The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

by Jeff Haden

Spark

Approach

Game Plan for Life

delightful.

There is only one recipe for gaining motivation: success.

Specifically, the dopamine hits we get when we observe ourselves making progress.

Not huge, life-changing successes. Those come all too infrequently, if ever. If you want to stay motivated, if you want to stay on track, if you want to keep making progress toward the things you hope to achieve, the key is to e...

Motivation is something you get, from yourself, automatically, from feeling good about achieving small successes. Success is a process. Success is repeatable and predictable. Success has less to do with hoping and praying and strategizing than with diligently doing (after a little strategizing, sure): doing the right things, the right way, over and over and over.

When you consistently do the right things, success is predictable. Success is inevitable. You just can’t think about it too much. No obsessing allowed.

slowly growing stronger, or more skillful, or more wise.

A slice of satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness can be found in the achievement . . . but the real source of consistent, lasting happiness lies in the process.

Incredibly successful people set a goal and then focus all their attention on the process necessary to achieve that goal. They set a goal and then, surprisingly, they forget the goal.

They feel good about themselves because they’ve accomplished what they set out to do today, and that sense of accomplishment gives them all the motivation they need to do what they need to do when tomorrow comes—because success, even tiny, incremental success, is the best motivational tool of all.

Real motivation comes after you start. Motivation isn’t the result of hearing a speech or watching a movie or crisping your soles. Motivation isn’t passive; motivation is active.

The key is to enjoy the feeling of success that comes from improving in some small way . . . and then rinse and repeat, over and over again.

You

feel motivated because you took action. Motivation is a result, not a precondition. You don’t need motivation to break a sweat. Break a sweat and you’ll feel motivated.

yourself: He works incredibly hard. The real premise of The 4-Hour Workweek is to increase your output by ten times per hour. Tim is the first to admit he has no problem with hard work—the key is to apply your hard work to the right things. But somehow that premise has been twisted to become “I just need to find the secret (something) that results in instant success.”

accept the fact that I had failed and (2) work really hard to improve.

Confidence comes from preparation. Hesitation, anxiety, fear . . . Those feelings don’t come from some deep, dark, irrational place inside you.

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency.

Ovitz relied on his process.

shows that people who talk about their intentions are much less likely to follow through on those intentions.

Declaring what we want to be and how we will get there causes us to feel we are further along the path of becoming who we want to be—even though we have in reality done nothing but talk.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Duckworth says that what really drives success is not “genius” but a combination of passion and long-term perseverance.

The goal was, in an odd way, actually the process.

“All it really takes is a desire to keep on doing it. Finding a passion comes from sticking with it, and that is easy when you work hard to keep getting better. And before long, you realize you’ve gotten passionate about the passion.”

You don’t have to find the motivation or willpower; you do what you need to do because that’s who you are.

Success → Motivation → More Success → More Motivation → More Success = Becoming

As Dr. Travis Bradberry, author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0, writes, “Even though we don’t always realize it, as the day goes on, we have increased difficulty exerting self-control and focusing on our work. As self-control wears out, we feel tired and find tasks to be more difficult, and our mood sours.”

The distance between your dream and the stark reality of your present is incredibly demoralizing—no wonder you give up on that goal.

James Clear, a leading thinker on the subject, the best use of a goal is to inform the process you will follow to achieve it.

Every goal should be specific, meaningful, attainable, realistic, and time bound.

Dream big. Set a huge goal.

Commit to your huge goal. Create a process that ensures you can reach your goal.

Then forget about your huge goal and work your process

instead.

“I will set it . . . and then I will forget it.”

Those are your goals. You set them, but for now you must forget them, because you will never be able to give yourself positive feedback when you constantly compare yourself with your end goal.

So I started writing for Inc.com in order to have published work appearing in my name on a highly reputable platform. That way potential clients may read it and think, “I really liked that . . . and hey, he’s a ghostwriter. I need a ghostwriter.”

Keep in mind each view was worth only 0.0095 cents; in other words, I would earn $9.50 per thousand views. To make serious money I would have to generate serious views. Monthly compensation was capped at $10,000, which translated to 1,050,000 views, and to date no one had ever “capped out.”

Write a new post. Without fail. No excuses. Build relationships. I contacted three people who tweeted my posts that day, choosing the three who seemed most influential, the most noteworthy, the most “something” (even if that “something” was

just “thoughtful comment”). Then I sent an e-mail—not a tweet—and said thanks. My goal was to make a genuine connection. Build my network. I contacted one person who might be a great source for a future post. I aimed high: CEOs, founders, entrepreneur-celebrities . . . people with instant credibility and engaged followings. Many didn’t respond. But some did. And

some have become friends and appear in this book. Add three more items to my “list of great headlines.” Headlines make or break posts: A great post with a terrible headline will not get read. So I worked hard to learn what worked for other people—and to adapt their techniques for my own ...

likes and tweets. I tried to figure out what readers responded to, what readers cared about. Writing for a big audience has little to do with pleasing yourself and everything to do with pleasing an audience, and the only way to know what worked was to know the audience. Ignore my editor. I l...

for columnists who were read by a maximum of 300,000 people each month. My goal was to triple that, which meant I needed to do things differently. We occasionally disagreed, and early on I lost some of those battles. Once my numbers started to climb, I w...

Posting frequently allowed me to improve my skills more quickly, increase my chances of writing “home run” posts that would go viral, and—not incidentally—build a library of posts for new readers to someday discover.

Building connections provided an ever-expanding list of great content sources.

Experimenting frequently with headlines allowed me to quickly learn to craft better headlines, and eventually I developed my own style (which was widely copied, so I...