Motivation Doesn’t Come Free

Motivation won’t save you, discipline will.

Have you ever had a goal, but never felt that it was the right time to work toward it?

There’s a pervasive idea that to make progress on something, we have to wait for motivation to hit us. We think that without it, we cannot do anything.

The problem is that motivation doesn’t come all that often. So, you’re going to have to rely on something else.

And that something else is discipline.

Habits Over Goals

Say you have the goal of writing a book. That’s a big goal, and one that’s almost too scary to think about. But to make it easier, you can create a habit.

From this point on, you’re going to write 1,000 words a day.

Grab a calendar and for every day you write 1,000 words or more, add a cross to the day.

Congratulations, you’ve just started a habit streak!

Your goal has changed from writing a whole book (scary!) to writing just 1,000 words a day (not scary!).

This is where discipline comes in. You remove the need to have motivation bestowed on you by the gods, and instead make your goal to keep the streak alive.

Doing this for a month, writing 1,000 words a day, you’d have accumulated 30,000 words and be well on your way to completing a first draft.

Apply it to Anything

Big goals are scary, but they don’t have to be.

The great thing about streaks is that they remove the focus on the big, scary goal and instead force you to focus on the simple, day-to-day actions. Take the thing you want to achieve and break it down to simple, daily habits.

And when you look back at a week- or month-long streak, you’ll have the intrinsic motivation to not break it.

And that, right there, is how discipline leads to motivation.