This is What Motivates You When Success is a Luxury
What motivates Tom Brady to keep playing football at age 44 after winning seven Superbowl’s? What motivates Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to keep making more money when they are the two richest people in the world as I write this?
Now think about yourself…
What motivates you beyond 1) safety, 2) love and family, 3) making a living, 4) eating and drinking, and 5) keeping a roof over your head?
How many of your goals are a luxury? For most people, goals beyond these five things are a luxury. In addition, the more difficult any goal you have beyond these five things, the more of a luxury they are. Particularly when your basic needs of safety, love, income, food, and shelter aren’t at risk.
This means most of your goals are less of a priority than you think. Consequently, this is likely the root of any struggle you have with motivation to pursue any given “luxury” goal. It’s not that you’re lazy or you don’t want to be rich as bad as Elon Musk, for example. It’s a mistake to beat yourself up over things that your subconscious mind is stopping you from prioritizing. Instead, make a decision to rewire your subconscious thoughts.
Moreover, there is only one way to do this as renowned sport psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais reminds people so often:
The reason people change is because of pain.
Using Pain to Motivate You to Pursue Luxury Goals
To explain this let me use myself as an example. Today marks the 1,440th day in a row I’ve published a post on this blog. That’s nearly 4 years, 3.94 to be exact. This means I haven’t missed a day of writing since 2018. I don’t have to do this. There is nobody paying me, cheering me on, or checking-up on me. I’m pretty sure If I skipped writing today, very few if anyone would notice.
Writing every day is simply something I told myself I would do 1,440 days ago almost on a whim, and then I just started doing it. On many of these 1,440 days I have a lot of other work on my plate or I’m traveling, vacationing, or attending an all-day youth wrestling tournament. It’s not convenient at all for me to write on these days and it’s definitely not necessary. Moreover, writing in this blog doesn’t pay the bills and it fills none of the 5 basic needs I previously mentioned.
Simply stated, I have no external motivation for writing today or any other day. It’s a luxury. Furthermore, I have no more will power than you or anyone else. So, how do I do it? I use pain.
1,440 days ago my goal was to only write for 74 days in a row, surpassing my original consistency streak of 73 days. If you read the story, you see it took me a few failures before I got to 74 days. Once I reached that goal, I then set a goal to write for 365 days in a row. After hitting that goal, I no longer set specific numbers as goals. Instead, my only goal is to stay consistent with my behavior.
Now after 1,440 days of consistently writing I no longer need motivation to sustain my routine. My routine is embedded in my subconscious. If I didn’t write today the pain would be more than the pain it’s taking me to push myself to keep going. This is what makes habits stick. This is also what makes Tom Brady, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos tick. Habits and the pain of breaking habits.
This is the lesson I ask you to takeaway. Most of your personal goals aren’t necessary for you to survive. They are a luxury. Given that, motivation is not going to be what keeps you going.
Instead, you need pain. The pain of quitting must be more than the pain to push yourself to keep going. To that end, you can only get to this pain point when you stick with your routine for so long that the behavior is no longer something you do, it becomes who you are. That is the process of building a habit.
Habits can be bad for you. But if you are intentional about creating them, they will change your life for the better.