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- If you need motivation, you’re doing it wrong.
If you need motivation, you’re doing it wrong.
How to remove the need for motivation in the first place.
Welcome to the 31st edition of Hey Wise Guy!
We’ve got more juicy wisdom than Los Angeles has insecure Instagram ‘models’.
That’s like, a f**k tonne, if you didn’t know…
Today’s newsletter is about hacking motivation to the point where you don’t even need it anymore.
Yes, we know. It sounds too good to be true.
And we’re not saying it’s gonna be easy, but it’s certainly possible.
Kind of like counting to 100,000 … or some other extensively difficult task.
Cool, let’s begin!
We’ve all been there before. And if you haven’t, then f**k you, but also congratulations.
It’s the start of something new. You’re nervous because that’s what happens to humans when it’s the start of something new.
You also feel feelings of doubt, and maybe even fear, and, on the very rare occasion, you might even feel like throwing up this morning’s breakfast.
And because of these negative feelings, you lose that initial motivation that was supposed to power your actions through to the end of your ambitious or not-so-ambitious goal.
So what happened?
Why is it so easy to lose that sense of motivation that sparked the idea of ‘trying’ in the first place?
The answer is actually quite simple … which was surprising even to us.
And to talk about it today is friend of the Hey Wise Guy Newsletter, Jeff Haden, in his highly motivated book titled ‘The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up To Win’.
Alright Jeff, show us your secret sauce…
“The anxiety you feel—the lack of confidence you feel—comes from feeling unprepared. Once you realize that you can prepare yourself, that you can develop techniques to do whatever you seek to do well, that whatever you hope to achieve is ultimately a craft that you can learn to do better and better and better, and that any skills you currently lack you can learn, you naturally become more confident as you become more prepared.”
“Knowing you’ve done what you set out to do, no matter how small—or silly—it may be, taps into the storehouse of motivation you already have inside you.“
Spread the good news, ladies and gentlemen! For the secret to everlasting ‘motivation’ has been found once and for all!
…
Preparation.
Or in other words, having a growth mindset.
This concept is one of the OG concepts of personal development.
It essentially means having the mindset where you recognise that you can learn quite literally anything you want.
And once you realise this is true, you won’t need motivation to push you through because all you have to do is see your project as a continuous set of problems that can be solved, one after the other.
And having a growth mindset means that this doesn’t scare you, in fact, it invigorates you like nothing else.
We stop in our tracks when we determine that the following actions that are required of us are ‘too difficult’ or ‘too confusing’. And because of it, we ‘lose’ the motivation we once had.
But by recognising that life is just a series of problems to be solved, and if you can’t solve them right now, then all you have to do is go out into the world and find the answer, then you won’t even need motivation in the first place, because nothing is scary anymore.
If you know that the next answer is just around the corner, then you’ll have no need to motivate yourself to ‘figure it all out’ from the beginning.
So what piece of wisdom can we gain from this?
To remove the need for motivation, see your goal as a series of problems that, with time, can be solved one after the other.
If today’s piece made you 1% (or hopefully more) wiser than before, then consider sharing this wisdom with your biggest ‘Personal Development Junkie’ friend by copying the purple link below and pasting it into iMessage!
If you’re reading Hey Wise Guy because your friend shared it with you, then welcome to the club! Just so you know, only sexy people are allowed to subscribe, so consider yourself lucky… (← This is not a threat. Please don’t call the police).
Kindest of regards,
Wise Al 🦉