Why Motivation Does or Doesn't Work

Monday Mountain
October 31, 2016

Breaking the Ruts:

Is Motivation a Real Remedy?

I always try to motivate myself through inspirational words, powerful thoughts, self-belief, and many other applications... But this feeling of empowered momentum always fades. Why does it always dissipate? This conundrum has been on my mind recently as I've been a fan of  everyone self-medicating their own motivation. A thought came to my head today as I drove nearly six hours to visit a handful of locations, it's a temporary solution much like taking an aspirin or other medication. Much like ibuprofen, it's meant to alleviate you of your pain until your body can naturally cure itself or repair whatever the cause of the discomfort was. 

When we seek to be inspired, we often crave a sort of fire to be lit inside of us. Allow me to dive into this analogy to explain how motivation can work. There's an ignition source, that initial motivation, it gets the fire started and may light the room briefly, but to really make a brilliant progress it's up to you the user to provide the fuel and to maintain this burning feeling. 

I suck at staying motivated, it's often like how they explain physics. An object at rest takes a lot more energy to get it moving rather to simply keep it moving. Also, the challenge is to fight the friction of vices and other obstacles around us to keep you from your goals. For example, if you wanted to get good at running a 5K race, you'll have to overcome the discomfort of being bad at running, the sore muscles after every run, and to continue development you may have to follow a training plan from an external source. Of course, most of the resistance is internal, that's what makes us human, the path of least resistance. It's the conquest of the resistance that makes it admirable. 

Really, truly, nobody should ever pursue a challenge to be admired by another. The whole idea of the conquest is to prove it to yourself, to make yourself better, learn something new about yourself, or whatever it is. Yes, I suck at motivating myself to do something for me and it's way easier to continue doing something you're already decent at. It's not about any of that really, it's about embracing the new challenge. If you don't want to then that's just alright, complacency embraces the familiar face. For me, I'll accept the challenge I bring to myself to push my limits, my comforts, and to develop my skills and abilities beyond what I ever thought.