Why Motivation is a Myth

I’ve had a lot of messages recently from people asking how to motivate themselves. With new year’s resolutions on the horizon, I wanted to share my two cents on the topic.

I used to have problems with ‘motivation’ but I don’t anymore because I’ve fully internalised the notion that motivation is a myth. In fact, I think we’d all be much happier and get much more done if we scrubbed the word motivation from our vocabulary altogether.

Here’s a quote from one of my favourite articles on the subject:

Motivation, broadly speaking, operates on the erroneous assumption that a particular mental or emotional state is necessary to complete a task.

Put simply, motivation is waiting until you feel like doing something before doing it. Discipline on the other hand, is doing it regardless of how you’re feeling about it. 

I return to this article several times a year to remind myself of its paradigm-shifting lesson. If you’re finding yourself lacking in motivation, please (a) read the article, and (b) attempt to remove the word motivation from your vocabulary entirely.

These days, the only circumstance in which I let myself even think about motivation as a concept is if a friend is complaining 'aarghh I just don’t have the motivation to work right now’. If I don’t know them very well, I reply 'yeah me too lol’. If however, I know the person well, I give them an unsolicited lecture about exactly why motivation is a myth, and why/how they should be cultivating discipline. If they’re still in the room by the end of this conversation, they usually think 'wow you’re right, I shouldn’t be trying to feel like doing stuff, I should just do it!’

So yeah, motivation is a myth. Trying to get yourself to feel like doing something useful is a fool’s errand. A 3-year old bases their day-to-day decisions on what they feel like doing. An intelligent student/adult recognises that feeling like doing something useful should have absolutely nothing to do with whether they actually do it.

If you’re interested to learn more, here’s a more detailed video about this:

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Ali