Why you don’t need motivation
What is motivation
Motivation is defined as the general desire or willingness to perform an activity, act, or behavior. This is also understood as the reasons for doing the things you do. Whatever you want to do in life, or anything you want to accomplish will include some reason, desire, or willingness to get it done.
Two types of Motivation
There is extrinsic motivation, those account for external factors such as money, praise, and other similar facets. Whereas Intrinsic motivation is derived from inner authentic reasons developed from within. Some intrinsic factors may be for honorable reasons such as caring for family, making a difference in your own life or the lives of others.
Regardless the type of motivation you rely on to get you there, those are your reasons for doing the things you look forward to and no one, absolutely no one should be allowed to have an opinion for the reasons you do.
Why you don’t need motivation
It is easy to accept the notion that there must be reasons for doing the things you do and for having the urge to set these goals for yourself. Mainly we believe we are beings of purpose, which we are, but that’s because we are beings of purpose we therefore need to have a desire or willingness to perform tasks each and every day. That could not be further from the truth.
You can have several reasons for getting up out of bed, going to the gym, and writing your paper today, but that’s the problem. Motivation can be abundant today, but then gone the next. Those reasons do not last every day and that’s okay, they don’t need to.
You don’t need motivation everyday to still be able to get your work done or tasks completed for the day. What you need is discipline. Discipline doesn’t care if you’re tried, if you’ve had a long day, or if that same reason doesn’t exist today. Discipline only cares about the task at hand and the goals you want to accomplish today.
Each day can be different, some days won’t be as great as others and that is also okay. That’s why discipline is so important. You want to develop a disciplined lifestyle for sustainable growth, because growth is all about making bits of progress every single day. You can get there with discipline, regardless of the type of day you’re having and that lifestyle will take you exactly where you want to be.
What is discipline
Discipline is defined as the system of rules of conduct. This is important, because you will need to develop your own system to obey in order to engage in conduct that will produce the outcome you most desire, even on the days you don’t have that desire.
For example, I myself have to be at work by 9 in the morning, but I have an hour long commute just to get to work, which is prolonged to an hour and a half in the evening traffic. The issue is that I want to continue my training and fitness journey and in all honesty, I have zero motivation to go to the gym at 6am or even after work, yet I am up by 5:30am every single weekday just to make it happen.
The reason I am able to get out of bed so early and manage to make it to the gym is not because of my desire to workout that early, but due to discipline. The discipline of working towards my goals. This has become my own system that I must perform in order to achieve the results I want and there’s simply no way around it. Some mornings my workouts are intense while others are just enough to make the rudimentary progress I need for the day, either way they get me one inch and one day closer to where I want to be without ever having to rely on motivation. Motivation and desire can be there today, but discipline is forever.
