tired that you drive somewhere closer and easier instead.
This happens to so many people because they don't start the right way they don't think enough about where they're going in fact some people just pick a random destination with no clue why they chose it. Even if they do make it somehow these people quickly realize it isn't really where they wanted to go.
So today I want to talk about motivating yourself the right way from choosing meaningful goals to persevering through failure. These simple tricks will help you follow a path toward your definition of lifelong success.
No 1. Your goals
This is a trap that tons of people fall into especially if they're just finishing high school or college now you might have an idea of how your life's going to play out but is it yours is it what you want or did someone else choose it for you.
For years a close friend of mine said he was going to be I'm a doctor. He initially came up with the idea and middle school and his parents immediately latched on to it. He got good grades and excelled in science so naturally it seemed like a perfect fit whenever anyone asked his parents would brag about how their son wanted to be a neurosurgeon. MY friend eventually started telling people the same thing after graduating high school he went to a college with a great pre-med program and started browsing potential medical schools. My friend thought he had his entire life planned out he was so sure he had found the path that would make him happy but did he in reality he was trying to achieve his parents definition of success.
He adopted their goals as his own he chose a destination and a good one but he never knew why he wanted to get there. Finally, after years of reaching for someone else's
dreams he sat down and thought about where his life was headed it didn't take long for him to realize. He was going the wrong way.
So what's the point of this story well you're surrounded by influences and expectations everyone around you will have a vision of who you are but really no one knows you better than you so don't spend your life trying to live up to their expectations or
run from their criticisms. You shouldn't choose a path because people say you should your motivation has to come from you it should stem from your talents your interests and passions. It should represent what actually makes you happy.
Now I'm not telling you to ignore your family or community but you won't have the perseverance to achieve your goals
If they aren't yours so here's the first trick to staying motivated set aside a few minutes each day to own your goals and during that time consider where they come from. Remind yourself how and why you chose them and not only will you feel more pride in who you are but you'll also know you're heading in the right direction
No2. Envision the Details
When you imagine your future do you ever think about the little details now I don't mean that vague fantasy that people have about living in a giant mansion with their million. There's nothing wrong with dreaming about wealth and fame but more often than not these aren't actually goals. They're just things that you think about for fun you can't figure out a plan to get there because there doesn't really exist. This is what separates a goal and a dream I often hear these terms used interchangeably but there is a difference dreams are flexible and easy they capture imaginary feelings and actions you might dream about flying or walking through walls my pet doesn't mean you're going to some dreams inspire you to chase after something but your goals actually do the chasing goals are concrete steps towards something you want.
They have deadlines costs and obstacles. They can and should exist in real life. Yet, people don't treat them that way they act like their goals are crazy and possible ideas So, they seem imaginary but they don't have to stay that way you can motivate yourself every day by visualizing your goals picture them down to the smallest detail.
If you want to ace a test imagine yourself in the room staring at the paper now think about the feel of the pencil in your hand and the seat on your back. This is the same technique countless professional athletes
use before major competitions. They envision themselves winning and then do everything they can to bring that vision to life but this trick isn't limited to short-term goals. You can do the same thing with your future ask yourself as many questions as you can think of what is your daily routine look like who do you spend most of your time with. What kind of furniture do you own you know these questions may sound pointless but each one gives you direction and drive you don't have to ask every question at once and you don't have to know all the answers by simply forcing yourself to be specific you can turn vague ideas into real achievable goals.
No 3. The Power of Expectations
And now I mentioned before that other people's expectations could lead you down.
The wrong path they can make you feel lost or unfold you might spend years doing something just to avoid letting other people down but if you already know where you're headed expectations can also work wonders after you decide on your goals tell someone about it, explain to a close friend or family member where you're going and why express your vision and the steps you're taking to make it a reality all too often.
I hear about someone hiding their dreams some stash away their goals on a secret to-do list others say they won't show anyone until it's 100 percent perfect which it rarely ever is either way they're too embarrassed to show the world what they're passionate about but hiding their goals may be holding them back when you explain your goals you turn them into physical deadlines. If no one knows what you're doing you can get away with not doing it so you should create that expectation you need someone to expect you to finish when you say you will ideally find someone who will check in and ask about your progress and make sure it's someone whose opinion matters to you that way you won't want them to see you give up no one likes to admit to a loved.
One that they failed or fallen behind instead you want to show up with a finished product and make them proud it's important however, that you don't get carried away this trick only works if you open up to one or two people otherwise you can actually lose motivation when you tell everyone that will listen you sometimes assume an identity that isn't yours to say you want to write a book lyou're having a hard time staying motivated. So you decide to tell a bunch of people about it. Now those people will unconsciously think of you as an author suddenly you've adopted a new title and reputation without doing much of anything. So why invest the time and effort into earning something that you already have.
I see this all the time through social media people seem more interested in getting attention and respect than accomplishing their actual goals to make sure you don't fall into this trap till only one person you care about and that way their expectations
will fuel your success not give you an excuse to be lazy.
No 4. Resurrecting Motivation
I wish I could tell you you'll feel motivated all the time but I can't even if you maximize every trick on this list you'll eventually feel lazy and unproductive. No matter how ambitious you are there's just no avoiding these moments of weakness. Most people let this negativity stop them from pursuing their goals they expect things to be smooth and easy but life obviously doesn't work that way every path you take will be filled with failure and frustration but here's the thing you know these obstacles are coming sure you don't know what or when or why but it's going to happen eventually something will make you feel like giving up.
So why not prepare yourself the fourth trick to stay motivated every day is to figure out ahead of time how to resurrect your motivation. Create a plan to navigate through your darkest laziest moments while everyone's plan will look a little different. There's one key thing you need find a way to accept your failures whatever happen and you can't change that if you spent the last two hours watching TV instead of working don't sit around feeling guilty about it instead remind yourself that every second is a chance to wipe the slate clean. Learn from your mistakes and try again.
Your outcomes in life are often a lagging measure of your habits.
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| How to Get Motivated All the Day |
We think the thing that needs to change
is the bank account or the test score or the number on the scale but actually the thing that needs to change are the habits that precede those outcomes. Rather than making the goal the default, the thing that you focus on almost exclusively
let's make the system the default and then only check in on the goal occasionally to see if we're moving in the right direction.
Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment it's actually not the thing that you're looking for.
We think the results are the thing that needs to change but it's actually the process behind the results. Like if you have a messy room, let's say your bedroom is mess and you set a goal to clean that room you can get motivated and do it for two or three hours and then you turn around you have a clean room for now. If you don't change the messy habits that led to a dirty room in the first place then you turn around two weeks later and you have a messy room again. And so actually you don't need a clean room you need better cleaning habits and then your room will always be clean.
You don't need to lose weight you need better eating habits and then your weight will always be around where you want it to be. You don't need more money you just need better financial habits and then you'll always have enough money to manage the thing that comes up. I think that's one of the reasons why small habits matter so much they don't necessarily transform your life overnight, right away, like doing one pushup does not transform your body but it does cast a vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. Or meditating for one minute might not give you an immediate sense of calm in your life
but it does cast a vote for being a meditator.
The real goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to write a book, the goal is to become a writer. Because once you have adopted that identity you're really not even pursuing behavior change anymore you're just kind of acting in alignment with the type of person you already see yourself to be.
It's kind of like true behavior change is really identity change because once you've changed that internal story it's way easier to show up each day, you're not even really motivating yourself that much to do it
you're just like this is who I am now. There's sort of this like yo-yo effect you know, like someone trains for a half marathon and then they run the race and that race motivated them to train for the last three or four months. And then the race ends and they stop and take a week off than a week turns into two weeks than two months and so on and then they turn around like four months later like, man, I haven't ran in months like I need to sign up for a new race or something. Because if it's all about the goal as soon as the goal is achieved you don't have that motivating you anymore.
But if instead it's about being a runner
then even once, even once you finish the race you still have a reason to show up again the next week because you're like, well, I just, that's what I do is I run, - that's who I am. - Right?
And so I think that that's a more... in pretty much any domain true long-term thinking is really goalless thinking. It's much more about being that person, developing that identity, following that system and then you just happen to realize your potential along the way. So what you come to realize is that your habits reinforce a particular identity
and sometimes this can be positive and sometimes it can be negative the story could be things like,.I'm bad at math or I'm terrible at remembering people's names
or I'm not good at remembering directions.
And all of those stories... that's just an internal story that you tell yourself but each time you have an experience that reinforces that the story gets solidified.
And so I think the method, the takeaway here is that every action you take is kind of like a vote for the type of person that you want to become. And if you can master the right actions, if you can master the right habits then you can start to cast votes for this new identity.this desired person that you want to be. Good habits become easy habits.when you can learn to find joy in delaying gratification. There's no rush build for the long term guys. It's as if they're standing at the foot of a mountain, they can see the summit they can see the thing they want, I want to make an impact what they don't see is the mountain.
This large immovable object you can go up fast, you can go up slow I don't care
but there's still a mountain. What they don't underst tandis that life, that relationships and career fulfillment are a journey. There's no app for that. I got nothing you've got to go through the slow plotting, annoying, meandering process called career and life.
Everything in my life, when something got hard, I quit. I wasn't great at reading, I wasn't great at writing so I just quit.
I couldn't catch on as fast as you, I had to work harder than you, so I quit. Like man, if I could just go that distance, that extra mile to just go, just to finish I want to feel victory for me wasn't winning, it was just finishing.
This is one of the things that's challenging about building better habits is that they're very easy to dismiss on any given day right like what is the difference between eating a burger and fries for lunch or eating a salad
not a whole lot on any given day your body looks basically the same in the mirror, the scale hasn't really changed. It's really easy to dismiss it in your mind and say, "Oh, this is kind of insignificant" but you know you turn around 2 or 5 or 10 years later and you realize, "Oh, wow, those daily choices really did add up." It's just much harder to see on a granular basis. The cost of your good habits is in the present and the cost of your bad habits is in the future. And the fact that we prioritize the present over the future
ends up making a lot of habit change difficult for that reason.
The ultimate form of intrinsic gratification
is a reaffirmation of your desired identity. So if you... if your desired identity is I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts or I'm an athlete. Every time you're doing a squat literally, you can be in the middle of the rep and you're already getting gratified
because you're acting in alignment with the type of person you want to be. It's like, "Oh, I just did that rep, I didn't miss this workout, that feels good" Umm, now, I do think it takes a little while to get to that point where that actually feels like you.
You know, you can imagine somebody goes to the gym for the first week or the first month they don't quite identify that way yet
because they haven't spent enough time there. Steven Pressfield I think it's in "The War of Art" he has a piece where he talks about a wolf and how the wolf develops a territory right? But the only way that it develops a territory is by being there, by walking around the terrain every day and then it starts to feel like this is mine, this is my home.
And he talks about writers doing that by like you make the chair and the computer and the desk in your office your territory, becomes your terrain. And I think that is true for most habits too like when you walk into the gym for the first time you feel very uncertain it's not your territory, you don't feel like it's your terrain. But once you show up again for a week or month or year at some point you cross this invisible threshold where it starts to feel like, "Yeah, this is for me" or "I belong" and that I think... once you've crossed that stage it becomes more likely that you can get that kind of reaffirmation of your identity and start to instantly feel gratified.
But there are other things that you can do in the short term to feel more gratified while you're working on those habits. So here's just one little tactic, let's say that you're either trying to work out or build a habit of meditating or something and so each time you do your habit of meditating for five minutes you have this little jar of marbles and you've got like 100 marbles in there and 90 are red and 10 are blue and after each instance of your habit you walk over and you pull a marble out of the jar. And if you pull out one of the 90 then nothing happens it's just like a pat on the back, good job you did what you're supposed to. But if you pull out one of the 10 then you get some kind of reward, that's exciting to you maybe.
You get to watch Netflix for an hour and not feel guilty or go for a walk outside or take a bubble bath or buy yourself a new jacket, whatever it is, like something that that feels rewarding. And what you just did was you introduce an element of immediate gratification and of like surprise and delight to the whole process. And so... yeah, that first week when you're meditating you still might not identify as a meditator or you still might not have a sense of calm watch over your life. But you have this other interesting thing that is rewarding right away that maybe gets you to stick with it while you're waiting for those long-term rewards to accumulate. Well, so we do have and this definitely plays an important role in habits we do have a bias toward the present and that makes sense, right? That example I gave about like finding a berry bush you know, 100 meters away.
Well, you should in fact go get the food that's close by and not the food that's on the other side of the mountain because that just makes logical sense, you'd rather have it now especially when we were not in modern society, right? For 99.999% of human history we're just trying to survive like every other animal. And so, you should try, you should prioritize immediate food, immediate shelter, immediate water, immediate safety. And in fact our brains are wired to do that. But modern society is a whole different ballgame because we have all these things that actually you should prioritize delayed outcomes.
So you go to college now and then you graduate in four years .You save for retirement today and then you retire decades from now. You show up at work this week and then you get a paycheck in a month. And so, it's actually like there are all kinds of things we do in modern society that require you to delay gratification
and that runs a little counter to what our wiring is or what our pref- biological preference is. There's a sort of an a misalignment of rewards that often happens with habits. So there's an immediate outcome, an immediate reward
and then an ultimate reward. And for your bad habits, one reason bad habits stick so readily that they they form so easily is because bad habits often the immediate reward is favourable. Right? Like what's the immediate reward of eating a doughnut
it's kind of great. It's sweet, it's sugary, it tastes good. It's only the ultimate reward
if you repeat that habit for 6 months or a year or two years that is unfavorable.
Meanwhile, good habits are often the exact opposite the immediate reward of going to the gym or going to the gym for like a week
isn't really that great your body's probably sore. You don't have much to show for it, your body looks the same,the weight hasn't really changed but if you stick to that for 6 months or a year or two years then the ultimate reward is favorable.
How to Get Motivated Prove By Phycology:
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| How to Get Motivated All the Day |
A study was conducted in 1998 at Columbia University by a professor Claudia M Mueller. She took a large group of fifth graders and had them work on numerous puzzles by themselves. Now these were very challenging puzzles but regardless of how well each child did he or she was told that they scored very well that they did better than most of the other kids, afterwards half of these students were told that they scored high because they worked hard while the other half were told that it was all because they were smart and gifted. Then they presented each student with three more types of puzzles to work on easy ones, medium difficulty ones and extremely
challenging ones. And what they found was very interesting the students who were
told that they did well because they were smart spent the majority of their time on the easy puzzles they spent almost no time on the extremely challenging puzzles and spent much less time overall trying to solve any of the puzzles which was a sign of lower levels of motivation and to top it all off when asked whether or not they enjoyed the experiment they said that it wasn't that
fun for them.
On the other hand the students who were told that they did well because they worked hard spent the majority of their time focused on the harder puzzles they also spent a lot more time overall attempting to solve any of the puzzles which was a sign of an increase in levels of motivation and to top it all off after the experiment they said that they actually enjoyed the entire experience.
So what can we learn from this study well there's a concept called the locus of control which is essentially the degree to which you
believe you have control over your life the kids who were told that they did well because they were smart and gifted were led to believe in what's called an external locus of control. They were led to believe that factors outside of what they could control where the reason they did well right you can't control whether or not you're born smart.
On the other hand the kids were told
they did well because they worked hard started to believe in what's called an internal locus of control they believed that it was factors they controlled that led to their outcomes it was their hard work and their extra effort that allowed them to do well on the puzzles right because how much work you put into something is something that you have complete control over now
Studies on the locus of control like this one have found time and time again that having an internal locus of control is the key to staying motivated you must feel like you have control over your life and that you are responsible for the things that happen to you. If you want to feel motivated all of the time I saw this happen with my own eyes back in the day when I was in charge of a sales team this wasn't retail sales or car sales this was old-school door-to-door sales which has one of the highest turnover
rates most people only last a week before quitting see you need to be an extremely motivated individual to be able to face hundreds and hundreds of.rejections every single day before someone even considers buying something.from you now over time I was able to develop a keen eye for who would.actually last who I should spend more time and energy training all I had to do was ask a simple question when a new salesperson on my team was confronted
with their first bad day a day in which they made no sales I would ask him why do you think you made no sales today and I would see how they would respond if they blame things like the weather the fact that it's a weekend and nobody wants to be bothered on the weekends or because it was the neighborhood I would instantly know that they wouldn't last because they had an external locus of control they believed that the reason they couldn't make any sales was because of factors outside of their control and because of this they spent less time.knocking on doors which was ultimately the real reason why they weren't making.any sales that's the curse of having an external locus of control when you feel
like nothing you do matters you stop working you stop trying bcuz what's the point of trying when the worlds conspiring against you right.
So how do we adopt an internal locus of control so that we can start feeling motivated all of the time well they found that the best way to do so is by
simply solving problems in your own life and then taking some time in appreciating the fact that it was your actions that solve this problem I'll.give you an example just to make things more clear let's say you're someone who struggles with falling asleep so you go do some research and you find out if you get some more sunlight in the morning if you only use your bed for sleeping and if you install a blue light filter on your phone that should drastically increase your to sleep faster.
When bedtime comes around you do all of those things and lo and behold you find yourself sleeping 15 minutes faster than before when you notice this improvement you need to say to yourself wow it was because of the changes I made because of the effort I put in that I am now able to sleep better it's that simple build up that belief that you are in control of your destiny that you have an internal locus of control and you will never have issues with motivation in your life again
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