How To Stay Motivated

In the book “The Motivation Myth” by Jeff Haden, the author lays out the myths surrounding motivation and help readers discover what truly causes and maintains the motivation they need to succeed in their accomplishments.

The main concept of the book, at least what struck me, is a simple technique (that I have customized for my personal purpose) to maintains motivation.

Let’s  assume you want to be an iOS Developer. The main long – term goal will be inevitably “Be an iOS Developer”. Ok, what you can do to accomplish it? You can pick up a course and start to learn the basics for instance. After that you can try to face off something difficult and more complex and dig deep in the “dark side”of iOS Development.  Did you realize it ?

When you have a long term goal BUT you don’t have any short term goal (that actually compose your long one) you will lose motivation quickly. Why? Because your brain just start to think to a lot of other stuff.

The problem with motivation is the following one: when you setup a long term goal you have a boost of motivation (and that is amazing). But without a process (a well defined process) with short-term goals your boots will run out fast ’cause troubles and doubts.

BUT let’s try a different approach. Setup a long term goal and then with the boots of motivation, try structure a well planned process with short-term goals. In this way you have your path already designed and you have only to follow it, without doubts or troubles because you already faced-off them (and probably overcome them) during your “motivation boost”. So, you follow the process and step-after-step you achieve the short terms goals, and every time you do it, every time you hit a “little goal” you get another boost of motivation. And again, with that boost you follow the process and hit another goal and get another boost of motivation, and again, and again, and again.

In this way you will always maintain an high level of motivation and a less level of struggles or problems or doubts.

The boost of motivation is not also gave by the act of achieve a goal, but also by the consciousness that you are one step closer to your term goal.

Do you think that Arnold Schwarzenegger always thought to the Mr Olympia? Yeah, his goal was win the Mr Olympia, but he was focused on the process and on every reps that dame him closer to the prize!

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