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The best way to get motivated is to break a sweat, literally or symbolically.
Getting started is often the hardest part. Financial planners frequently recommend paying off a small debt first, even though the balance on that bill may carry the lowest interest rate of all your debts. Rationally, that approach makes no sense: If you carry a balance on three credit cards, the card you pay off first should be the one with the highest interest rate. But the thought of paying off, say, a $7,000 balance when you can spare only an extra $200 a month... ugh. The time horizon is too long for the payoff—literally—to seem worth it. The “irrational” approach often works better: Working to pay off the card with the smallest balance seems a lot more attainable. Once you start, you can see the difference. Knocking $200 off an $800 debt feels like you’ve accomplished something. After next month, you’re halfway done! And once you pay off that card, you’ll be motivated to keep going to pay off the next card.
Think about why you sometimes procrastinate. (Don’t say you never put things off. Show me someone who doesn’t procrastinate and I’ll show you a robot. Everyone procrastinates.)
I definitely procrastinate.
One example: I’ve written more than seven million published words. (Please keep the jokes about long-windedness to yourself.) You might then assume it’s easy for me to sit down and write, but at times it’s anything but: I’ll make calls, take care of administrative tasks, do a little “research” (in my line of work, any reading is research, right?), play with the cats... I love to write, but sometimes the thought of writing seems daunting, especially at the beginning of a project, when I need to find the right voice and the best way into the material.
Except for the cats, I can rationalize that I’m being productive, but usually I’m just procrastinating.
Another example: I like to ride bicycles. Over the last five or six years I’ve ridden about 35,000 miles. I love riding, but sometimes I’ll do anything not to ride.
Neither makes sense, right? Writing and riding are both things I love to do, yet at times I find ways to actively avoid doing them. Putting off tasks I don’t enjoy would make a lot more sense.
I love to ride my bike, but sometimes the thought of riding seems daunting, especially those first few miles, when it’s cold outside and my legs are stiff and my heart has just started to pound. I pant and gasp and wonder why I’m on the stupid bike... but then something magical happens. Somehow my aversion to “hard” goes away once I break a sweat.
The endorphins kick in. My legs warm up. I feel proud that I can do something hard, and do it reasonably well. That rush of satisfaction I always feel? (That rush of satisfaction you always feel when you start doing something you’ve put off... and suddenly realize it wasn’t as daunting as you anticipated?) I know that feeling will come. I’ve trained myself to anticipate that natural “high.” Instead of thinking, “Ugh. This is going to be hard,” I’ve taught myself to think, “I can’t wait for that little high I’ll feel when I move from inactivity to activity. I can’t wait to feel that rush I know I’ll feel when I’m actually doing what I planned to do.”
The key is to enjoy the feeling of success that comes from improving in some small way... and then rinse and repeat, over and over again.
Why? Improving feels good. Improving breeds confidence. Improving creates a feeling of competence, and competence breeds self-confidence. Success—in your field or sometimes in any field—breeds motivation. It feels good to improve... so you naturally want to keep improving.
You’ve probably put off a task, finally gotten started... and then, once you got started, thought, “I don’t know why I kept putting this off. It’s going really well. And it didn’t turn out to be nearly as hard as I imagined.”
And here’s the thing: It never is.
Why? Because once you get started, once you get active and start doing something—doing not just anything but something you know will get you one step closer to your goal—the process gets easier. Motivation kicks in because you’ve gotten started. A really cool virtuous cycle—one we’ll look at in detail a little later—kicks in. You feel good because you’re engaged and involved.
You feel motivated because you took action. Motivation is a result, not a precondition. You don’t need motivation to break a sweat. Break a sweat and you’ll feel motivated.
Once you start, it’s easy to keep going. The act of getting out of the house to go for a jog is often harder than actually running the five miles you planned. The act of sitting down at your desk to start writing a proposal is often harder than putting together twenty pages of material. The act of picking up your phone is often harder than cold-calling twenty prospects.
Starting is hard because “motivation” doesn’t make it easy to start. Starting provides the motivation to finish.
Fire walks don’t provide lasting motivation. Breaking a sweat provides lasting motivation.
Speeches don’t provide lasting motivation. Progress provides lasting motivation.
Posters don’t provide lasting motivation. Success provides lasting motivation.
If you aren’t achieving your goals, a lack of motivation or confidence isn’t the problem. A lack of motivation or confidence is actually the means to a solution. When you accept your weak points, when you accept your flaws, when you accept your imperfections... that’s when you can motivate yourself to make changes and improve.
Hide from your weaknesses, and you’ll always be weak. Accept your weaknesses and work to improve them, and you’ll eventually be stronger—and more motivated to keep improving.
But you have to do the right things in order to make real improvements. In upcoming chapters I’ll show you how.
Before we do that, though, let’s debunk some other myths that have held you back.
You know this now, but it bears repeating: Lightning bolts of inspiration strike only in the movies—or in the minds of people who want to believe they’re capable of inspiring you (if you pay for the privilege, of course).
Wait for a sudden burst of inspiration and you’ll never get started... and if you do manage to ride that initial sugar-rush wave, you’ll never stick with it, because sugar rushes never last.
The same is true for seeking shortcuts. You can’t “hack” your way to success.
I love Tim Ferriss, but don’t fool yourself: He works incredibly hard. The real premise of The 4-Hour Workweek is to increase your output by ten times per hour. Tim is the first to admit he has no problem with hard work—the key is to apply your hard work to the right things. But somehow that premise has been twisted to become “I just need to find the secret (something) that results in instant success.”
Of course there are no hacks. Sure, you can learn to peel a banana a lot more effectively (thanks, Tim!), but real success, meaningful success, is never instant. You absolutely should look for better, more effective ways to accomplish your goal—and I’ll show you several—but there are no shortcuts.
There definitely aren’t for me.
I’m as insecure as anyone I know. Where feeling confident and self-assured is concerned, on a scale of one to one hundred, one hundred being Oprah, I’m a one.
So some years ago when I was invited to speak to an audience of around 1,000 people, my first thought was “Yes!” My second thought was “Oh no!” I had never spoken to an audience larger than about 150 people. Plus, I had been asked to speak on an unfamiliar topic.
Even so, the opportunity was too good to pass up. So I looked around and found a few articles with tips on how to captivate a large audience; it seemed all I needed to do was employ some big nonverbal gestures and speak more loudly at some points and softly at others, and boom: I’d kill.
Nope. I bombed.
Granted, everyone told me I did fine. (To a speaker, being told you were “fine” is like being a teenager who is told he has a good personality.) Sure, I wanted to believe them. I wanted desperately to ignore my feelings of incompetence, disappointment, and failure.
And then I realized I would never get better if I didn’t (1) accept the fact that I had failed and (2) work really hard to improve. So I went back to the drawing board. I wrangled invitations to local civic groups. I spoke to students at local colleges. I forced myself to speak on topics outside my wheelhouse so I could learn the mechanics of crafting a great hook and a great story.
Sometimes I did well, sometimes I did poorly, but over time I gained competence and skill.
Am I still nervous before I step out in front of a large crowd? Oh, hell yeah. I’m a hot mess of insecurity. But I can work through those feelings, not because I engage in a lot of happy horseshit self-talk and fire-walking bravado but because I know I’ve been there, done that, and can do it again. I’m confident because I have success in my pocket. I’m confident because I’ve done the work.
Confidence comes from preparation. Hesitation, anxiety, fear... Those feelings don’t come from some deep, dark, irrational place inside you. 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.
Take Jamie Little, a pit reporter for Fox Sports and the first woman to accomplish several motor sports broadcasting milestones.
“When my mom and I moved to Las Vegas,” she says, “I met Carey Hart [motocross racer, freestyle motocross competitor, married to Pink]. He had a big influence on me. I thought he was the coolest thing ever. I already had a thing for motorcycles, and I learned about Supercross through him. I would take dirt-bike magazines to class with me.... I loved it. It was my happy world.
“I went up to a guy working for ESPN at a race and said, ‘How do I get started?’ He let me hang out for two years with no pay so I could get my work known. I learned to write; I learned to interview athletes.... It was a great training ground. I wasn’t getting paid, but that was okay.”
But that doesn’t mean her path was easy. When Jamie started working for ESPN covering NASCAR races, the challenges only increased.
“I don’t think there was anything harder I could have taken on than covering NASCAR at that level,” she says. “I look back and wonder where I got the courage. I was coming into this garage; there weren’t a whole lot of people before me that had done it, especially not women.... I had to figure things out on my own, which was the best way but also the most challenging way.
“My confidence came from overpreparing. I still overprepare. I put together a page of notes for every driver, talk to the drivers and crew chiefs at the track... and then I use all that to help me trim the fat down to the most pertinent facts and the best angles to share with viewers during the broadcast. I use that same approach with other forms of racing. Feeling overprepared lets me feel confident and natural.”
And where does the drive required to help you prepare come from? Success—small, frequent, repeat successes.
It truly is a virtuous cycle.
Confidence is a feeling, but ultimately confidence is the result of knowing that you’re not only willing to do the work, but that you actually will do the work. You won’t try to hack your way to success.
Hacking is great when you need to perform a simple task. Hacking is worthless when you need to acquire a complex skill or accomplish a huge goal. Plus, hacking doesn’t provide a jolt of motivation like gaining skill and expertise does. And hacking doesn’t help you gain confidence in your ability to accomplish other big goals—whereas real success in one pursuit can yield greater confidence and motivation in other areas of life.
Take me again: The first major Gran Fondo I rode (a Gran Fondo is a mass-participation cycling event) was one hundred miles long and featured more than eleven thousand feet of climbing over four mountains. Two of those climbs were on dirt and gravel roads. It was long. It was endless. It was physically and emotionally harder than just about anything I had ever done. But I finished it.
And for weeks afterward I felt more confident. I worried less about what people thought of me. I had done something huge, at least for me, and the memory of that accomplishment carried me for a long time.
Of course, riding the Gran Fondo was the opposite of a fire walk. While it was seemingly a one-off event, that one day was also the culmination of months of hard work. I didn’t close my eyes and sprint across semihot coals. My eyes were wide open, every day, to the effort and sacrifice and determination it took to follow the right routine that would allow me to accomplish my goal.
That’s why motivation and confidence gained in one aspect of your life can spill over into other aspects of your life. When you feel good about yourself in one way—when you achieve some degree of success in one aspect of your life—you tend to feel better about other parts of your life as well. After all, if you can do one thing well, you can do lots of things well. You realize that all you have to do is find the right process, work the process, and enjoy the feeling of success and resulting motivation you get from constant improvement (because if you follow the right process, you will constantly improve).
Plus, many shortcuts shackle you with extra risk in exchange for productivity.
In the music industry, for instance, it’s almost a given that artists eventually regret the terms of their first contract; artists are so happy to get signed—and get an advance—that they will sign almost anything. (Tom Petty was so unhappy with his first contract, he sued his label and risked losing his career rather than continue under its terms.)
Joe Satriani took a different course. Joe has sold millions of critically acclaimed solo albums, toured with Mick Jagger, Deep Purple, and Chickenfoot, created signature guitar and equipment lines, founded his own long-running concert series, G3... and, oh yeah, he’s been nominated for fourteen Grammys.
Joe told me why he decided to take personal ownership over each part of the publishing process. He was in a band called the Squares in the early 1980s.
“Our rehearsal space was in the same building as Nolo Press, a company that made how-to books with tear-out pages for all sorts of legal situations. Their Dumpster was right outside the door where we would hang out and have a smoke and a drink in between practicing, and it was always overflowing with damaged books. So we’re out there wondering how we’re ever going to make it in the music business and start absentmindedly flipping through books. One of them showed how to start all kinds of businesses.
“I took it home and was fascinated. I thought the upcoming vacation the band was taking was an opportunity for me to just ‘do the book.’ I got a real copy of the book and decided I needed to start my own publishing company and my own record company and then make a record. I just followed the advice in the book, filled out the forms, went to the Oakland courthouse and paid my twelve dollars, and suddenly I was a record company owner.”
Joe ended up recording an unusual, avant-garde record with no bass, drums, or keyboards. He realized that he “didn’t have to go out and chase the brick-and-mortar powers that be.” This was during an era when the music business did not have the equal access to opportunity that it has now. “That challenge was what gave me the energy to pursue the future I glimpsed in that little misprint of a book, How to Start Your Own Business, ” Joe says.
“Then I was in a band rehearsal one day and our bass player said, ‘Hey, I think they reviewed your record in Guitar Player magazine.’”
Armed with a newfound confidence, Joe slowly made a name for himself. Better yet, he says, “I was a musician who could not be taken advantage of. That’s why I wound up owning all my own publishing and making a deal that was quite advantageous for a new solo artist.”
Had Joe found a way to get signed by a record label, he might have eased some short-term financial pressure, but he almost surely would have signed away his publishing rights, his control over his art, and his chances for long-term financial success.
Even though taking a shortcut may lead to a short-term success, you will often regret ever having taken it.
Process gets a bad rap. Hard work, consistent effort, long hours... That’s what stupid people with no talent do, right?
Um, nope.
Take Michael Ovitz, the guy who built Creative Artists Agency (CAA) into the largest and most powerful organizations in Hollywood. He started in the mail room at William Morris, then the biggest agency in town. Here’s what he told James Andrew Miller in the excellent book Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency.
When I went to William Morris, I decided that I had to do something that was disruptive. I was in the mailroom with about twenty guys. They’d come in at nine, so I came in at seven. They’d leave at six, I’d leave at ten o’clock at night. Some days I left earlier because at that time I was also going to school at night to get my master’s in business. I worked my butt off—reading everything there was to read. I was a scavenger. Those guys were waiting to be fed things; I went looking for things. I viewed the mailroom as an education course, period, and was going to move over everyone very quickly. I volunteered for every job and was very aggressive.
Three months into the training program, I had begun to notice that the president of the company would often come back to the office after dinner when everyone else had left, so I made sure to be there and became the only guy sitting at a desk on the first floor. As I figured he would, he asked if I could do a favor for him. I did the favor so well that he asked me to work for him some more. I kept doing it each night until he finally made me his assistant.
Ovitz is incredibly smart. Ovitz went on to almost completely transform the way the talent agency business operates—and in many ways how Hollywood operates.
Yet Ovitz decided that the best way to succeed was to develop a routine and then stick to that routine. He did things no one else would. He didn’t just rely on his intelligence and talent to succeed. He didn’t wait for his boss to “discover” his talents. He didn’t wait to get a promotion—and the raise that comes with it—to work harder and sacrifice more. Ovitz relied on his process.
Say you have a huge goal you want to accomplish: a massive, audacious, incredibly challenging, and ultimately worthwhile goal. You think about that goal, dream about that goal, obsess about that goal... and talk about it with your friends and family.
That last part can sometimes be a big mistake.
Granted, seeking support makes sense at a surface level. Most people assume they should talk about their dreams and goals in order to receive encouragement. And even if positive reinforcement doesn’t work, what about negative reinforcement and that extra jolt of motivation you’ll undoubtedly receive from wanting to follow through on a public statement of intent? Surely that will keep you going when times get tough, as times inevitably do?
Nope.
Science agrees with me. Research (see? I sometimes am actually performing research and not just procrastinating) shows that people who talk about their intentions are much less likely to follow through on those intentions. Or if you prefer researcher-speak, “Identity-related behavioral intentions that had been noticed by other people were translated into action less intensively than those that had been ignored.”
(I know: You don’t prefer researcher-speak.)
Here’s an example. Say you want to through-hike the Appalachian Trail, a grueling five- to seven-month trek from Georgia to Maine. You’re having dinner with friends and tell them you’ve decided to walk the entire 2,200 miles.
“Oh, wow!” one exclaims. “That sounds amazing. But won’t it be super hard?”
“Indeed, it will,” you say with some added bass in your voice. You share what you know about tent sites, shelters, infrequent showers, and the cool trail name you’re bound to get. (Trail names are nicknames through-hikers are given—or that the pretentious try to give themselves—partly out of tradition and partly because “Slumber Cat” is a lot easier for near strangers to remember than “Martha.”)
You love talking about the trail. It feels awesome to bask in the glow of people who admire you for wanting to take on such a huge challenge. Even though you’re sitting in a restaurant, it feels like you’re already on the trail.
It also means you’re less likely to someday actually
be
on the trail, because “when other people take notice of an individual’s identity-related behavioral intention, this gives the individual a premature sense of possessing the aspired-to identity.”
Or in non-researcher-speak: You already got a huge kick out of people thinking of you as a trail hiker... so now you’re less motivated to actually be a trail hiker.
Sounds counterintuitive, right? Aren’t we supposed to share our intentions so other people can help support and motivate us?
According to NYU psychologist Peter Gollwitzer, one of the authors of the study, that is not the case.
Gollwitzer thinks the issue lies in our sense of identity. Each of us wants to be certain things, and we naturally declare those intentions, even if we have not yet become those things. Check out Twitter bios if you don’t believe me. Thousands of people are motivated, innovative, creative, passionate, and unique—not to mention gurus, ninjas, curators, and connoisseurs.
Describing how I plan to run a marathon and how I bought running shoes and a treadmill (because it’s really hot outside and that whole sweating thing is icky) and joined a gym and found this cool training plan online certainly makes me feel good... but it also makes me feel like I’m already halfway to the finish line even though I haven’t jogged a single step.
Declaring what we want to be and how we will get there causes us to feel we are further along the path of becoming who we want to be—even though we have in reality done nothing but talk.
Have you done that before? I have.
Other people can’t motivate us, not really, and definitely not for long. And that’s because we can’t motivate ourselves, not really, and clearly not for long—otherwise we would achieve every goal we set.
The problem also isn’t a lack of willpower, even though conventional wisdom would have us think that greater willpower is what separates the achievers from the dreamers.
You sigh when you hear about a friend who just lost twenty pounds. “That’s amazing,” you think. “I wish I had that kind of willpower. But I don’t.”
Or you shake your head when you hear your sister-in-law just got an MBA while working full time and raising two kids. “That’s amazing,” you think. “I wish I had that kind of drive and determination. But I don’t.”
Or you hear about my wife, who earned an MBA and a master’s in nurse anesthesia and became a doctor of nurse anesthesia practice while raising a family. (My wife kicks ass.) “That’s amazing,” you think. “I wish I had that kind of drive and determination. But I don’t.”
You’re right.
And you’re wrong.
Exceptional willpower isn’t a quality you are born with, like double-jointed thumbs.
Sure, some people may be more self-disciplined than you. But it’s unlikely they were born with some certain special something inside them—instead, they’ve found ways to make decisions that don’t require willpower and determination.
They seem to have exceptional willpower, but not because they actually have more. Instead, they’ve learned how to best use what they have. And as a result, they have what Angela Duckworth calls grit. (Her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance is outstanding.) Duckworth says that what really drives success is not “genius” but a combination of passion and long-term perseverance.
My definition of “grit” is: the ability to work hard and respond resiliently to failure and adversity; the inner quality that enables individuals to work hard and stick to their long-term passions and goals.
That definition almost perfectly describes qualities every successful person possesses, because mental toughness builds the foundations for long-term success. Successful people are great at delaying gratification. Successful people are great at withstanding temptation. Successful people are great at overcoming fear in order to do what they need to do. (Of course, that doesn’t mean they aren’t scared; that means they’re brave. There’s a huge difference.) Successful people don’t just prioritize; they consistently keep doing what they have decided is most important.
All those qualities require what appears to be incredible willpower—but then again, they don’t.
Sound impossible? It’s not. Later I’ll show you how to avoid exercising almost any willpower at all.
I know what you’re thinking.
“Wonderful. You’ve spoken to large groups. And you’ve ridden a Gran Fondo. That’s fine... but what if my goal is a huge goal? What then, big boy?”
Good question.
Pretend you’re Kirk Hammett. (Yes, I’m fascinated by guitarists. Sue me.) You play lead guitar for Metallica, a band that has sold more than 110 million albums. And has won eight Grammys. And even though the band has been around for thirty years, it’s still incredibly popular: In 2016 Metallica performed the first rock concert held at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, selling out all 66,000-plus seats in ten minutes. Metallica is arguably the most successful hard rock band in, well, ever.
So if you’re Kirk, what do you tell me when I ask about how you got started?
“I wasn’t motivated by a lot of the things that might motivate people, like fame or fortune or whatever,” he says. “I was motivated by wanting to play the guitar well.”
Kirk didn’t want to be a rock star. He wanted to play guitar. The goal was, in an odd way, actually the process.
“So one day,” he says, “I pulled my guitar out of the closet where it had been sitting for a while and said, ‘I’m going to learn how to play you.’ I struggled like everyone does, but then I learned to play a few things and I got such a big kick out of that.
“That made me want to keep learning. Over time all those little successes built and built and before long all I wanted to do was play guitar and learn how to play it as well as I possibly could, and I knew that if I just kept working I would keep getting better.”
Oh yeah: Kirk is ranked eleventh on Rolling Stone magazine’s “100 Greatest Guitarists” list.
Kirk sums it up this way: “All it really takes is a desire to keep on doing it. Finding a passion comes from sticking with it, and that is easy when you work hard to keep getting better. And before long, you realize you’ve gotten passionate about the passion.”
Kirk’s point about passion is important. It’s easy, and extremely tempting when you’re rationalizing your own lack of success, to assume successful people have some intangible quality—ideas, talent, drive, skills, creativity, etc.—that you don’t have.
In fact that’s rarely true. Talent typically reveals itself only in hindsight.
Success is never assured. It looks inevitable only after it is achieved.
Sure, other people may have skills you don’t have—at least not yet—but you have skills other people don’t have. You don’t need a gift. You just need yourself and a willingness to put in a tremendous amount of hard work, effort, and perseverance, because that is where talent comes from.
I once asked Lance Armstrong what he missed about being a professional cyclist.
“The one thing I truly loved about being a pro cyclist was the process,” he said. “Not the accolades, not the money, not the podium... I miss the process of getting to the point where you can stand on that top step.
“I miss the hours spent alone and suffering and working to get to the point where I could win. I loved the process. I loved all the thinking, all the collaborating, all the planning and effort and working with great people. I feel like I got paid to do the races, meet sponsor obligations.... That’s what they paid me for. I would have trained for free.
“I don’t really miss the result. I miss the work.”
When you put in the time and effort, when you make improvements, when you gain a certain level of skill, you become the thing that you’re trying to achieve.
“Becoming” feels wonderful because you’ve earned it.
Say you’re a manager of a department; at first you think about managing, but over time you think of yourself as a manager. Leading is no longer only something you do; leading is who you are. Or say you’re Kirk Hammett. At first you play a guitar, but in time you think of yourself as a musician.
The same is true in any pursuit; in time you “become” the thing you do. If you’ve just started jogging, you would never call yourself a runner, but over time—and with improvement—you begin to feel as if you belong to the running community... and it’s like you give yourself permission to think of yourself not as someone who runs but as a runner .
You don’t just start a business; you’re an entrepreneur . You don’t just write; you’re an author .
You don’t just strive for success; you’re successful .
And oddly enough, even though “becoming” is incredibly motivating, when you transform yourself into a leader or an entrepreneur or a runner or a musician or whatever you hope to be, you no longer need motivation.
You don’t have to find the motivation or willpower; you do what you need to do because that’s who you are.
Hopefully you see where this is going. Each little success is motivating. Each little success gives you confidence. The accumulation of small successes makes the process, um, maybe not fun, but definitely rewarding—and that’s all you need to keep going.
And somehow, without noticing when it happens, you stop thinking about following your routine for three months or six months or a year. You just think about that day and what you will do that day. Somehow, without noticing when it happens, you embrace the routine and not the goal. Every day you get to feel good about yourself, and that sense and feeling of accomplishment motivates you to do it all over again the next day.
In short, the process looks like this:
Success → Motivation → More Success → More Motivation → More Success = Becoming
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.
Earned success is the best motivational tool of all. That feeling, that knowledge, is hugely energizing because it’s based not on wishing and hoping and dreaming but on a reality—a reality you created.
So forget the fire-walking. Forget the self-talk. Forget searching for, or paying for, the right kind of motivation. Tony is right in one way: All the motivation you need is already inside you. But you won’t tap into it by seizing a single moment of inspiration. You won’t stay motivated because you experienced one “aha!” moment.
You’ll stay motivated when you find a process you trust and commit to working that process for as little as a week. Forget how far you need to go to reach your goal; just commit to following the process for a week.
By the end of that week you’ll have made a small improvement: You’ll be able to run a little farther, or lift a little more weight, or speak with greater confidence, or perform a task more effectively. Whatever goal you set, you will have moved a few steps closer to achieving that goal.
Never forget that we all lack confidence. We all lack motivation. We all have insecurities, doubts, fears. All of us. We all say we want to achieve things, but we don’t really want to achieve them unless we are willing to take the necessary steps to achieve what we say we want.
Wanting something badly isn’t enough. No matter how badly you may want to achieve something, what matters more—a lot more—than the power of “why” is the power of “how.”
We’ll talk a lot about “how.” For now, just know that as you follow the right routine and gain a small—even very small—measure of skill, your motivation grows, your confidence grows, and your happiness grows, and those qualities make it easy to keep following the right routine, to keep improving, to keep gaining skill and confidence and motivation... because you will have earned those feelings.
And in time you will become whatever it is you set out to be.
So yeah, while I love Tony... fuck fire walks.