On sufficient motivation
How badly do you want what you say you want
In the past few years, something I’ve been thinking about with respect to achieving goals and something I think is an essential principle for achieving goals is something I call sufficient motivation.
Most people think of motivation as binary: you either have it or you don’t. But I’m realising that you can be motivated or inspired to do something but not enough. There’s a threshold you have to cross where you become “gingered” enough to actually do something.
So if there’s a goal you’ve been carrying over quarter to quarter, year on year without any improvement or nearness towards it, maybe it doesn’t matter to you as much as you think it does. Or maybe not yet.
It is sufficient motivation that makes you choose to spend time differently, that makes you want to try again, that makes you keep going even if you’ve failed at it before, that makes you even attempt the thing even when it seems impossible. It’s what makes you keep moving (even with different tactics) when it seems like you’ve hit a wall.
And the mistake many people make here is thinking that this is and must only and always be an intrinsic thing.
Intrinsic motivation is sold as the only sustainable means of motivation but that’s not always the case. When I did a distance challenge with my friends (run/walk 150km in 30 days), the only reason I did over 17km in one night was because I didn’t want to be bumped down on the leaderboard. The reason I did a daily podcast in 2024 beyond the support I had and the internal drive to do it, was so that I could have additional external evidence about being able to do hard things. And there are many stories of inventors, creators, athletes etc who were so motivated to do or achieve something because they wanted to prove other people wrong.
To find if you’re sufficiently motivated, you have to look beyond what is expected or the things you’re “supposed” to say. You have to think about the actual reason your goal matters to you. Whether it’s something internal or external. You must admit it to yourself. If you’re not serious about it and you’re not sufficiently motivated, you won’t achieve the goal.
You can also manufacture the sense of sufficient motivation by creating external systems of accountability, connecting the goal to something that matters to you, or identifying and naming the cost of not doing it. For example, with the daily podcast in 2024, I could not imagine not finishing it after telling everyone I was going to do it. There had to be a reason outside of my control for me not to actually do it. The cost could be the possible regret you’ll feel if you don’t do it.
There’s a way you can say you want something but you don’t actually do anything towards it because you don’t really mean it. It doesn’t matter enough—at least not yet. But when you hit the point of sufficient motivation, you begin to rely more on discipline than “feeling” motivated in the moment because you have already identified what drives you. It is what makes you go for a run instead of scrolling on instagram (when I was training for my half marathon, this was a real concern for me. I had a lot of time because I was on my mini sabbatical so I could have also spent that time on Instagram).
Sufficient motivation is the point where your desire to achieve the outcome outweighs the boredom, difficulty, or seeming lack of results as you go through the process.
So, ask yourself: Are you really serious about what you say you want (to do)?
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