Discipline is much more important than motivation
There are two main ways to force yourself to do something.
The first, most popular, and crushingly wrong approach is to try to motivate yourself.
The second, less popular and completely correct choice is to develop discipline in yourself.
This is one of those situations where adopting a different approach immediately leads to better results. You don't often hear the correct use of the phrase "paradigm shift", but this is the case. The moment when a light bulb comes on overhead.
What's the difference?
Motivation, in general terms, is based on the erroneous assumption that a specific mental or emotional state is necessary to complete a task.
This is a completely wrong perception.
Discipline, on the other hand, separates activities from moods and feelings, and thereby bypasses the problem, constantly improving them.
The consequences are staggering.
Successful completion of tasks leads to internal states that seem necessary to chronic procrastinators in order to start implementing tasks.
To put it simply, you don't have to wait until you're in Olympic form to start training. You, on the contrary, train to achieve this form.
If the action is driven by feelings, waiting for the right attitude becomes a particularly insidious form of procrastination. I'm all too familiar with this, and I wish someone had pointed it out to me twenty, fifteen, or ten years before I felt the difference the hard way.
If you wait until you feel ready to do something, you're finished. This is how terrible procrastinator loops arise.
At its core, chasing motivation means insisting on the infantile fantasy that we need to do only what we are determined to do. The problem is framed as follows: "How do I set myself up to do what I have already decided to do with my brain?". Badly.
The right question is: "How do I recognize my feelings as irrelevant and start doing things that I consciously want to do, and not act like a bitch?»
The trick is to cut the connection between feelings and actions, and do what needs to be done anyway. You will feel good and energetic afterwards.
Motivation is the wrong way to go. I am 100% sure that this erroneous restriction is the main reason why many people in developed countries just sit in their underwear, play Xbox and masturbate, instead of doing something useful.
Belief in motivation is a consequence of psychological problems.
Because real life in the real world sometimes requires people to do things that no one in their right mind can be enthusiastic about, "motivation" runs into an insurmountable obstacle in trying to generate enthusiasm for something that objectively doesn't deserve it. The only solution, other than fooling around, is to forget about this very "sound mind". This is a terrible, and thankfully misguided, dilemma.
Trying to maintain an enthusiasm for fundamentally lackluster and murderous actions is a form of deliberate psychological self-harm, voluntary insanity: "I love these signs so much, I really want to finally fill out the formula for calculating annual income as soon as possible, I love my job so much!»
I do not consider intentional manifestations
of hypomania to be an optimal incentive for human activity. The human brain does not allow abuse for an infinite period of time, so
satisfaction is inevitable. The body has its own brakes and safety valves.
The worst thing that can happen is that success in the wrong action is temporary. A much better scenario is to maintain your sanity, which unfortunately tends to be misinterpreted as a moral failure: "I still don't like my aimless paper-shuffling job", "I still prefer pie to broccoli, and I can't lose weight, maybe I'm just a weakling", "I need to buy another motivation book". Bullshit. A critical mistake is to generally consider such cases in terms of motivation or lack of it. The answer is discipline, not motivation.
There is another practical problem with motivation. It has a tiny shelf life and needs to be constantly updated.
Motivation is when you manually push down on the handle to increase the pressure. At best, it stores and converts energy for a specific purpose. There are situations when this is the right approach - Olympic competitions and prison break come to mind. But this is a terrible basis for normal daily actions, and it is unlikely to help achieve long-term results.
On the contrary, discipline is like a motor that has once started up and is constantly supplying energy to the system.
Productivity does not have the necessary mental states. For consistent, long-term results, discipline trumps motivation (cutting circles around her, giving her clicks, and eating her lunch).
As a result, motivation is an attempt to reach a state of readiness for some action. Discipline is when you do something even when you can't.
After that, you feel good.
Discipline, in short, is a system, and motivation, at the same time, is rather similar to the goal. There is a symmetry to this. Discipline is something more or less permanent, and motivation is fleeting.
How to develop discipline? Acquiring habits - starting with small, even microscopic ones, gaining momentum, using them to further change your daily life, building a positive feedback loop.
