I have a love-hate relationship with motivation and self-help literature. I love it, because it mostly comes from people who’ve done something substantial. In those cases, they’re sharing their wisdom, gained from decades of failures and successes, in hopes that people like me will soak it up and thereby create a quicker path to achieving or becoming whatever we want to achieve or become. I hate it, because all of that motivation and wisdom are so elusive! But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe a lack of motivation and a relentless desire for sleep are exactly what I need to grow and get better at my craft.
Creating only when you feel motivated or inspired is like only loving your spouse when everything is going great. That doesn’t build a fruitful relationship. It makes you lazy. It makes you give up when happiness isn’t magically enveloping you. Creating when you particularly don’t feel like it builds discipline. Discipline, as we all know, has a strong tendency to create great work over time. Forcing yourself to do something you have no momentary desire to do is what the path to success is all about! After all, “Do what others won’t today, so you can do what others can’t tomorrow” (Vince Lombardi). Others won’t work outside of 9–5 if they don’t feel like it, but each of us has the opportunity to do so, and to get ahead by doing it.
Recently, a good chunk of my writing time has been taken up by pieces and projects for people and places other than Kennetic Expression. I still need to write for KE, but usually by the time I get here, I’m burned out from the day. I’ve still been writing and practicing by creating stuff for others, which makes it easy to justify putting off a blog post till the next day. Doing that won’t make me better, though. It’s not helping me build discipline. Reading or watching a movie or going to sleep before checking that box off the day’s to-do list does nothing but teach me how to be lazy.
I wish, I wish with all my heart that I never ran out of motivation, and that I was always 100% enthralled by the next idea or project. That’s just not the case, and honestly that’s a good thing. Working through a lack of motivation forces me to gain discipline, to work when I know I need to, even if I don’t particularly want to. I don’t need motivation to grow, I just need to do the work.