Stop Relying on Motivation and Make Change by Building Systems
Motivation is great when you have it. It makes you feel excited and you can’t wait to touch the grindstone and start working. However, when you don’t have one, your productivity can plummet. Instead, stop relying on motivation and start creating a system of habits to achieve your goal.
As the personal finance blog I’ll Teach You To Be Rich notes, motivation comes in waves. It is unreliable and therefore cannot be relied upon. Instead, creating a system that allows you to do what you want is the best approach to implementing change anyway:
One of my mentors, B.J. Fogg, who runs the persuasive technology lab at Stanford, says we must assume that our “future self” will be lazy without any motivation. We need to create systems to make it as easy as possible to achieve our goals – even when our motivation is low. In other words: motivation DOES NOT WORK. Systems do.
While it’s nice to be motivated, you’re much more likely to quit drinking soda and start drinking water if all you have is water in your home. Feelings of motivation to be healthier are not enough all the time. For any habit you can develop, the more you can structure your life around you to accommodate the lifestyle you want to live, the more likely you are to stick with that habit, even when your motivation fails.
How to motivate yourself | I’ll Teach You To Be Rich Through Rockstar Finance