the myth of motivation

I couldn’t find my way to motivation, but after a cup of coffee and an earful of D&B —the result of a Google search for the fastest genre of techno music— I see that my fingers have begun dancing across the keyboard. Why at times is it so damned difficult to get or stay motivated? I can be obsessive about a new project, game, band, or goal at first, sometimes for weeks, and then suddenly find that I can’t stand it or that pursuing the activity feels toilsome. In the last week or so I have begun struggling to find the energy and attention needed to study Spanish, hit the gym, or work on my new blog (which at the time of this writing hasn’t even been published yet!) So this post is a twofer —a way to work through my own motivational issues while sharing some ideas for how you might do the same when you’ve got a case of the nopes.

Who needs motivation when you can have habits?

When I complain about not being motivated or you say that you’re just not feeling it, we’re giving in to the myth of motivation. If we wait until we feel like doing something, then we’re probably not going to get anything accomplished. What we need is regularity. We don’t need motivation. We need to form new habits. It’s simply not the case that if we’re serious enough about learning a language, going to the gym, or staying consistent with a blog that we’ll simply do it because we want to. The truth is that we have to form new habits, which is going to be uncomfortable at first. I’m not going to discuss how to create long-term goals in this article. For now, I’m simply going to advocate the use of bite-sized goals for the daily struggle. Over time this should increasingly feel normal and eventually it ought to feel like something is wrong when we miss out on one.

Relativity

I’ve been getting a little discouraged this week with my language learning. I’ve been studying for a couple of months now and I’m not fluent yet, which really bums me out. Why can’t I just shove an Ethernet cable into the back of my head and download Spanish? Of course it sounds stupid when I put it like that, but that’s part of my way of dealing with unrealistic expectations. I understand that I can’t be fluent in such a short amount of time. There are people like Benny “The Irish Polyglot” Lewis (of Fluent in 3 Months) who are able to consistently demonstrate an ability to reach a respectable level of fluency in an extremely short time. I am simply not putting in the hours or effort necessary to pull off such a feat. Since I work a minimum of 60 hours a week, I simply don’t have the resources available to do something like that right now. So when I find myself stuttering and stammering through a discussion on estereotipos de género (gender stereotypes) with Gabriela, my online Spanish teacher, maybe I’m being overly critical by lambasting myself for producing three or four sentences a minute. Perhaps it would be more constructive and give me a better, more realistic perspective to instead look at how far I’ve come. A few weeks ago I was in Peru desperately trying to explain to a taxi driver how to get to my hotel and I’m sure that wasn’t just the alcohol talking, because I know Tequila can hablar español! Obviously I shouldn’t compare myself to somebody else nor should I expect to be good at anything —much less great at it— without first putting in the time and effort. Instead, whenever I start to fall into these ways of thinking I’m going to remember how much I’ve accomplished so far. This is proof that I have already been making progress and that if I simply keep it up will continue to do so, eventually reaching my goals.

Swimming is better than drowning for those who can’t walk on water

 I didn’t realize it for a long time, but one of the things that holds me back from accomplishing more in general is perfectionism. “I’m not a perfectionist,” I would think when I saw articles like this one claim perfectionism as one of the major pitfalls toward success. Then while reviewing and translating phrases and sentences on my Anki app, I realized that I was getting exhausted from being stuck in a loop of the same few sentences because I was forgetting to use the proper articles in the proper places. I caught myself closing the app to check my Facebook so often that I was spending more time laughing at cats that look like The Donald than studying. So I decided that maybe upon reviewing something and only getting it slightly wrong after a few attempts, it was just better to go on. ¡Dios mío! What if I learn it wrong and am stuck forever sounding like an idiot by saying “a el” when it should always be “al”? Fair question. Counter question: How many of us would still be in our last year of school had we been required to get a perfect score on every test? They say that perfect practice makes perfect, and perhaps that’s true, but do you speak your native tongue perfectly? Do you need to? Maybe it’s more important to continually make progress than it is be perfect right now. Siempre hay algo que aprender.

Time is your friend

One way to place progression over perfection is to give yourself a strict deadline. I’m rapidly approaching a 9pm deadline I set for myself with this post. Is this post good enough? No, I don’t like it at all. It’s poorly edited, makes gratuitous use of passive voice, is rife with the corniest brand of humor and looks like it was organized by a guy who thinks the floor is a suitable location for long-term storage. It’s a monstrosity. I should burn the computer I’m typing it on for its audacity to display such crap to human eyes. Yet if I write and rewrite it until it’s right, then I’m all too likely to stay up late working on it, have it hanging frustratingly over my head until I finally get it done, and quite possibly get myself stuck in a loop of exhaustion and exasperation that threatens to kill all momentum, ultimately derailing me. No bueno. Good enough is good enough. If you think you may have this issue, I would urge you to figure out when something is frustrating you, stop to pinpoint the cause, then determine if you’re being overly critical with yourself in that case. If you think you might be, maybe you should give it a miss for now. Know this –you are going to fail! A lot and often. Accept this now so that daily or short-term failures don’t accumulate into disaster. Few wars are won by winning every battle.

Stress can be your friend, too

I remember a Navy Chief at the schoolhouse at Fort Meade explaining to the class that we weren’t real journalists until we had to hatch an article in an hour. Of course we laughed at this good-natured exaggeration. A year or so later I got a call from 3^rd Corps Public Affairs desperately seeking an article to fill up half a page of the paper going to press in just over an hour. That Chief popped up in my head and I figured that day was as good as any to become a real journalist, so I said “I got this” and hung up. Then I stared at the wall unblinkingly for five minutes trying to figure out what the hell I’d just gotten myself into. With 55 minutes left I decided that whatever I was going to do, now was the time. I literally ran around my brigade’s headquarters talking to anyone and everyone trying to figure out where I was going to get a story. Someone mentioned that one of the Staff NCOs there was a kind of financial advisor to soldiers as an additional duty. I summed up all my charm and got ready to beg before barging in to get the story the higher headquarters trusted me to get. In the end I used a very straightforward by-the-book style and format combined with a picture of my own wallet with bill denominations $1-$20 fanned out in front of a light box I quickly put together out of printer paper. There was no time to have anyone on my end edit it, so I kept it simple to help avoid mistakes. Boom! In about an hour I had done it. The article appeared in thousands of papers the next day and I was a real journalist, at least by the standards of my old teacher. It was good enough to be good enough.

TLDR

So instead of relying on whether or not I’m feeling it (porque siempre no me da la gana), I’m going to rely on a methodical approach instead. I’m going to:

–Focus on now.  I can finish this paragraph. I can complete this set of exercises.

–Stick to the routine. It’s better to complete as many of my flashcards as I can today than not to study them at all.

–Have realistic expectations. I can’t jump to the moon, but I can build a rocket.

–Compare myself to myself. Maybe I can’t lift 500 pounds, but I can lift 10 more than last week.

-Acept some misteaks. Might as well, because I’m always going to make them.

–Make deadlines. This forces me to take action NOW.

That’s it. Go do something. ¡Lo haz ahora!