How to get motivated even when you don't feel like it

Yo!

So for the past 2 months or so, I’ve been running every single day. I’ve never been a runner and honestly, on most days it was extremely hard to get motivated to do it, but through doing this, I found a few simple tools that helped me get motivated even when I didn’t feel like it that I think might be useful to you.

If you’re trying to stick to a new habit or stay motivated with a goal, these are some of the tools that will keep you motivated.

💡 Learning of the week

1. Kidnap yourself
This might sound odd but I learned this from a famous talk from a successful entrepreneur in Asia. He talked about how he went from someone who could barely wake up at 10am every day to someone who could wake up at 6am every day no matter what.

He basically just told his coworkers and friends one day that they could expect a voice message from him every single day at 6am. This social accountability was enough for him to feel motivated to wake up early - he essentially cornered himself into a task he needed to do. I’m sure you have felt this to a certain extent, like how it becomes easy to wake up super early if you have a flight to catch or some meeting you have to attend to.

So the first key to feeling motivated even when you don’t feel like it is that you should try to “kidnap yourself”. Expect to not feel motivated, and create penalties so that you stay motivated to do it even on the worse days. For example, telling a friend that you‘re going to send a selfie from the gym every day or else you’ll have to pay $100 dollars for the next 30 days. It works tremendously well.

If you’re familiar with focusmate, what I do is that I book deep work sessions with people ahead of time, which forces me to show up and do the work even when I don’t feel like it.

2. Don’t rely on motivation

Realize that the more you do the work even when you don’t feel like doing it, the more you are strengthening that habit and the more likely you’ll be able to do this in the future. Sometimes just thinking about this logically can push you enough to just get started, and most often the hardest part is just getting started. Discipline is more powerful than motivation.

3. Do the thing first thing in the morning

Let’s say you’re trying to start some habit like study a language for 2 hours or run every single day. The point of the day where you will most likely have the maximum motivation is the morning when you wake up, before you do literally anything else. The more you wait until later in the day, the more you can logically reason yourself out of it, or the more busy you might get and push it off until the next day.

So do the thing immediately when you wake up. Ideally you should be in a half awake, groggy state where you don’t even know what is going on and you find yourself already one step after another, running. This is one of the best hacks I’ve found. In college I tried to close that gap between my eyes opening and me setting foot in a gym, and when I started studying Japanese I did my flashcards in bed with my phone in my hand. (I didn’t miss a day for 3 years straight doing 1 hour of flashcards with this method.)

📖 What I’m Reading

This week I listened to this audiobook called the 10X Mentor written by Grant Cardone. He’s been called a lot of things, but it was really interesting to see how he thinks about taking risks, dealing with setbacks, and tackling your goals. When it comes to books, I love reading all different sides and seeing a wide variety of view points. I think it helps you build better mental models. Narration was on point, would recommend the book overall.
 
🍿 Update of the week

If this is the first time you’re reading this newsletter, thanks for reading! Check out this video I made about how I read books and how to absorb the information better. New video on Tuesday!

Happy Saturday,
Eric