You jump up in your chair. Eureka! – You just got a great idea for a project!
You excitedly run off to a shop, get all the supplies you need, and start working immediately. You work for 6 hours the first day, 10 hours the next, loving the project… but after a few days, your initial enthusiasm wears off. You’re faced with weeks, or even months of regular work before you finish. You lose your motivation and stop.
Sounds familiar?
“They say getting started is half the battle. That means finishing is the other half of the battle. Most people forget to mention that.”
- Vlad Dolezal
When I offered free life coaching the other day, the single most common problem people mentioned was “staying motivated and keeping on track” with their goals. So let’s cover that!
Get your initial motivation right
If you start a project simply because it seems fun, it will be hard to stay motivated once you inevitably run into patches of dry, boring work. (That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as we’ll see later.)
But if you want to stay motivated to finish, make sure your project aligns with your core values. (Finding out your core values is way beyond the scope of this blog post. For now we’ll assume you already know what they are.)
Let’s say among your top values are Environment, and Empathy. Then it might not be a great idea to start a project that involves drilling for oil in the antarctic, spilling tons of oil and killing off cute fluffy baby penguins with a big rusty knife in the process.
On the other hand, starting a project that involves conserving rare monkeys in New Zealand rainforests would work out pretty well! Because even when you hit rough patches of tedious work, you will still feel a warm glowing feeling every day, as you’re working on something that’s aligned with your core values.
In other words, the first and most important tip is this – align your goals with your core values.
How to stay motivated later on
“People often say that motivation doesn’t last.
Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.”
- Zig Ziglar
And now for a bunch of tactics to keep you motivated throughout working on a goal!
1. Break down big tasks into small chunks
This gives you regular feedback on how you’re doing. If a task takes a week to complete, you will easily lose motivation to work in the middle of the week. But if you chunk it into 2-hour sub-tasks, you will regularly get the pleasure of ticking off a want-to-do list item. You will visibly see your progress, and stay motivated.
2. Make your goals public
You can simply post your goals on your blog, or let your friends know on facebook. When other people know about your goal, you feel a motivation not to let their expectations down, and you’re more likely to complete your goals.
3. Get other people on your team
Working alone gets hard. Get other people involved in your goals – that way you can keep each other motivated when things get rough. (Plus, working with others is fun!)
And even if you’re doing solo work (like blogging), you can ask friends for tips, or run ideas past them. Either way, getting other people involved helps your motivation.
(NaNoWriMo is a great example of the two above principles.)
4. Enjoy the process – make it fun!
My favorite method for killing procrastination is making work fun. Once you enjoy the process itself (instead of only being motivated by the end result), getting motivated will be a breeze. Hell, you’ll actively have to stop yourself from working so you don’t burn out!
(For example, see my recent post involving a dialogue between Vladilles and the Tortoise. It may or may not be fun for you to read, but it sure was fun for me to write!)
5. It’s okay to have bad days
Nobody is 100% motivated every single day. You might only see the positive side of all the personal development gurus, but the fact is we get lazy and demotivated like everybody else. Sometimes I have weekends where all I do is browse the web or watch TV shows. It’s okay.
Don’t beat yourself up over bad days. Instead, accept them as they come, and once they pass, get back on track!
6. If you start losing motivation, think back to your original reasons
This relates to picking the right motivation. If your goals align with your core values, just thinking back to that will often pick you up and get you going again. You’ll zoom out to see the big picture, and realize your difficulties are just temporary, and your project will be fun again!
7. It’s okay to be a quitter
And finally, this.
Sometimes, you find out your initial enthusiasm wears off and your original motivation is gone. Maybe you started something because it was fun, but slowly it turned into something tedious you have to do every week.
Good news, everyone! You can quit. Doing things you hate isn’t heroic, it’s dumb. You can contribute far more to the world by doing things you love, because it keeps you enthusiastic and full of energy!
So forget about finishing things just because you started them. Only finish things when you still have the right motivation to do so.
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I hope all this helps you stay motivated! And if you use any cool motivation hacks I haven’t mentioned, please share them in the comments.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Great blog. I have two additional motivators for you. 1.Dedicate the project or event to someone special to you. We often find additional motivation when we can focus on our love or admiration to someone else. 2. Some have very little self motivation – they need the accountability to someone else. It is their idea and their project, but they need someone to expect completion of them.
Hey Vlad, I have a motivation-issue question you may have some insight on. I was talking to a fellow writer the other day and was surprised to hear her express a problem I’ve had for years. She and I both make our livings writing, so it’s not just a hobby, although I’d say we both love it like a hobby as well as enjoy it as a job. Anyway, we both find that when we’re hired for boring writing projects, whether they pay well or not, we just shoot that stuff out, no problem. But give us an assignment for an idea we love, and a deep-seated work avoidance takes over. We sit at the computer and stare; we come up with busy work to waste time. I over-extend the research end of the project to avoid the writing end. What’s going on here? Why would we (and other creative types I know) avoid the work we ought to love the most? What would be some strategies to get around this self-defeating behavior?
@Anon:
This is just a shot in the dark, but – I have a little bit of experience with that myself, being a blogger
Maybe it’s because with the boring projects, you don’t really care how they turn out, you just churn them out and are done with it. Whereas with the ones you love, you CARE about how they turn out… so you worry about making them perfect, sometimes you only feel 85% awesome instead of 100% awesome so you feel your writing wouldn’t be that great, you spend too much time thinking and none doing…
Does that explanation feel right? Or am I completely off
I’ll have a think about how to handle that, and get back to you
See the only problem with that seventh step is i resort to it every opportunity I get. I’ll starts tons of projects, but once that initial motivation goes away, I no longer can work on the project. And I feel like If I keep quitting, I might as well just spend all my time watching TV, seeing as I’m not getting anything done.