I recently watched an interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger where he talked about going from being a small, self-doubting kid to winning Mr. Universe 7 times. He described hanging photographs of boxers and athletes he idolized all over his room. Every morning, he would wake up early and look at the pictures, which were his goal. He wanted to look like those athletes. He described this as the source of his early motivation to push himself to train as hard as possible. He kept his goal in front and center, focused on it every day, and pushed himself to achieve it. He went on to describe himself as smiling at the gym constantly, while the guys all around him were grim. The reason was that he was reminding himself that he was striving to achieve his goal and that made him happy. He was happy to be achieving his dream. There’s a great principle behind this approach to life. It’s easy to have vague ideas about what you’d like to achieve in life and never actually do anything about them. It’s also easy to talk about accomplishing great things without putting in the work to actually accomplish it. We often think about motivation as though it is a feeling we have. I hear folks say: “I don’t feel motivated, so I didn’t ”. The problem is that we confuse motivation with feeling excited to do stuff. Just about everyone I know gets up and goes to work every day, whether they feel like it or not. If we don’t go to work, we can end up unemployed. So, we get up and go, whether we feel like it or not because meeting our basic needs is more important than our feelings. When folks say: I didn’t feel motivated, what they are saying is: “My feelings were more important than my goal so I didn’t act.” Real motivation is an orientation in life. We see what we want to accomplish, become, etc. and we do it because it matters more than our feelings or other desires. I go to work because my job is important to me and, whether I feel like it or not, I need to do it. Motivation is a life orientation. It is living in a direction that is more important than anything else, which prompts us to act. When feelings are more important than our goals, we can easily become “unmotivated”, but in reality we weren’t all that motivated in the first place. We just happened to have feelings that pushed us to action for a time. The key to actually being motivated, as we see in Schwarzenegger’s account, is focusing on your goals and making them the highest priority. It’s easy to forget the destination of a long term effort when we allow ourselves to be distracted or stop focusing in our goals. We need to envision where we are going and make it a priority. It’s got to stay the main thing and you have to remember that it’s the priority. Very few people forget that if they don’t go to work, they’ll end up in financial straights because they are reminded regularly of their financial needs in the form of bills and other expenses. Regular reminders of our goals keep us striving to accomplish them.
