Motivation is overrated discipline is real
Saturday morning aka Weekends, 6:45 I am heading to the gym, weather is you know as bad as it can get in Finnish dark winter.
In the warm cozy bed are my partner and son, sleeping so sweetly. Am I motivated to go to the gym? Not. Will skipping this gym hour to stay cozy with family on Saturday morning does any significant harm to my body or health whatsoever? Not. I am not a super athlete guy with a super hard-core gym routine anyway. But whenever I get into this kind of thought, I recall a theory I heard on a podcast, one coin loophole. If you do not pick a coin one day, it wouldn’t change anything significant in your life and you wouldn’t lose anything but if you do it over some time it would.
For many years in the past, I had brainwashed myself with the theory of motivation. I kept on searching for the thing that would motivate me because I somehow believed that the reason why I couldn’t focus on something is due to a lack of motivation. While I can’t argue about what exactly is motivation but surely I can say that I was using motivation as an excuse to cover my laziness.
Motivation is that unreliable friend who sometimes joins you at your parties, you enjoy his/her company so much but you can’t trust him/her as you don’t have control over him/her. However, discipline is that boring friend who is always with you, whom you can control most of the time, who is not that interesting when you start partying but as you continue you get the best fun out from him/her. If you can have both of these from the same friend voilä you are in magic land but for most of us that is not the case.
That day of realisation
4 years ago, one day, being tired and exhausted from a hectic job search I decided to go out for a walk and ended up in a bar alone drinking a beer. I was a bit tipsy and decided to continue my walking journey. That day I went into a deep thought about why I am struggling in my career. I tried to go as much in the past as I could. Soon I could see the pattern of how I kept starting new things and quitting. I was surprised to see that I never succeeded in anything I started with. I was motivated to join the dance class, I enjoyed the first month as the steps I learned were easier to follow but as soon as it required more effort from me I decided not to continue. Then I started the video editing journey, and when I had to advance my skills I gave up. I do still do the editing but never took it to the next level. This kind of getting excited, starting, and then quitting persisted in everything I did.
I made a promise not to quit
The next morning, I made a promise to myself — this time I will not quit and I will learn to program properly. I said properly because I had the same case of starting and quitting programming already in past. This wasn’t the first time I made any promise but this time I felt different maybe because I was prepared that motivation will not last forever. I tried to recall how hard school life was, especially in that part of the world where I came from, the meaning of learning was memorising. With the family pressure, peer pressure, and the social pressure I did pretty good in high school, I memorised a lot but now just a few syntaxes in programming were messing my head. When I was at school I had no motivation over those but I was disciplined, I needed that back in my life again. The only difference — there was no one monitoring how disciplined I was.
Fast forward 4years, today I am a software engineer and I am truly enjoying the journey so far. Learning never stops and technology is emerging every day so I can’t fully say I succeeded in learning programming but I had a measurable milestone and that was to work full-time as a programmer.
Motivation and food
Motivation comes and goes but life must move on. Sometimes we enjoy the food we eat, sometimes we eat just to supply energy to our body, and sometimes we just eat for the sake of eating. I see it applies to anything in life.
A vacation sounds interesting but the actual journey might not be interesting from start to end, being in a relationship with a person you love might seem a great achievement but over a while, you can have the same feelings every day. Same with your dream job, dream car, and so on. If you only run after motivation you will end up messing up everything.
When I got my first job as a junior developer, for the first time I felt like I did not quit something. This reference from my life gave me confidence in many other things such as running a YouTube channel, learning about investment and investing, going to the gym regularly, and so on.
So far I realised that process is the key, and discipline is what makes you move forward in your process. Anything you want to achieve takes hard work, dedication, and discipline. Do not run after finding a motivation, run after something that you are ready to be disciplined for. Motivation will come and go but you should move on.
I hope this was useful for you. Everybody has their way of learning, improving and growing what worked for me may not work for you. I would love to hear your feedback and comments. If you enjoyed reading this article, support me by clapping and following. Additionally you can connect me via Linkedin.❤