Advance reading (Mr.x⚡)

🌟ACTION IS BOTH THE CAUSE AND EFFECT OF MOTIVATION🌟 Most people think that motivation is this elusive, magical creature that we’re all desperately chasing, hoping it will somehow magically infuse us with the energy and drive to do what we need to do. But motivation isn’t some fairy that sprinkles you with pixie dust to get your ass off the couch; it’s actually the byproduct of taking action. That’s right, motivation is something that emerges when you start doing stuff, not the other way around. This is what I call “The Do Something Principle” and I use it all the time when I’m not feeling very motivated. The hardest part of any task is usually just starting it—but that’s also where the magic happens. Instead of waiting for motivation to strike, just do something—anything, really. Even if you’re stumbling and fumbling through it, you’re creating momentum. This momentum is like a snowball rolling down a hill; it keeps growing and growing until it becomes an unstoppable force. As you take action, you begin to see progress, and progress is like jet fuel for motivation. Your brain starts to realize that, “Hey, I can do this,” and suddenly, you’re riding the motivation wave, feeling empowered and unstoppable. So, if you want to unleash the motivational beast within, don’t sit around waiting for it to knock on your door. Instead, take a step—any step—toward your goal and watch as motivation comes running to join you in the journey.

🌹Emotional Inspiration → Motivation → Desirable Action🌹 But there’s a problem with operating under this framework: often the changes and actions we most need in our lives are inspired by negative emotions that simultaneously hinder us from taking action. If someone wants to fix their relationship with their mother, the emotions of the situation (hurt, resentment, avoidance) completely go against the necessary action to fix it (confrontation, honesty, communication). If someone wants to lose weight but experiences massive amounts of shame about their body, then the act of going to the gym is apt to inspire in them the exact emotions that kept them at home on the couch in the first place. Past traumas, negative expectations, and feelings of guilt, shame, and fear often motivate us away from the actions necessary to overcome those very traumas, negative expectations, and negative emotions.

🌟Action → Inspiration → Motivation🌟 The conclusion is that if you lack the motivation to make an important change in your life, then do something, anything really, and then harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating yourself. I call this The “Do Something” Principle. And I developed it on accident back in my years as a consultant, helping people who were otherwise immobilized by fears, rationalizations, and apathy to take action. It began out of simple pragmatism: you paid me to be here so you might as well do something. I don’t care, do anything! What I found is that often once they did something, even the smallest of actions, it would soon give them the inspiration and motivation to do something else. They had sent a signal to themselves, “OK, I did that, I guess I can do more.” And slowly we could take it from there. Over the years, I’ve applied The “Do Something” Principle in my own life as well. The most obvious example is running this website and my business ventures online. I work for myself. I don’t have a boss telling me what to do and not to do. I also often have to take major calculated risks in which I’m personally invested, both financially and emotionally. It’s been nerve-wracking at times, and major feelings of doubt and uncertainty arise. And when no one is around to push you, sitting around and watching TV reruns all day can quickly become the more appealing option. The first couple of years I worked for myself, entire weeks would go by without accomplishing much for no other reason than I was anxious and stressed about what I had to do, so it was too easy to put it off. I quickly learned that forcing myself to do something, even the most menial of tasks, quickly made the larger tasks seem much easier. If I had to redesign an entire website, then I’d force myself to sit down and would say, “OK, I’ll just design the header right now.” But after the header was done, I’d find myself moving on to other parts of it. And before I knew it, I’d be energized and engaged in the project.

🌟DEVELOP A RITUAL🌟 You might think that doing the same thing over and over again, day in and day out, sounds not only incredibly boring but incredibly limiting. But you’d be dead wrong. Rituals put The “Do Something” Principle in overdrive. You designate a behavior or set of behaviors to perform at a predetermined place or time—or ideally, both—in order to get you moving toward your desired behavior. It won’t take long until all you have to do is simply set the ritual in motion—using the “Do Something” Principle, of course—and let inertia do the rest. Then, something magical happens: The ritual soon takes on a life of its own. It becomes a sacred space and time and often just as important as your target behavior itself. Performing the desired action starts to feel empty without performing the ritual and vice versa. Now, be careful not to get too caught up in exactly what your ritual is. A lot of people see someone who’s successful doing something like eating or wearing the same thing every day or working out at exactly 5:27 AM every morning because some study said it’s the best time to do it and blah blah blah and they think they need to do exactly the same thing as them.

🌟Life🌟 Everybody wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money, and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when you walk into the room. Everyone would like that—it’s easy to like that. If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so ubiquitous it doesn’t even mean anything. A more interesting question—a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before—is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.

🌟What is the pain that you want to sustain?🌟 That answer will actually get you somewhere. It’s the question that can change your life. It’s what makes me, me and you, you. It’s what defines and separates us, and ultimately brings us together. For most of my adolescence and young adulthood, I fantasized about being a musician—a rock star, in particular. Any badass guitar song I heard, I would always close my eyes and envision myself up onstage playing it to the screams of the crowd, people absolutely losing their minds to my sweet finger-noodling. This fantasy could keep me occupied for hours on end. The fantasizing continued through college, even after I dropped out of music school and stopped playing seriously. But even then it was never a question of if I’d ever be up playing in front of screaming crowds, but when. I was biding my time before I could invest the proper amount of time and effort into getting out there and making it work. First, I needed to finish school. Then, I needed to make money. Then, I needed to find the time. Then… nothing.

🌟How Can You Have Too Much Meaning? 🌟 I think there’s two ways you can have too much meaning. First, you could feel too strongly about the significance of something. We’ve all had anxiety and fears when something is so important to us that we’re unable to function. That relationship that you wanted to hold onto even though the other person wasn’t in love with you. That job which meant everything to you—until you got fired. That conviction you held to desperately, until it started to unravel. Feelings are mental tools. They put our minds into a state that allows certain ideas, actions and thoughts to flow more easily than others. However, to allow some ideas to flow more easily, that must necessarily mean you’re blocking others. The feeling of significance therefore will be useful in some contexts and harmful in others, just like anger, fear, optimism, joy, love, sadness and everything else you feel. The second way you can have too much meaning is related to the intellectual idea of meaning. If you have a strong set of ideas about what something means, either in terms of its definition, explanation or implied effects, that can “lock” you into a certain way of seeing things. Too much meaning can prevent you from seeing something in another way, and other perspectives may be necessary to solve certain problems.

🌹Why You’re Still Single🌹 So you went on a first date with someone you met on Tinder. You made jokes and they laughed. You asked all the appropriate questions and listened attentively as they lit up talking about that job they love and that trip they’d always wanted to go on. It was a good night. But then they didn’t text you back, didn’t return your first, second, or third call. What went wrong? You did all the things they tell you to do on a first date. You have a good job—even if you don’t always love it. And maybe you don’t look like a movie star but you’re not Quasimodo either. You’ve got interests and hobbies and do all the cool “cultural things” and eat (kinda) well and (kinda) exercise and (usually) don’t smoke. What are you doing wrong? Why are you still single? You might think you’ve just had a seriously unlucky run of it, always swiping right on serial first daters who’re never looking for more than an evening of free culinary delights. You may think all of the people you’ve ever asked out are blind to your many magnificent traits and if only they would just see how big a heart you have and how great you are at your job and how excellent a kisser you are… Well, guys and girls, sorry to break it to you. But someone’s gotta do it if you’re going to get out of this “forever single” rut. It’s not them, it’s you.