Inertia - Nº93

To be pushed by motivation, or pulled by discipline?

To know my soul is my greatest knowledge.

— Lailah Gifty Akita

Almost everybody can be excited about a goal for two or three months. A few years. Maybe more. But a champion will stay excited for 10, 20, or even 30 years. However long it takes to win. Or for as long as they are physically able to work on it. Very few people will make it this far with their ambitions, but we all can. How?

Well, what does motivation mean to you? How do you define it in your way? And then what about discipline? For me, it’s like this: there’s a clear physical difference when riding a bike with the wind swaying in different directions. When the wind is in front of you, pushing you back, slowing you down, it’s a grind. It feels incredibly unnatural. Evil. And you quickly concede that you can’t push on forever. But when the wind is behind you, pulling you along, it’s euphoric. It’s transformative. You feel like you’re flying. Gliding along the tarmac as if the science of friction does not apply to you.

Motivation and discipline work in the same way. And a shift in the way you think about them is the key to reflexively mastering these two beautiful qualities. Making them work in harmony, seamlessly woven through the fabric of your character.

Discipline: (v) To train by instruction and exercise; drill.

Motivation: (n) The general desire or willingness of someone to do something. (1)

By basic definition, motivation only exists as a noun. But discipline has a verb form; it is something you do and choose to do. Motivation is merely an energy that can come and go—of which you cannot choose to do or control.

You can’t switch on motivation, though you can trigger it. With discipline, you can switch it on and trigger it. And then combine the two: when you are pulled along by the tailwind, and you decide to push a bit harder, what happens? You fly.

Often, when we talk about setting and achieving a new goal or mini-target, we cite motivation as what gets us started or keeps us going. And that’s great, we need that.

But the problem is motivation won’t keep the ball rolling for you up the mountain you need to climb. Eventually, you will tire. Your work rate won’t last on motivation alone since it relies on your willingness to achieve your goal. You will have your bad days like everybody else. Motivation is a beautiful thing to take advantage of when you generate it. Like an Energy Recovery System on a Formula One car, you build it up, and then expel it measuredly in your day-to-day life—using it only when you need it. And it can give you unusual powers of focus and productivity. But you must spend it wisely.

What’s more powerful than motivation? Habit. We’re born to excel at our habits, whatever they are. As much as people don’t want to admit it, humans are highly automated in their behaviour. When was the last time you stopped to think about or question your daily routine? The amount of brain power it would take to focus this much every day, on top of everything else we do, would exhaust most people. Even now, a very conservative guess would say there are at least 1 million people who may never think about what they’re doing daily more than you are right now.

The more you think about your habits, the more patterns you can list that you don’t even consciously think about. Most people avoid this because it scares them. Not because it’s dangerous, but because it’s the unknown. Because it’s like staring in the dark. And it’s often used against us, whether that’s by corporations, family, or even friends. They use it as leverage to keep you staying still. As much as some don’t want to admit it.

But tapping into those hardwires is precisely what discipline and self-mastery are all about. It’s the most powerful thing you can do for yourself. There is little to no risk in rewiring your mind to choose what you want in life, creating an unbreakable discipline to achieve it, and harnessing motivation to give you the kick you need on the days with darker clouds.

Wisdom and expertise come from synaptic pruning: cutting the extra fluff of intricate but laborious processes we don’t need our brain to do, in order to unlock a level of high performance we didn’t know we had. Your habits pull you along as discipline lives in you as the fire you thought ran out.

And so you know you want to cultivate a potent mixture of motivation and discipline, but now you don’t know what else it needs. Well, habit change isn’t hard, but it is time-dependent, which is where most people who make it this far, tend to lose sight and fail.

And so we go back to the beginning of this essay.

The ocean is vast. It takes time to cross. But on the other side is something better than you can imagine. So take the small steps. Give yourself the time to be a master. The small first few actions might be so small that it seems ridiculous—like if you started going to the gym and only went for 10 minutes. But believe me, what happens when you let discipline pull you along, and motivation push you back up, is indescribable.