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When I worked in manufacturing for R.R. Donnelley, the world’s largest commercial printer, I desperately—and I do mean desperately—wanted to become a plant manager; the closest I came was running manufacturing operations for a small, privately owned company. I spent years trying to get one—just one—short story published; the closest I came was... Well, I never came close. (Looking back, deservedly so.) I have dozens of failures to my name. I’ve tried and failed, over and over.
Even worse, I’ve let many goals go without even trying to achieve them. I thought about them, I dreamed about them, I imagined what it would feel like to accomplish them... but I never even got started.
In both scenarios, I spent a lot of time trying to motivate myself. I’d been told success was all about mind-set, and I wanted to lock in the optimal psychological state before the rubber met the road. We can all remember those times when we were hit with a lightning bolt of inspiration, whether to work out or to start learning French—and we can also remember how that urge never produced any action.
I was in the grip of an insidious myth. I thought motivation was a prerequisite to starting a tedious learning process—a spark necessary to get me going. But motivation is really a result. Motivation is the fire that starts burning after you manually, painfully, coax it into existence, and it feeds on the satisfaction of seeing yourself make progress. The problem with waiting for motivation to strike is that it almost never comes with enough voltage to actually get you started.
Granted, sometimes motivation strikes like a hammer. Minutes or hours later, though, you’ve lost your enthusiasm, partly because a lightning-bolt burst of motivation is like a sugar rush: It feels great but is impossible to maintain, and when you come down you actually feel worse. Rah-rah speeches and inspirational quotes and fire-walking challenges (more on those in a minute) may help you picture yourself at the top of the mountain with your arms raised in triumph, but the effect is fleeting. After the glow is gone, you’re left standing by yourself at the bottom of that same mountain, hugely intimidated by all the steps you need to climb.
So you sit, and dwell, and sulk, and wish, and hope, and maybe even think about saving up for Tony Robbins’s next seminar... but even that sounds too hard.