John: Hey, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com.
I’ve got a question about motivation.
I frequently get questions around this because sometimes it’s hard to stay motivated.
This question is from Jason and Jason says, “Hi, John.
Thank you for creating your videos on YouTube.
I feel more motivated after listening to your advice.
One thing I have a question about is where did you get your drive and motivation to succeed
in your career and life in general?
Did you get your inner drive from positive reinforcement growing up or did you teach
yourself to be positive and expect the best out of your career in life?
One big issue I'm facing right now is that I'm feeling stuck in a job where I'm not learning
anything new or relevant.
I feel as though I'm just going to work to make money and that I don’t have any real
valuable skills.
That’s not really a good feeling.
“After years of experience, my salary is still not that high.
I don’t think that it’s due to not wanting to succeed, but I do see a difference between
the drive you have and the drive I have.
I’ve been learning iOS programming in the spare time and I'm working on building apps
with the hope that a portfolio of apps will land me an iOS position.
I don’t really network with people at all, which is likely one big reason why I'm not
moving up in my career.
I think this all comes back to motivation and inner drive.
What makes you want to go through obstacles/issues to succeed when the times get tough?
I'm hoping I'm not coming across too negative.
I'm just going through a bit of a hard time and need some help.
Thanks, Jason.”
Jason, you’re not coming off too negative.
I don’t think, you know, and I’d like to help you.
Let me start by talking about like where my motivation and drive comes from like to answer
your first question, “Where did I get it?
Do you think that it came from positive reinforcement growing up?”
I definitely had some positive reinforcement growing up and some negative reinforcement
growing up.
I wouldn’t really attribute it to that.
I would say that part of my drive and motivation—it’s almost like a self-created thing that I one
day decided that I wanted to not live a mediocre life that I wanted to achieve things.
I sort of pushed myself.
As I pushed myself, I discovered that my motivation dropped off.
Well, in fact, I’ve talked about this a few times, but what I find is that, in general,
when you do things, you’re motivated at first, right?
You have this passion for a thing.
You’re motivated and that almost always drops off.
People who become really good at things or excel, to the outside world they appear to
be super motivated and driven.
Driven, they are, but motivated, not always.
I was just listening to a book, an audiobook by Seth Godin which was one of his talks,
and he was talking about this artist who was basically saying that motivation is unnecessary,
that you just do.
That’s sort of the philosophy of life that I’ve taken, is that I realized that motivation
comes and goes and you can’t rely on motivation.
You have to have this inner drive.
You have to like look and see where you want to get and you think about it and you plan
it out, and then you just execute, execute, execute and you get there.
You wake up in the morning a lot of times and you don’t feel like doing anything.
You don’t feel like going to the gym.
You don’t feel like working on your career.
You don’t feel like shooting YouTube videos or whatever it is, right?
You don’t feel like writing a blog post, but you go and you do it anyway.
A lot of people say, “Well, that’s inauthentic.
Well, that’s not my art, man.
That’s not how things work.”
When you look at like a lot of great writers, a lot of really successful people, that’s
exactly what they did.
I just read that Isaac Asimov, he wrote 400 novels.
He woke up every morning at the crack of dawn and wrote until 12 PM everyday.
Do you think he was motivated every single day to do that?
No, he wasn’t.
There’s no way.
You can’t stay that motivated.
You’d look at these people that are super successful and you think that that must be
what’s going on, and it’s not true at all.
You know, to bring it back to your situation, what would I say here?
Well, you know, you got to set up a plan and you have to just execute on that plan without
feeling this need to be motivated.
You’ve got to be able to separate out—doing your planning.
You should be motivated when you’re planning, like you have goals that you want to achieve,
and then you have to go through and do the execution of those things to get there.
Sometimes it’s going to be painful.
If the road weren’t hard then so many people would be successful and do it.
I’ve talked about this a lot of times before because it’s so true.
You should kind of be thankful that this is hard, that it’s difficult, that it’s not
an easy path because it makes it possible.
If everyone could do it, then we wouldn’t have these opportunities.
Sometimes when things are hard, I'm thankful that I have this opportunity to do something
that’s really hard.
I don’t feel motivated today because I know that other people, my competition, is out
there and some of them are going to hit the snooze button.
They just got dropped out of the race and I'm going to keep going forward.
That, in itself, maybe you could call that motivation, but I would call that drive.
That’s how you have drive and that’s really what the difference is.
Things are going to come and go.
One thing that I would recommend to you is—I talk about this a lot too, but stoic philosophy.
Go and read Seneca’s Letters on his letters on morality.
He’s from ancient Rome and he’s a stoic philosopher.
He said some really, really good stuff to say that, that sort of—he talks about this
kind of thing, about doing things not because you’re motivated but because you’re driven,
because you know that you want to achieve some goal and being able to not be subject
to fate.
Forget about what’s happening outside of you.
You can control internally what you do.
You’re in control of yourself.
Focus on those things that you can control.
Anyway, a little bit of a long answer here, Jason, but hopefully this is helpful to you.
It’s probably not the answer that you want to hear, right?
Unfortunately this is reality, right?
Everyone that I know of that’s achieved great things has forced themselves to go through
it.
When you look back at them and you see their highlight reel, it looks like they’re motivated
and driven, and all this.
Especially if you look at professional athletes, you’ll find a different story.
You’ll find that they trudge through it, that they grinded it out to some degree, and
that they made it because other people weren’t willing to do the work that they were willing
to do.
Thanks again, Jason.
If you’ve got a question, email me at john@simpleprogrammer.com and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel.
Take care.