Does motivation sometimes desert you when you need it most? You are not alone. Virtually everybody you know has had their motivation fail them at some point in their lives, and losing your motivation usually results in having to live with the pain and regret of failing, as well as the frustration and disappointment that you will feel when you know that you had everything you needed to succeed and all you had to do to win was to give a little effort. Ultimately, not having control of your motivation can, and almost certainly will kill your hopes, dreams and desires. If you want to become the person you dream of becoming and to have all that you desire to have in life there is one thing you need to know about motivation, one lie you need to stop believing.
Before I reveal the lie, I would like to ask you a question. If you were to be honest with yourself, have you reached your full potential? Have you achieve the things you are capable of achieving, or have you achieved less than what you know you are capable of? You have a great wealth of potential within you, the potential to do great things, to become great. For you to become great and to do great things, you need to embrace the potential within you, to unleash the full wrath of your greatness onto the world. What is keeping you from tapping into the power you have? Is your motivation keeping you from greatness?
Many people think that they simply lack motivation in their lives. You may think that the reason you have not realized your greatness is because you do not have the motivation it requires to become great. If you believe that, I regret to inform you that you believe the single biggest lie about motivation. You have more than enough motivation for you to achieve greatness. Motivation is not the problem, the real problem is that you do cannot control the direction your motivation propels you to.
Motivation is like a magnet. It repels and it attracts. It is so because of how we are wired up. Us humans are wired to be repelled by pain, and to be attracted to pleasure (get your mind out of the gutter :) Pain and pleasure can take many forms. Of course there are physical pains and pleasures, but there are also pains and pleasures that are of the non-physical nature. Boredom is an example of non-physical pain, excitement is an example of non-physical pleasure. Of these two, which repels you, and which attracts?
Pain is like putting like poles of a magnet together, it requires a lot of effort to keep them together, and the moment you slack, they will come flying apart. Pleasure is like putting opposite end of a magnet together, it takes no effort at all to put them together, and much effort to pull them apart. When is the last time you had to do something you knew was going to be unpleasant? Did you feel motivated to do it? When is the last time you wanted to do something exciting? Did you need motivation to do it?
If finding motivation in your life is something you battle with, it is not because you have little motivation, it is because you have too much motivation. By learning how to direct your motivation, you give yourself the power to change your life overnight. To master your motivation means learning how to make the painful pleasurable and how to make the pleasurable painful. I will go deeper in an upcoming post, so if you do not want to miss that, don't forget to hit follow.