Whenever you’re having a hard time coming to grips with a personal (as opposed to interpersonal) challenge, it is worth asking yourself, “Compared to what?”
One of the most common challenges people face is finding the motivation to do difficult things in their lives.
The question then is, “I am struggling with motivation…compared to whom?”
Without an example to base yourself off of, you’re simply drowning in a soup of doubt and anguish.
Why not compare to someone who has it down?
They say that comparison is the thief of joy but why does it have to be necessarily so? Why can’t envy be a panic about incompletion? Someone else has the motivation that you lack. Why not learn from them? Why must we automatically assume that comparison involves tearing down that person, stealing from them, or getting down on yourself for not having what they have? It would be better to simply feel the panic, deep down, that their success provokes for you. You are not in a conversation with them. You are simply provoked by something about them. It’s a chance to go deeper with yourself.
One of my favorite, earlier listens to Stefan Molyneux (I got into his work in 2007!) was the seminal podcast Procrastination, released in 2008. He links procrastination to having all of your time programmed by your parents as a child. This self-direction muscle was never developed for you and as a result you flounder as an adult.
I want to go back to that “compared to whom?” question.
As a parent, I have not made the trespass of programming my kid’s time. Of course, there is a difference between offering support and structure versus pinning your striver vanity onto your kid and driving them to do things they don’t want to do. I have had the opportunity, time and again, to go to various “play groups” or hear about them secondhand from the wife. Over and over, I observe children, before they’ve been corrupted and demoralized by public schooling, engaging in spontaneous play for their edification and enjoyment. They haven’t suffered from adult “demotivation” or procrastination.
When you’re all inundated in your woes and self-talk around motivation, you ought to consider anchoring to the experience of a child at play. Does your life have to be all that different? Or did you have the “play” propagandized out of you? When did you give up your creative spark? Don’t you have to go back to that point and take it back?
Knowing this, motivation is no longer an elusive, happenstance state that blows in by chance. You no longer have to suffer some murky writer’s block or a bear trap of doubt slowly closing over your mind. Motivation is a choice to offer pushback on the voices you internalized that snuffed out your spark. It is a choice to connect with the aspects of yourself that can play and create. You are no longer rudderless, adrift in moods and hedonic pleasure cycles. But you have the choice: do the right thing by honoring yourself or drown out your conscience in the commercial blabber programming that the world is full of.
Scroll social media and react to others or go within and get aligned.
It’s not “demotivation”.
It’s a choice.
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Looking for something in a similar vein? Try my video on failing your goals.
