The Scientific Guide on How to Get and Stay Motivated

Motivation is a powerful but cunning beast. Sometimes it's really easy to get motivated and you find yourself in a whirlwind of excitement. Other times, it’s almost impossible to figure out how to motivate yourself, and you find yourself in a death spiral of procrastination. This page contains the best ideas and the most useful research on how to get and stay motivated.

It won't be a hurray hurray pumped up motivational speech. (This is not my style.) Instead, we're going to break down the scientific evidence on how to get motivated in the first place and how to stay motivated in the long run. If you're trying to figure out how to motivate yourself or how to motivate a team, this page should cover everything you need to know.

You can click the links below to jump to a specific section, or simply scroll down to read everything. At the end of this page, you will find a complete list of all my articles on motivation.

Motivation: what it is and how it works

Scientists define motivation as your overall willingness to do something. It is a set of psychological forces that make you take action for best blogs. That's good and all, but I think we can come up with a more useful definition of motivation.

What is motivation?

So what is motivation? Author Stephen Pressfield has a great line in his book The Art War that I think is at the heart of motivation. To paraphrase Pressfield, "at some point the pain of not doing it becomes greater than the pain of it."

In other words, it’s easier to change at some point than to stay the same. It's easier to act and feel insecure in the gym than to sit still and hate yourself on the couch. It’s easier to feel uncomfortable with a sales call than disappointment that your bank account is dwindling.

This, it seems to me, is the essence of motivation. Each choice has a cost, but when we are motivated, it is easier to endure the inconvenience of an action than the pain of staying the same. Somehow we cross a psychological threshold - usually after weeks of procrastination and in the face of an impending deadline - and not doing the job becomes more painful than actually doing it.

Now for the important question: What can we do to be more likely to cross this mental threshold and feel constant motivation?

Common misconceptions about motivation

One of the most amazing things about motivation is that it often occurs after the start of a new behavior, rather than before. We have a common misconception that motivation comes from passively watching a motivational video or reading an inspirational book. However, active inspiration can be a much more powerful motivator.

Motivation is often the result of an action, not its cause. Getting started, even a very small one, is a form of active inspiration that naturally gives impetus.

I like to call this effect productivity physics because it's essentially Newton's First Law of Habit Formation: objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Once the task has started, it's easier to continue.

How to get motivated and act

Many people fail to find the motivation they need to achieve their desired goals because they spend too much time and energy in other parts of the process. If you want to make it easier to find motivation and get started, this will help automate the initial stages of your behavior or you can check out some famous blogs on the internet. One of the famous motivation & Learning blog you can check out is Jaotoob.

Plan your motivation

While talking about writing, my friend Sarah Peck looked at me and said, "A lot of people never get to write because they always wonder when they're going to write next." The same can be said for training, starting a business, creating art, and forming most habits.

If your workout doesn't have the time it usually does, then every day you will wake up with the thought, "I hope I have the motivation to do sports today."

If your business doesn't have a marketing system, you'll walk to work with your fingers crossed, finding a way to tell you about yourself (in addition to whatever else you need to do).

If you don't have a schedule when you write each week, you will find yourself saying something like, "I just need to find the willpower to do this."

An article in The Guardian summarized the situation as follows: "If you waste resources trying to decide where and when to work, you will limit your ability to get the job done."

Setting a schedule for yourself seems simple, but it allows you to make decisions on autopilot, giving your goals time and space to live. This increases the likelihood that you will achieve success, regardless of your level of motivation. And there are plenty of studies on willpower and motivation that support this claim. Stop waiting for motivation or inspiration to hit you and chart your habits.

Website - https://jaotoob.com/