What if you could always operate at a higher level? What if you could keep the fire burning in your heart at full force at all times? What if you could will up motivation whenever you wanted or needed it? That’d be great right? Motivation plays a huge role in all that we do in life and is incredibly important in being successful, regardless of what that success looks like to us. The problem is, it can be hard to stay motivated. This article aims to address this problem of not staying motivated
With that being said it should also be noted that motivation is not the end all be all. Motivation alone isn’t going to do much for you. You still need discipline, knowledge, and skill. These are all essential ingredients to the success cocktail or perhaps more accurately machine (I’ll get to this in a moment) every day you need to improve your skills (especially the important ones) as well as make sure you are stoking your fire for achievement.
The Success Machine
I want you to imagine success as a machine. A machine that runs on three cogs that all must intertwine and work together to function. If one cog stops working then all the other cogs stop working as well. The cogs are skills, knowledge, and discipline (action taking) respectively. Every cog is needed for the success machine to run. However the success machine needs fuel to run on. Now I want you to imagine that in the middle of that machine there is a fire that burns that fuels the machine.
The brighter and hotter the fire burns the fast the machine (success) goes. That fire is motivation. The more you can do to add fuel to this fire and make it stronger the quicker the machine runs and the more that it accomplishes. Of course improving each of the cogs does this as well but they cannot run without motivation. Which is another reason numbness is so dangerous. While this fire doesn’t have to burn at it’s brightest all the time for success and there comes a point when adding fuel to the fire isn’t going to do anything, it’s still in your best interest to keep the fire as strong as possible.
What Causes Motivation?
So in order to keep motivation strong it makes sense to figure out what it is that causes motivation. Motivation is loosely defined as the reasons for acting on something. Before I go on I think it’s important to know that action is preceded by emotion which is connected to thought. So thought plus emotion equals action if that makes sense. Now a large part of motivation is your reasons for doing something. When you know or feel that you will get a gain out of taking a certain action you are much more motivated to take it. If you knew going to Antarctica would make you a billionaire suddenly you’d drop everything and get there ASAP.
So here is an activity I am going to suggest to stay motivated and keep your motivations level high. What you are going to do is look at whatever activity you need more motivation at. Let’s say you want to start making 10k a month. So what’d you do is you’d write down on a list everything that making 10k a month would get for you. For example move out of ghetto apartment to a place near the beach, allow to invest in seminars and high level training, and so on and so forth. The more specific you are the stronger and better this is going to work.
You also want to draw out any benefits of the benefits. For example moving from ghetto apartment to the beach, be around a nice downtown area with plenty of hot girls, etc. So there are benefits to your benefits that you want to include on the list. The magic of doing an activity like this is that the more you add the more you realize so you’ll be adding to your list days after you started. You then want to refer to the list as often as possible. Also I would suggest doing this list in your own handwriting.
Focus
Focus is essential to success as well. Take the top three benefits from your list and really burn them into your head. Think about them every night, visualize what it’d be like to have accomplished what you want to accomplish so bad. If you’re not motivated that just means you’re not focused on what you want strongly enough. You need proper reasons to be motivated. To keep the fire burning. And you need to keep these reasons forefront in your mind. Focus on the reward and the grind won’t be nearly as bad. Keep the end goal of what you are striving for in your mind.
And when you accomplish it then focus on what you want the most next. When you’re hitting the gym think of the broad shoulders and looks you’ll get. When you’re doing sales training on the weekend while your buddies are drinking their workweek away at a bar think of the income on tap. And so on and so forth. You get the idea. Motivation stems from the feeling of achieving your end goal. So it makes sense to make sure you are setting goals properly, building the motivation for them, and then taking action to reach them.
Summary
Focus on the end result. Visualizing about it and really feeling it, is what is going to give you motivation. And it’s going to give you much more motivation then some four minute video clip. This isn’t the only way of creating or sustaining motivation but it is the one that I have found to be most effective. Try it out and see how it works for you. Whenever you feel that fire getting a little low know that you have to resell yourself on the benefits of doing what you’re doing. Success will come, but it takes time.
If you have any questions you would like to see answered in a future post send them to me at charlessledge001 (at) gmail (dot) com. If you found value in this post then I would encourage you to share this site with someone who may need it as well as check out my books here. I appreciate it.
-Charles Sledge
