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

🟧 - training, 🟦 - resting

🥊 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:

How life goes on around us unnoticed

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

Small Bets Newsletter

) with the help of

Louie Bacaj

and

Elle Griffin

, 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?

📰 Weekly shoutout

1. The #1 new engineering managers mistake by

   Anton Zaides

2. How to plan your growth by

   Fran Soto

3. When is the Right Time to Quit? by

   Akash Mukherjee

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