What exactly is motivation and how do you motivate yourself? There’s a lot of disagreement about the answer to these two questions, and I certainly don’t claim to have found the perfect answer.
But I have been having an interesting experience over the last couple of weeks. I thought I had a great deal of motivation for two projects in particular. And yet my motivation for both of them collapsed at virtually the same time.
The first of these was writing a daily blog post. Some of you may have noticed that the last proper blog post I wrote was on Monday April 25th.
The second one was regular exercise. That lasted for a few days longer, but the last time I took any proper exercise (either gym or running) was on Friday April 29th. Since then my motivation for both blogging and exercising has been just about zero.
“What’s so special about that?” you may be saying, “People lose motivation all the time.”
Yes, but in this case I can put my finger on exactly what it was that caused me to lose motivation. I only realized it today when I started both writing and exercising again - and became aware that what had caused me to lose motivation was no longer there. Or to put it the other way, the factor that gave me motivation had been put back in place - today. The effect was immediate.
What do you think that motivating factor might be? Think about it. I’ll reveal the answer tomorrow!
Clue: There are no outside circumstances involved. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you already know everything you need in order to have a good guess at the answer.