Self-Motivation and the Danger of Making Grand Plans

Self-motivation is often the hardest thing for many people when they go about improving themselves. Some people decide habits are a great way to spur self-motivation. I’d agree completely, as long as those habits are good. But, self-motivation is also about finding the actual reasons that you want to do things. Good habits can only be part of your self-motivation. You have to actually put reasoning and logic into it, as well.

I’ve long fancied myself a writer, expressing myself on a wide variety of topics including human rights, self-improvement, and kittens. More than anything, I’ve longed to use my abilities and talents to write words to improve people’s lives in any way possible. That’s what got me into writing motivational topics. I’ve hit on many self-improvement topics in the past, including self-awareness, self-expression, self-forgiveness, and self-love. I was on a pretty great roll for a while, then the wheels fell off.

Originally, I had a grand plan to write a book about these things. What you’re reading now six plus years later is a piece of what I wrote for that project. What derailed me? I got extremely sick. Obviously, I survived, but that’s another story. Today, I’m going to talk about self-motivation.

Why the long intro? I want people to know that my major failing in remaining focused and motivated to write this series is my worst habit: making grand plans for everything that I do. I’ve always created unrealistically high expectations for everything I try doing.

Even the best habits can lose their purpose if you lose your reasoning for participating in them. I thought trying to make a habit of writing every day was going to be one of my keys to success. All it did was lead to a bad habit of having grand plans for every random writing idea I had. It got to the point where I always had something to write about, but I ended up with so many ideas that I couldn’t flesh out properly. Eventually, I became overwhelmed and ended up writing nothing at all.

What I learned is you have to break everything down into manageable chunks. If you find yourself stuck on something, just leave it alone and move onto something else. This is something I have trouble doing. I end up having little chunks that are completely unrelated to each other. I end up with many notes and half-written pieces, beginnings of stories that I’ll never return to, or a few stray lines of poetry.

So, where do all of these results of my efforts fit? This is the question I ask myself that kills my motivation. If I can’t ever finish anything, what good is starting? But, that’s just it. You have to start. You just have to do it, and keep doing it, no matter how often you get stuck. If it’s really what you want to do and you’re good at it, the motivation should be deeply rooted in something you believe in. In my case, it’s all about helping others learn from my mistakes.
I feel like in writing this, I’m not really accomplishing what I meant to do with my article series on self-improvement. That’s why I lost my motivation to write it in the first place. But, I realize now that this struggle is part of life. Admitting it is probably the best thing I can do.

On some of these self-improvement topics, I don’t feel very qualified to write about them. But, as has been said by numerous writing experts, the best way to learn something and become better qualified in a subject is to write about it. Admitting what you don’t know is just as important as saying what you really do know.

So, my motivation for writing going forward is to admit my failures just as often as my successes. I know that I’m not alone in dealing with these personal shortcomings, because  what use would there be in writing on these subjects to begin with, then?

If your self-motivation is waning, just think about the thing that’s most important to you in the whole universe. Focus on that. Do everything you do for that reason. That’s the best advice I can ever give.