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Abundance of Motivation

Dry Tree in UN Park
Almost always, we are inspired or influenced by something and then we set goal to achieve it. We feel highly motivated to work on it. But the motivation eventually fades away and we stop working on the goal we set up initially.

We set up goals but struggle to achieve it, mostly because motivation is fleeting. Most of us struggle to motivate ourself everyday. There is a huge spike of motivation at the beginning but we fail to generate it equally over time.

For some people, it’s just a matter of some minutes to lose motivation. Whereas, most of us lose motivation within a month or a week.

So the question is how do we elevate the level of motivation with time, if not, keep it same. I like what Tyler from Real Social Dynamics calls aligning your higher self, day to day self and petty self to one goal.

When you have all different types of self and personalities driving for one coherent goal, you’ll find it relatively easy to motivate yourself over time. We struggle to motivate ourselves because we have conflict over different types of persona.

We say we’ll do something, but don’t do it. We promise that we will achieve something, but forget it on the long run. You say you’ll be strict at your diet, but you can’t stop eating pizza when you see it.

It’s all because we have different types of self within us. One is your higher self, another day to day self and then finally your petty self.

Your higher self wants you to succeed and be on top. It wants you to move ahead and view the world as one and help it as much as it can. It cares about the higher stuff.

Your day to day self wants to live in pay check to pay check. It’s all about surviving today, and how to have a good life for now, this moment. It concerns about living life on a day to day basis. It doesn’t care about the long run.

Your petty self is your ego self. Very low self, which just wants to prove others wrong and belittle others effort.

The main trick for you to feel motivated over time is to drive all these self to one goal.

Unless you are enlightened, you will always move back and forth between these selves or personas. While making a decision, you might be making with your higher self thinking about the benefits in the long run. But while you execute, you might be in day to day self mindset. If that’s what happens, then you won’t be able to motivate yourself over time.

You need to align those different selves to one goal. For example, let’s take writing as a goal. For me to generate abundance of motivation, I need to ask questions and align my selves to it.

So the question is, “why write?”

Higher Self: To help people of this world with my knowledge. To improve the world, at least in a small way. To leave something behind for the mankind.

Day to Day self: To track my time and journey. To create goals for executing. To hold myself accountable.

Petty Self: Answer for people who thought I couldn’t write. For people who say I can’t write.

Now, if you look at it, all three selves have the same goal – to write. This way, I won’t face difficulty performing my job to write. I’ll be motivated from all three inner personas.

You should, too, consider aligning your personas with single goal, so that you can perform your work with abundance of motivation all the time.

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  • You make significant progress while following a set of goal that your heart desires, but you will lose focus if you ruin your passion.
    ……… and that’s the major problem which all of us deal with at one point or the other.
    There are lots of stuff that can ruin your passion. The most dangerous of them all is money.
    When you first work for your passion, you are self motivated. You have a set of disciple which works for you because you are passionate about the work you’re performing.
    However, if you start to receive monetary rewards for the work you do, money starts to work as a form of motivation. It starts to take the place of self motivation.
    It’s so lethal that it removes all the self motivation from your life and occupy it’s space.
    And if monetary reward starts to dry up somehow, you lose motivation. You never feel like working on that project again.
    For example, I’m starting 365 photo project, which means that I’ll be taking one photo and posting it on instagram and on my blog everyday for the rest of the year. I’m doing this with my own interest and I’m self motivated to work on it.
    Let’s say, someone starts to pay me some amount of money for doing this project.
    The moneytary benefit I receive will start to push away the self interest and self motivation which I cultivated while starting 365 photo project.
    And if that person stops paying me for doing this project, then I’ll lose interest in the project altogether. Which means that I’ll stop working on the project.
    If I hadn’t received moneytary rewards while working on the project, I would be working on it with my own self interest and not with the motivation set by monetary rewards.
    Money is silent a killer and it’s the most lethal form of motivation. It kills your motivation and self interest.
    If you let it occupy you, it will destroy you.
    That’s why it’s very important that you don’t take any monetary rewards while you first start out on project. With time, it can probably be a viable option, but at the beginning, it’s very dangerous and useless to take any monetary rewards.
    Always keep in mind that you either cultivate self interest and let motivation rise from there or you let other external force cultivate interest and motivation.
    As far as you can, always stay away from monetary rewards because money is a lethal form of motivation.

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