“Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.”
I have spent the last few years embracing hard things. Building up my skills, body, and mind. Going from someone who never went to the gym. To someone who goes multiple times every week. Someone who thought learning was hard and unenjoyable to someone who now loves learning and uses it to self-study and build up a career.
And in this post, I will be breaking down the 6 ideas that made it happen. So you can use them in your own life.
Let’s dive in.
The Dynamics of Motivation
Motivation can stem from many sources, each fuelled by distinctly different reasons.
Inner vs. Outer Motivation
In one situation, we are working for an external reward like money, good grades, or to avoid negative consequences. In the other, we work because want to do. We are driven by our curiosity and interest in the thing itself. We enjoy the activity and the challenge that comes with it. We do it because we love the excitement that comes from going from one level to the next. Like in a video game, where we start to play in easy mode, and as we get better, we increase the difficulty to keep it interesting and fun.
Although both external and internal motivation can be motivating. Internal motivation is what will keep us going in the long run.
When I’m looking back on all the things I’ve ever done. It was on the days where I did the work for the work itself that I didn’t feel the need to do something else. I felt happier, more excited and my results improved. On the other hand, when I did the work for an external reward, I needed a lot of willpower to keep going and starting was extremely hard. I felt drained far more quicker. I got demotivated, inpatient and my results suffered as a result.
What Drives Us to Do Hard Things
The truth is not every task we do will give us that feeling of excitement and fun. That’s okay. That’s part of life. Although, we can work towards changing our perspective on the work we do and increasing the time we have with activities we find intrinsically motivating over time. The question is, how do we keep going in moments of difficulty, nonetheless?
It’s our why. The power behind our desire to improve our skills, our relationships, and our lives.
When we don’t know our why, we will struggle to keep going. Therefore, taking some time to define what we want and why we want it will help us push through the setbacks and the hard work entailed in the journey.
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche
As I was working as a waiter, there were many days were I didn’t felt super motivated to do the work. But by thinking about the “why”, which was to finance my self-study and the service I’m doing for others, the work became easier to do.
Motivation Changes Over Time
Although we might not enjoy a task right now. It doesn’t mean we will feel this way forever. If we put in the effort to get better in the thing we are doing and trying to unlock our curiosity for the work itself by looking at it from different angles. Something that is hard and unenjoyable can become easy and fun over time as our ability to perform the work improves.
As I learned latte art and became better at making coffee, my enjoyment of my work as a waiter increased. Now, I was looking forward to every moment someone ordered a cappuccino because I could put in the effort to make the best coffee possible and practice my skills. This doesn’t mean I now had endless joy and felt fully happy and fulfilled at every shift. But it improved my overall feeling, and it changed something that was mainly driven by extrinsic motivation to being more intrinsically motivating.
Mastery of Focus and Uninterrupted Work
Motivation is useless. It’s only when we learn to channel it through focus toward something meaningful for long, uninterrupted periods of time that its true power unfolds.
Creating a Supportive Environment
Most of us have heard the phrase “You are the average of the 5 people you spend your most time with.” But it’s not only the people you surround yourself with who will drive your ability to focus; it’s the physical work environment you create for yourself that will lead your focus and output.
4 Ways to Create a Productive Work Environment
Find Your Happy Place - Where this is, is at the end something we need to try, test and figure out over time. I worked in coffee shops, at home and in public offices. Turns out I’m most productive at home. So that’s what I’m now optimising for.
Clean up - Remove all the unnecessary clutter from your desk and clean your environment. It’s easier to focus when there are not 100 things searching for our attention.
Go Full Do Not Disturb - Silence all your notifications and put your phone into another room whilst working.
Prepare - Bring a glass of water, your notes and anything else you might need to do the work. With that, you don’t need to get up later and get it, opening up a chance to get distracted.
Dealing With Challenges
No matter how much preparation we do beforehand, in the end, we will need to sit down and do the work. It’s in that moment where feelings of overwhelm and unease start to hit us. We want to flee. Because the things we need to do are unknown to us, they are hard, and we might not know where to start.
But in these moments, we need to remind ourselves that it’s just a temporary state. The feeling of unease will go if we start focusing our attention on taking the first step—writing the first word, creating the first slide, lifting the first weight. The negative feelings will ultimately subside, and momentum will take their place.
If you think back on all the things you’ve already done and how it felt the first time. It will be incomparable.
I still remember how shy and akward I felt when I went to the gym the first time. I had the feeling that everyone was watching my every move. Today, I just do my thing and cannot even think of those feelings anymore.
By reminding ourselves that everything new will feel hard and unattainable at first, breaking it down into little steps, taking one step after the other, and knowing our why, we will eventually reach a level where we won’t be able to even imagine how it felt at the beginning.
It is also okay and often preferable to start really, really small and then increase the load over time. That builds up momentum, and the reward we get by taking the first step fuels the next and the next.
Once we are going, it’s much easier to keep going.
When I’m writing a piece of content, the hardest part is sitting and staring at a blank page, trying to figure out the first word I will write. But once I start to take action and choose one, it starts to flow, and I just keep going.
It’s the small actions taken over long periods of time that will create the remarkable results we want.
Escaping The Need for Instant Gratification
No matter how much work we put into creating an environment that supports focus. Preparing our mind. A why that keeps us moving. Optimising for tasks that come with innate motivation. Our body will still grave the pleasures of cheap dopamine and instant gratification offered by the many tools and services we are surrounded with each day. Social Media, Netflix, and sugary foods.
It’s by choosing boredom over distraction, silence over noise and mindfulness over mindlessness.
By not trying to fill every moment we have with something to do, we train ourselves to not only embrace the emptiness of the moment but start to notice what is right in front of us. We also drain our muscles to not give into our graving to reach for our phone, get distracted, and receive a rush of dopamine when boredom arises. We increase the level of focus we can dedicate our tasks.
10 minutes of meditation can help us save hours being distracted. A silent walk can give us the clarity we need to take the next step. Journalling helps us understand how we think and what we value. Sitting on a bench in the park lets us appreciate the beauty we are surrounded with.
By incorporating some of these habits into our day, especially in the mornings, we start setting the theme for the day: a day with more focus and less distraction, more time doing the thing we want to do, working on becoming the person we envision to be and creating the life we truly desire.
Recap
Know why you do the work.
Work that is hard today can become easy tomorrow.
Prepare your mind for facing the unknown. Remember that feelings of unease will pass.
Create an environment that supports rather than hinders your intentions.
Face boredom to increase the time you can be focused.
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And with that. Remember. Keep growing. Keep striving
I will catch you in the next one!
Piece
Tamino