Motivation 101

I always find it difficult to get started on a project. It can take me months upon months to finally start something that I meant to start a while back. I tried to write an entire 50,000 book in the month of May and I ended up giving up after 11 days and 18443 words because work was too stressful.

You have to admit, when you aren’t getting a day off work for weeks at a time it's rather hard to get started on something in your ZERO free time.

But what I have learnt is that you shouldn’t wait for motivation, as dumb as that sounds, you need to make yourself do the work. I can’t remember the exact quote I read but it was one of those ‘motivational quotes’ plastered over a picture of a sunset. Basically.. The gist of it was that you need to force yourself to do the work and that leads to the finding of motivation.

What I gathered from it was that motivation comes from forcing yourself to work through all the unmotivation. It’s hard but eventually it leads to habit.

This applies to everything and everyone of course, it’s not just writing. I have to motivate myself to clean my house as well. I do it like a circuit. Ten minutes of cleaning, ten minutes of writing and then I get to rest for ten minutes… okay fine I actually sit down and watch like three episodes of something on Netflix. The main thing you need to take away from that was that I could have watched four episodes of my tv show and done zero minutes of cleaning or writing. The main thing is that I did the work I set out to do and making this a daily habit means that maybe one day I can do 20 minutes of writing or a half hour. Practise makes perfect.

I know where I want to be in my life, I know that I want to be successful in the things I want to do and lastly, I know that I need to work for everything I want to achieve.

Five minutes here and five minutes there will get me closer to my goal ultimately but if I can build up the time I spend working rather than procrastinating then I will be better off later. We all want to make it to where we want to be so it’s easy to say that I am going to spend my entire day off sitting in front of my computer and writing all day and I will be so productive but it’s not as easy to actually do that.

Pretty much what I do is make a bearable target to reach and I create a reward. Rinse and repeat. Even with my hours getting increasingly longer as the months go by I can still find at least twenty minutes to get my cleaning and writing down. No matter how big and difficult your target seems, you need to do little steps to get closer to your goal. Just keep it in the back of your head that the first step is always the hardest and always the most important.

However if you fail the first time, you will never be back to square one because you made that first big step and got started the first time. Eventually the steps will get smaller and smaller because you will be building yourself a stronger foundation every time you make the next step. I believe in all of you, believe in yourself too.