"Motivation". It has become a very common word amongst daily conversations. Everything you do or plan to do you try to seek motivation for that. Also lack of motivation is being seen as a major problem in this era of distractions.
If we look at it closely, it has become a business too for many people. There are numerous motivational speakers, authors
explaining ways to tackle your mind to make you to do stuff. Stuff that you
look forward to but don’t have the passion, motivation, instinct etc. etc. to
take a leap towards.
If we look more closely, the need for motivation has become
an addiction on its own. People are endlessly looking at motivational videos
without actually keeping their phone aside and start doing what they need to do
in order to achieve whatever they want to achieve.
According to my observations, the problem is not lack of motivation but the
problem is wrong perception of people about themselves and this wrong
perception has been fueled more and more by the urge to get motivated.
I call the problem of lack of motivation as “The problem of Split Identity”.
Let me give you an example of a very common scenario. “Trying to be fit or lose weight”
The thoughts of an average person trying to lose weight or acquire a celebrity body go like this:
I need to work out daily and follow a diet plan because I need to be/stay fit
or lose weight/ maintain this weight. I am going to call this The Motive.
But I get lazy in the morning and did not wake up on time
for workout. Now I am late for workout and if I do workout now, I will be late
for work. Let’s skip workout today.
After a few of such incidents, I start cursing myself for not waking up on time in morning. Even if I don’t curse, I think that there is something wrong in my habits or thinking and I need to get “motivated”.
So,
I look at documentaries of famous sportsperson, paste photos of Hollywood Gods
on my walls, buy a “No Pain, No Gain” poster and many other things in order to
help me “motivate” myself.
Let's draw a diagram for this:
What I have done is that I have split my sense about myself in two parts. My one self is the one who need to motivate and the other self is the one that needs to get motivated and this other self is responsible to do the work. While The Motive (The Green Rectangle) is clear.
Also, I am sure everyone has experienced this that once you finally start doing the actual stuff that needs to be done, you actually start liking it until you get distracted, back to not doing the stuff. This shows that for a huge amount of time, we identify ourselves as the person who needs to motivate and this is the Orange circle which represents who we are conscious as, when we are trying to motivate ourselves.
When we actually start doing the work we don’t feel the need for motivation. The actual work looks good, which is depicted below. Our consciousness and perception of self move to the latter circle, the doer circle.
But it remains there only for some amount of time until we are distracted back to being conscious in the identity of the one who needs to motivate.
The more time we spend in the first state the more we enlarge it and it becomes more difficult to jump to the actual working self identity.
The solution is to understand this trick that your mind plays with you and gradually reduce the time that you spend in the motivating self and start spending more and more time in the actual working self.
Basically, we need to just realize that the ultimate goal is to achieve The Motive, the green rectangle.
You are the one who created the green rectangle for yourself. You are the one who need to work to achieve it. There is no need for an intermediate goal of getting motivated. Therefore there is no need for an identity which needs to motivate.
Hence, the picture needs to change to the following:
If you are wondering whether this article itself is a motivation article or not. Let me assure you it is not. There are no motivational quotes by famous people, no encouraging words in this article. It is purely written to create clarity in you about yourself.
