When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about. —Haruki Murakami
Motivation
The trouble with motivation is that it is a desire to do or accomplish something and it’s very hard to make ourselves want to do something that isn’t intrinsically immediately fun. It is VERY easy for me to find motivation to eat chocolate. It’s much harder for me to find motivation to write this Friday Inspiration. (How meta! Maybe this makes me an expert?)
A Fun Fact About Bison
It feels worse to avoid doing something than it does to simply do it.
But I know one thing about motivation—it feels worse to avoid doing something than it does to simply do it. The truth about motivation is that it is easier to reverse-engineer it than it is to try to create it. By that, I mean that I find it easier to simply admit that I do not want to do something...and then do it anyway. When Bison sense that a storm is coming, they turn and walk or run—straight into the storm. Why? It shortens the amount of time that they have to endure the storm. They face it and get through it. As Winston Churchill famously said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
Reverse-Engineer Your Own Motivation
When I’m doing the work, going straight into the storm, I often become completely absorbed by the task. Once that happens, I don’t want to stop until I’m finished. And that’s motivation—by simply accepting my own reluctance and diving in, I find that I have reverse-engineered the feeling I was looking for. And then, suddenly, I find myself at the end of the task and in a better place, where the sky is blue and wide open.
