Understanding What Drives You

MOTIVATION

• If you want to have a limitless life, you have to have a limitless mind.
• Motivation is the purpose you have for taking action.
• Many people struggle with procrastination. Can you relate? There is something important that you need to do or learn, but you continue to put it off.
• I believe it’s important to train yourself to do difficult things. Jim Rohn said, “what you practice in private, you are rewarded for in public.”
• It’s about mental fitness and re-training yourself to get excited about looking at difficult tasks as opportunities to get more fit. When you go to the gym you don’t look at the treadmill and weights and get angry, you look at them as opportunities to challenge yourself to grow. Challenge leads to change.
• Just like strength training — if you don’t use it, you lose it. Difficult times can diminish you or they can develop you. Doing difficult tasks builds your strength.
• Part of having limitless motivation is training yourself emotionally to take on difficult tasks, so you build strength to plow through difficult times when you need that resource available to you.
• For example, research suggests that taking cold showers reduces inflammation in the body and helps to reset your nervous system, but it is very difficult. Even if you do 10 seconds cold, 10 seconds warm, you get the health benefits while training yourself to do something difficult.
• If you just do the easy things in life, life becomes hard. If you train yourself to do what’s difficult life becomes easier. The goal is to train our motivation like a muscle.
• Motivation is about the purpose of taking action.

THE FORMULA

• Motivation = Purpose X Small Steps X Energy.
• Motivation doesn’t mean you have to enjoy the thing, it means you have to see the purpose in it. You may not enjoy exercising, but you do it because there is a purpose.
• Reasons reap results.
• The success formula goes from your head to your heart to your hands. You can visualize your goals in your head, but if you are not acting with your hands (through procrastination or self-sabotage), it is likely because you are missing the second “H”, which is your heart.
• Metaphorically your heart is your feelings and emotions. I used my bucket list and the things I wanted to do for my family as high-leverage to get me to do difficult things.
• The purpose of this session is to help you fully sensitize yourself to the emotions of doing something.
• How do you do that? Remember, it’s (small simple steps X energy), but it starts with having a clear purpose.
• Having emotional intelligence, identity, and life values will help you with purpose, so be sure to refer to those chapters in the Limitless book.
• As a start, ask yourself a new question. What will I gain from doing this? What will I gain from reading this book? What are all the benefits, pleasures, and rewards for completing this program? How will this affect my career, academics, and sense of well-being? How will it feel to have limitless abilities?
• Don’t just feel the benefits, also feel the consequences. What are the potential consequences or pain you will experience from not following through on something? Who do you become when you do not follow through?

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

• Imagine you are at the end of your life. How does that feel?  What are you proud of? What do you wish you would have done earlier upstream? Begin with the end in mind.
• One of my favorite books was by Dr. Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. One of the habits is to ‘begin with the end in mind’.
• For example, if someone asks you how your day was and you are able to answer that it was amazing — what had to happen in order for you to feel that way? Get clear on your purpose.
• In the comments of this section or in your private journal, start to stream your consciousness — share your purpose. What’s your purpose in life and learning endeavors?
• Your purpose is not the same as your passion. Your passion is what lights you up. Learning lights me. Your purpose is what lights other people up. My passion is learning. My purpose is to teach people how to learn.
• You might not know this about me, but I am more of an introvert. It is a little bit uncomfortable for me to go on stage in front of thousands of people, but I do this when I think about my purpose. It gets me to do difficult things because I feel a moral responsibility to do what I do.
• My purpose is to build better brighter brains because as the “boy with the broken brain”, I know what it is like to feel not enough — to be limited.
• If you are willing, share your purpose in the comments or in your journal. It does not have to be super clear and you don’t have to have a big global purpose.
• Train yourself to ask, “why is this important?”, “what’s most important to me?”, and “why must I do this?”.
• Do difficult things because as you train yourself to do difficult things, life gets easier because you are stronger.

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• Check out my book at limitlessbook.com