Stop Fighting Failure: Find Your Intrinsic Motivation
Q3 kicks off tomorrow. 😱 Excited? I bet you are!
Sudden excitement became ordinary.
The curse gift of social media is that we get hyped up in an instant to:
become a digital nomad
start a new side-hustle
write a newsletter
build a company
learn surfing
make videos
adopt a dog
FIRE
and the list goes on.
But have you ever noticed that most things we pick up in the heat of the moment quickly die out?
Why This Matters?
The fading of these projects is a good and valuable moment if you handle it well.
But most of us:
think of it as a failure
become even less motivated
don’t know how to take advantage when the thing sticks
Hype → Do it for two weeks → Abandoning it forever
It’s impulse buying but for your brain.
Selling my car two weeks ago showed me I have the intrinsic motivation to write this newsletter.
But you can conduct this experiment without selling or buying anything.
Let me explain.
🧪 The Dead Car Battery Test
We loved our Corolla, but it was clear that with a stroller and all the baby accessories, our cat’s accessories, we can fit two lollipops in the trunk when we go for a vacation.
I sold the car for the price I wanted, convincing the buyer that he was buying one of the most reliable cars. We shook hands, and he took the car. On the same afternoon, he called me.
The car didn’t start.
I had no idea what to tell him.
Long story short, the battery died, and I got him a replacement.
But before this happened, we talked a lot, he wanted his money back and so on.
I was stressed, couldn’t concentrate on work, and completely skipped things that had previously been part of my daily schedule.
This made me rethink if I needed them.
🧘 How to Find What You’re Intrinsically Motivated to Do?
Randomness is part of life.
Batteries get fried in an instant without any warning.
An event that turned my week upside down turned out to be a gift, a system check, if you will, to determine what I’m intrinsically motivated to do
The things you are intrinsically motivated to do show when life doesn’t go as planned.
During the last two weeks, I didn’t:
open LinkedIn or X
scroll, post, or make any interaction on any of these platforms
But I:
added two new chapters to my upcoming book
meditated daily
wrote 2/2 newsletters
hit all my training sessions
🥊 How to Take Action?
Next time life decides to go the other way, don’t fight it.
This can be a dead car battery or a summer so full of trips and excitement that Social Media doesn’t even come to your mind.
Last year, my wife and I traveled around Europe and had a ton of fun.
Social media disappeared from my life:
Or, it’s more accurate to say that I haven’t found a place for it in our new and exciting summer.
Let things play out, but observe what you make time for daily, no matter the circumstances.
In the Summer of 2023, I abandoned everything else given the first chance, except this newsletter.
So, I doubled down on it six months ago.
What did I do?
I took expert advice and learned how to take it to the next level.
Thanks to the SmallBets community (they also run the
) with the help of and , who are experts on newsletters, I got some excellent advice on going beyond “just writing”.Have you found a project you keep returning to no matter what?
What helped you discover it?
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For me, it’s very hard to fight the power of inertia and break ‘commitments’. This weekend I REALLY didn’t want to post on LinkedIn or write the newsletter… We were on a short weekend vacation, and instead of take a nap I sat down to write Tuesday’s piece 😅
So for me, it has to be more intentional, as I too often find time even for things that aren’t my top priority.