Maintaining Motivation
So let’s answer the question from Monday, how do we keep our motivation when the going gets tough (or boring)? The answer is, we don’t. Motivation doesn’t last. It is a gift that gets us into motion, but we have to rely on physics to keep us in motion. We are constantly held by the law of inertia.
For those that don’t remember this lesson from high school, the law of inertia is Newton’s first law of motion. It states that an object at rest will stay at rest, while an object in motion will stay in motion, unless or until an outside force comes in contact with it.
While we primarily were taught those laws through shapes on a board, the same principles apply to people. I find myself laying in bed, scrolling through Instagram for much longer than I planned, and the biggest outside force that gets me to move is hearing my baby wake up from his nap. My object at rest would probably stay at rest until acted on by an outside force. But the same thing applies to those of us that are child free. An outside force could easily be defined as the pressing weight of a to-do list or an alarm for a scheduled activity.
This is why we find it easier to keep doing something if we are already doing it, and hard to start new things. AJR sings a song called Inertia, that says all of these things like: “My friends say they’re quitting this week to chase down their dreams, they’re probably bluffing…I was gonna save the planet, but today I got plans…You said you’d break up with her, but she met your family, and dating’s the worst… now you’re not in love anymore, but you’ll stick it out for, like, 20 years more.”
Luckily, we have motivation as an outside force that can strike us into action. I’ve been motivated this week to hang up more pictures that have been sitting on the floor of our closet. That being said, it took eight months of living in this house for those things to make it onto the wall, despite the fact that I’ve been meaning to tackle it for months. But motivation never lasts, and if it runs out before our project is finished, then we might be screwed.
So if we can’t count on motivation to always be around to get us in motion, then what do we depend on? Discipline. I know that is not a fun answer. It would be much easier if lightning could strike and get us exactly where we need to be, but the reality is that our dreams take work. The good news is that a significant amount of that work will come from our ability to discipline ourselves. The bad news is that we have to actually do it.
This will likely be one of the biggest, never ending battles that we have to face when it comes to chasing our dreams. It certainly is for me. I am plenty capable of exceeding discipline in my life. I’ve proven it in the past with every one of my accomplishments. For many of us it is not a lack of capacity that keeps us from staying disciplined; instead it is a lack of focus.
It doesn’t take much of an achievement to experience the power of discipline. Studying hard, graduating with diplomas and degrees, and making a sports team, are all examples of times when we have committed to getting something done, and followed through on that commitment. The same things applies to our marriages, our relationships with friends, and our employment history.
I would argue that all of us can look back on our lives and see some level of success. We may not be where we thought we would be today, but that does not mean that the field is littered with failures behind us. We all have a track record of success in some area, and we can use those same skills to create discipline towards our dreams.
Discipline probably won’t ever come easy to us. That’s kind of the whole point. This is certainly the thing that I struggle with the most when chasing my dreams. But there are strategies that we can implement in our lives to ensure that we stay disciplined when it matters the most. We’ll talk more about those things next week.