Hello everyone ?
What have we already discussed?
— We live in a skillset-driven society
— Automated ants in the head
Today, we would like to discuss another simple idea: motivation and willpower are not enough.
Most people mistakenly believe that motivation and willpower are all they need to achieve their goals. No wonder we believe this because that’s what we hear from our friends, family, or motivation gurus. Recent brain research shows that willpower is like a container or a gas tank. You start out with a full tank, but every time you use it, you run out of stock.
? Here is a simple example of how it works:
You are trying to eat healthier foods. You work from home, sit down at your desk, get to work, and find chocolate cookies next to your laptop. What happens? You use your willpower and resist the cookies. You manage to do that – this time you were lucky. Then you refrain from switching to social media. Then you need a little more willpower to take on some not very important but urgent task.
After work, you plan to go to the gym, but end up extending your workday to solve a problem with a client or some difficult task from your task tracker. You just don’t want to leave something unfinished for tomorrow. Your willpower is quite exhausted by the end of the day, and the additional stress of not sticking to the original plan for the day does not help, of course.
❓ After all, will you go to the gym today? You know the answer because it happened to all of us. With a high degree of probability, if training in the gym is supported only by your motivation, you will abandon this idea.
When we rely on motivation and willpower to achieve our goals, it doesn’t take long to just give up and abandon them. Our strength is not always enough. This is why 25% of people abandon their goal after the first week, and 60% – after the first month of effort.
Many people who manage to change something in their lives understand this reality, so the next step is just acknowledgment. Acknowledgment of the fact that achieving your goals is not just a will effort. Admitting this fact, you will stop punishing yourself mentally for tripping over or failing to complete your plan – and that will give you more emotional freedom to try again.
? Let’s get back to the idea that to start your own business you lack the motivation, which you can be “pumped up” with at a two-day conference or training.
The same as with the gym, results come with practice and repetition. This requires energy and understanding not only of the Big Ultimate Goal, but also of intermediate results.
☝ If your Big Goal is to exercise every day, then your small achievable goal is to do one push-up every day. Or exercise every morning. If you want to reduce stress in your life, your small goal might be to meditate for one minute every evening. If you want more affection for your loved one, another hug or kiss may be your mini-goal. Start learning something new? Dive into the world of new ideas and abstractions? It also works if you start – little by little, but constantly.
Each of these examples requires almost no motivation or willpower to complete. Yet every step is a positive shift in the right direction.
The largest changes require small steps that are repeated regularly. Steps that create an impulse and positive cumulative results.
The AirBnB team opened city after city, physically visiting each of them and establishing the first contacts on the spot with homeowners. It was a digital startup and physical contacts with homeowners who had rented their apartments for years “without any internet”. City after city.
Elon Musk (because you can’t be a trendy School without mentioning Elon Musk) built a network of Superchargers from city to city, having set up a goal to connect the two coasts. Starlink satellites are launched into the orbit in batches of 60, while there are already 1,100 of them in the orbit. No one launched them there at once, being strongly, strongly motivated by the Big Goal.
Business results are achieved gradually. A person’s thinking changes gradually. This is not a quantum leap that will force you to think differently.
Tetics – the entry point into the program of your changes
