How To Stay Motivated When You Are Actually Not
When staying unmotivated comes with no price & pushing yourself can cost you an unfavorable struggle.
Failure, heartbreak, negative criticism, physical abuse, financial constraints, death of loved ones, strained ties with family and friends. There is no such thing as a perfect life for anyone. The world we breathe in is a two-faced, hideous monster.
We are all flawed and miserable to a noticeable degree and that’s a far cry from the fairy-tale lives that we believed in while growing up.
In this big bad world, all of us are destined to taste the sourness of fate. Period.
While each one has his own share of tragedy to bear with, we are expected to familiarize with bliss. Words that hold a huge universe in them are thrown at us in every nick of a second. We are expected to embrace terms such as success, gratitude, and honor and nurture them to a point that they become an important part of our individuality.
With pain a significant player in the course of our lives, we naturally crave for feelings of fulfillment and entitlement. Achievements that are subjective to our mindsets become the only goals in our lives. Couple that with loads of crap on the double-edged notions of success and entrepreneurship on the Internet and you have human bots ready to take over the world with ideas that are based on a fixed ideology. The results. None. Or repetitive.
When shallow ideas are not actualized or vague dreams don’t turn into purposeful reality, the abrupt endorphin release comes to a halt.
Your mind becomes indifferent to the circumstances and gradually more accommodating of debacle and ache. Stay in that state for long, and you become viciously unmotivated.
Amidst the process of accepting the proportion of pain in our lives, there is a need to operate in an optimistic and meaningful manner. And the only prerequisite required is to stay motivated.
So, many of you would be questioning why one should bother to be motivated when life is actually a bundle of BS. For this, you first need to have an understanding of what life is.
What is life?
Life is mainly a composite of material and non-material things. Some people have more material things such as money, a fancy house, and a car while others are abundantly blessed with non-material things such as certain skills, empathy, intuition, etc. Either way, each human who steps on earth is endowed with certain possessions, whether in the form of material or non-material attributes.
Those who have set footmarks in any sphere of life mastered the skill of utilizing their inherent attributes to achieve the ones they lack.
Success is subjective
Success is the most misleading and vague term that has multiple meanings and connotations to it. Success for Mark Zuckerberg holds different meanings than as it does for Lady Gaga.
You may consider yourself to be successful after purchasing a penthouse in New York, but for your best buddy, it might be reaching his sales targets. We can all be successful in our own distinctive ways. Comparing your triumph story with Johnny Depp or Khabib Nurmagomedov won’t do you any good if you are meant to excel in writing stories. Therefore, it is important to first identify what actually success means to you.
Money isn’t success
Accumulation of colored paper notes referred to as money can’t be attributed to success. The sooner you get this right, the sooner you’ll be to steer towards self-development.
Real success is not about gathering money, it is more about your mind state that makes you content with what you have, making you purposeful with your life. Achieve these hallmarks and you build a legacy with money as a by-product of your efforts.
With a clear outline of how life is meant to operate, you can have deep introspection on how to stay motivated when you feel the opposite. Here is my personal formula that has helped me stay on the pedestal even when I run out of oxygen.
1. Every Day Is A Different Story
It’s okay to feel bad. It’s okay to feel embarrassed and unloved. It’s okay to be average. It’s okay to fail. It’s okay to be hungry and cold. It’s okay to be stuck in life. It’s okay to be directionless. For today.
What isn’t okay is to feel bad and embarrassed and unloved every day. What isn’t okay is that you stay hungry and cold, stuck in your life and directionless for the rest of your life.
Your current state today doesn’t necessarily have to go with you into your tomorrow.
The best thing about life is that it is never the same at any time for anyone. If today is a sad story, you have the power to pen down an interesting fairy-tale for tomorrow. The realization that you have control over your future circumstances is enough to give you the needed push from within.
2. Happiness Is Success, But Success Isn’t Always Happiness
Though interchangeably used, if you dissect these terms you would find that the two have different meanings. Happiness is a mental state that is acquired with emotional and spiritual well being, while success is the achievement of material goals.
Those who focus on being successful merely drive their efforts towards achieving certain goals, unsure whether the results will provide them with mental peace or not. Simply put, they exhaust all their efforts in pursuit of material gains.
On the contrary, people who strive towards achieving happiness as their end objective, work religiously to meet their goals along the way. They paint a bigger picture in which success is just a blotch that they fill anyways. Moreover, they are mindful of the needs and feelings of people who surround them and hence, they naturally end up getting more by giving in more.
If unfulfilled goals demotivate you, remember, it’s just a blotch that you have painted and the rest of the canvas is still at your disposal.
If unfulfilled goals demotivate you, remember, it’s just a blotch that you have painted and the rest of the canvas is still at your disposal.
Putting in sincere efforts will not only make you tranquil and loved, but it will also be a source for undying motivation to never cease at thriving.
3. Character Matters
If you observe closely how life and nature function, one thing is apparent that everything is in a recurring state accompanied by a set of varying circumstances. For instance, we eat food throughout our lives but every day we have the power to choose what we want to consume.
Each day we perform countless repetitive actions with a certain extent of control on how we carry out those tasks. Recurrence is evident in nature too; seasons come and go in a sequence, night follows the day with new opportunities for us to explore.
By examining the lives of top achievers in any industry you will discover that they excel by performing repetitive tasks or taking the same actions over and over again. Athletes go to the gym every day, marketers apply their tried tactics to all their customers.
While circumstances in life may not be recurring, it’s events definitely fall into a pattern.
Whatever that you are doing to excel needs to be done over and over again. But routine doesn’t equal a mundane process. You can turn the tables by choosing which circumstances to operate in.
With you being the boss of your own future in an already determined present, you can achieve monumental gains and build a legacy. Your ability to maneuver with your options would keep you motivated to discover yourself over and over again.
Bottom Line
While you can’t control many aspects of your life, you can certainly reign your heart, mind and your abilities. Combine all these three and there is nothing that can stop you from chasing your dreams and building on them. In a life that is full of adversity, be confident of your resolve against whatever life throws at you. Once you are in control of yourself, life and nature would tame down too bringing unearthly outcomes.
