Maybe motivation doesn't really exist?
I've found all my life that I struggle to start things, I don't remember before school much but I know that during school if I had the opportunity to put off starting an assignment or some kind of work, I would. Going to that first after school soccer class was much more difficult that the following ones and was usually only achieved by encouragement by friends signing up together, or maybe not being given the option by my parents.
This attitude towards life never really went away, when something is perceived to be hard or when there's a chance at failure the psychological weight of simply starting that task is sometimes harder than the task itself. I've had this problem with starting new hobbies (new paintings, writing for example), university assignments (leaving things for the last minute because the stress of starting is enough to keep me delaying the inevitable) and to my own detriment I've sometimes struggled to start things like looking for a new job, quitting bad habits such as smoking and in my darker days struggled to even start my day by getting out of bed.
What is it that finally gets the cogs turning? It seems to me that it's either one of two things.
- Necessity; sometimes you simply cannot delay anymore, sometimes the thing you're avoiding is now the thing you need to do, and so you force yourself to do it.
or
- This strange feeling we sometimes call "motivation", the feeling of will to accomplish a certain activity no matter the difficulty, this bizarre collection of emotion pushes us towards our goals, conscious or unconsciously.
Motivation comes and goes, that feeling isn't always there and I've been through some serious motivation droughts... but what I've noticed is that when the magical emotion is there, it's there for a reason, not some otherworldly ethereal spiritual reason, but rather - certain things in life are in place that have created the feeling. It could be encouragement, having enough sleep, doing well at something else leading you to want to try something new but most importantly, the feeling comes from how we feel about the outside world and what the outside world is telling us.
Luckily we're the ones in control of a fair majority of our outside world. We can improve our living space leading us to want to do more, harder things for example, we can start off the day with an easy win such as making the bed which will help build the motivation to go on to accomplish other tasks.
What I'm trying to say, and maybe the TLDR of this whole post, is that motivation doesn't come from within, it's either built in us by outside forces, or we can learn how to build it in ourselves piece by piece, and the best way to build it, is by starting to start.