Motivation is a lie.

I, like many of you out there, would describe myself as an optimist but with a healthy dose of realism sprinkled in there for good measure. I always try and focus on the positives of any situation and always try and see a way out of whatever problem I may be going through. I am a restless person too, and as much as I can give in to laziness every now and then, I much prefer to keep busy and do things that get me closer to my ultimate goals. I also have very clear goals on what I want to achieve in life and am desperate to be successful for a variety of reasons.

Now, having got my Miss Universe speech out the way, I am by no means some absolute beast who wakes up, does 100 pressups, drinks 12 raw eggs like Rocky then writes another 20,000 words of my own version of war and peace all before 6am. I, again like many of you, have some days where I churn through every task I set myself. The tasks themselves I identify the night before. Some days though, it feels like the entire day slips through my fingers like eating soup with chopsticks. What's the difference between those days though? They have the exact same time in each. I am the same person with the same knowledge and skill to achieve the same tasks. The difference is the presence and absence of the elusive mistress that is motivation.

You will know it yourself that when you have a goal, particularly a fresh one , you see the path clearly in front of you. You take that first step and start skipping along gladly and intensely. Let's say for example you read an article about learning to play the guitar and you are inspired by the stories of people going from zero experience to suddenly playing like a rockstar. You picture in your mind all the benefits that that skill will bring into your life and so with a smile on your face you purchase that shiny new guitar and start learning those first few notes.

You learn those initial notes quickly and your brain deceptively fills in the gaps for the speed at which you will progress. In a few weeks, you will be playing live at Wembley you think.

However, a week or two down the road, your progress starts to slow as you find putting together certain chords more difficult than expected. In fact you spend a whole evening trying to play just 3 chords together. In your head your motivation is flashing that it's in the reserve tank now. Your mind then justifies giving it up for that day, maybe it's best to leave it a few days in fact. A few days turns into a week. A week turns into a month and before you know it that guitar is gathering dust in your attic, never to be seen again (I actually did this by the way).

Motivation is about as consistent as the wind when you're sailing. Some days it sends you flying relentlessly to where you want to go. Other days it's as still as a drunk sloth. If you're trying to actually achieve something then you need to rely on something else other than just motivation for it is a lie.

Think about something you want to achieve. Particularly something abstract and by that I mean something that doesn't necessarily have a very clearly defined end. So working out for that day doesn't count. It's not hard to find "motivation" or the will to do just one workout in isolation. A much more difficult but infinitely more valuable goal would be to be in shape, as a result of conistent and potentially limitless workouts.

Now we're talking.

As anyone who has this goal will know, this takes months if not years to achieve. It is not an overnight process. As such, many people have trouble staying on track and regularly miss workouts or cheat on the diet too much and as such the results slow down or don't appear. When that happens you abandon the goal entirely because it isn't working.

I understand this and I've definitely been there. Now, what I've found has massively helped me stay on track with this goal (I'm not built like a Greek God by the way, but hopefully one day) and others like it, such as being a multi millionaire, that are not finite and require years of work to achieve and also to maintain, is conistency.

Great advise there, how do you stay consistent when you're unmotivated?!

Relax, I'm getting to it!

You need to force yourself into making action towards that goal a daily habit and become addicted to sticking to it. It will not take as long as you think to do this either.

I'll give you an example, focusing again on the fitness goal. Before lockdown I would go to the gym every single day. When I say every single day, I mean every single day. Now some of you fitness aficionados out there might say, well that's overtraining and actually counterproductive and yes you might be right but you didn't let me finish. I would force myself to go the gym with the express goal of getting closer to that ultimate goal and was commited to doing anything that would be beneficial to my body and my health. So some days if I was particularly sore or tired I might just go swimming and do some stretching.

The point is, doing something is always better than nothing, whatever the goal. Sure some days, you may be completely 100% exhausted and you can't even leave your sofa, maybe because you're ill for example. This is rare though, and an exception to the rule. Don't allow this to become an excuse.

Deep down you know that you have time to train or at the very least do something. So again just focusing on fitness as one goal that you feel requires "motivation" to keep on track with. Just do this, and if I'm wrong then I'll give you your money back.

From right now, just do something every single day for 28 days straight. Right now, it literally doesn't matter what the thing is.

Honestly find your starting point, if all you can do is walk round the block then that is fine. Again right now what you do is not important just commit to doing something today. Then do the same if not more tomorrow and so on and so on. From experience, the easier you make it initially the more likely you are to continue and to carry on with the pattern.

Now this is where the magic happens.

If you do something, every single day (including weekends obviously) then after about 14 days max you will have created a habit and you will have gained a new superpower. I promise you that you will wake up one of those days and you will be tired or completely "unmotivated" and you will hear that voice in your head telling you to just take the day off. Let's just say that the weak part of you starts to entertain that idea and in fact you undo the laces of your running shoes and sit back down on the sofa. This time though, this other voice, this new Morgan Freeman like voice will pipe up and will threaten you with the disappointment of breaking the streak.

It will be like an itch on your mind that will grow and grow until eventually the addiction and satisfaction of maintaining that record will compel you to get out the door and do something. The great thing about this power is that you longer you do it, the stronger it gets.

I don't know about you but I use an app called Duolingo and this illustrates the point perfectly. For those of you who don't know what it is, it is an app that allows you to learn foreign languages in an almost gamified way though. One of the best ways it encourages you to keep going though and not miss a day is not to lose your streak of log-ins. Now, there is no reward for keeping that streak, at least nothing substantial. The only motivation is not to break it out of an almost immature competitiveness with yourself but it works. I myself have a streak of a couple of hundred days and all it takes is just 10 minutes a day.

Whatever it is, challenge yourself to see how long you can maintain a streak in positive action towards your goal. If you do, it will guarantee permanent and perpetual progress towards your goal and also safeguard against any slippage.

I'll give you another example.

I am trying to write a book and I have it on my daily to do list to write at least 500 words. Now 99% of the time I will hit at least 500 words. However, some days when I am so unbelievably unmotivated or tired or whatever bull**** excuse I have at that moment at time. I will open my laptop and write at least a sentence. That sentence may be totally awful, and I will most likely have to delete or rewrite it the next day but it guarantees you will stay on the path. 100% of the time the next day I will write well over 500 words to compensate.

Don't let 1 day slip. 1 day always leads to more.

This is the most important thing you need to take onboard. If you give yourself that day off it is like a crack in a window. It will grow and grow until it breaks completely. As soon as you justify taking your foot off the gas slightly and allow one day off, it's very easy to justify to yourself that another day can't hurt and so on. Before you know it all progress has stopped dead in it's tracks. In addition, getting back on track is even harder . Noone likes putting effort in. By that I mean even the hardest working people find hard work uncomfortable because by it's very nature it is hard and it is difficult. The difference is those people have the strength of character to persevere because they understand what it leads to.

Make it easier for yourself and never stop. If you are cycling up hill say, then every single inch you go forward is hard. However, if you are currently in a good rhythm putting in about 60% effort then that next inch doesn't seem so bad. If you stop completely though to take a break, that next inch requires 100% effort to get going again because you have to rebuild that momentum from scratch and fight against gravity.

Don't stop the momentum.

I know it sounds daunting having to commit to something everyday but once you get into that cycle (which as mentioned above takes a lot less time than you think), not only will that itch to stay on track get stronger and stronger as time goes on to ensure that the voice to quit is never heard. Importantly though, the prospect of another day of work becomes less and less daunting. In fact as time goes on you will crave to do even more.

Human beings as a species in a lot of ways are fairly unremarkable (our intelligence aside which is obviously exceptional). We are nowhere near the biggest, the fastest or the strongest. Our senses are almost incomparable to some other animals who can see, smell and hear incomprehensibly better than us. What then is our superpower? It is our ability to adapt. If you look at human beings we have this remarkable ability to adapt to our environment. That's why we live on every corner of the planet, from the coldest arctic to the most scorching of deserts and everything in between, human beings adapt to whatever is thrown at them. Once we adapt though, what do we do? We strive for more.

It is human nature to want more and more. I'm not necessarily talking about more wealth and anything material, but we are naturally curious. There's a reason why humans cover the entire planet, and it's out of curiosity. Once we flourished in one area and everything was going great, we decided to go further afield and on and on.

So bringing it back to achieving your goals in life. If your workload at the moment towards your goal is zero, then understandably committing to working on it everyday seems impossible. Just start at 10 mins a day, whatever the goal.

Once you get accustomed to that, you'll realise that not only is that level of commitment so embarassingly easy, but you'll realise you can do so much more everyday towards that goal and everything else you want to achieve.

The quality of your work will come with time but as you will well know, the hardest step is the first one. Once you lock in that pattern of work and time into your goals the quality and ulimately the results will follow.

I will share one other major revelation that I have had as a result. In those 50/50 moments where you have the opportunity say to do a workout but your mind is wrestling between justifying not to and to take the day off and the other half is begging you to listen and say that you have the time to do it, you don't need the rest etc.

Just remember, you will 100% not regret having done the work but you will 100% regret not doing it. Think about everytime you have forced yourself off your sofa to do some exercise. Have you honestly ever come back and thought that was a complete waste of time? No, you haven't. On the other hand, when you allow that weakness in, for the rest of the day you mutter to yourself. "Dammit I should have trained today, I must do it tomorrow."

But as we all know, often tomorrow doesn't happen either.

As mentioned before, the longer you build that streak of constant work towards your goal, the bigger that compulsion to act grows and the bigger that regret will be if you give in to that short team weakness. This is a good thing, because you further you go the more likely you are to stay there in perpetuity.

If you worry about the speed of the results then just remember this little phrase.

The aggregation of marginal gains.

Firstly, I want you to think back to six months ago. Think of a particular moment, say a work event or a social outing. Remember it like it was yesterday right? Now 6 months in the future can go just as quickly, so don't be daunted.

Now take the next 6 months and factor in your current work output towards a goal. Let's take the goal of writing a book. Now let's say you have the typical irregular output of most people. Bursts of intense work surrounded with seas of nonexistent output. Let's say you write 1,000 words on average every 5 days. Over the course of 6 months that will give you 36,000 words by the end of the 6 months (6 x 30 days roughly = 180. Divided by 5 = 36. 36 x 1,000 = 36,000 words).

Now instead commit to writing 500 words every single day.

If you do that, by the end of that same 6 months, you will have 90,000 words.

Now considering that the average word count of a book is indeed 90,000 words. You have just written an entire novel in 6 months. If you stuck to your original work output it would take you almost a year and a half.

Congratulations, you've just saved a year of your life and achieved your goal much sooner, allowing you go onto your next project and so on.

That's the beauty of developing such a pattern of work. It gets you addicted to completing goals quicker and once you have built up that capacity to work you will find that you don't want to then rest on your laurels and crack open a beer you find that you are craving the next challenge and the next goal.

Once you achieve that first major goal through relentless pursuit, it's not just that habitual discipline that prompts you to go to the next thing. It's the actual reward of achievement that naturally prompts you to pursue more. For example, if you have a particular fitness goal, say being able to run a 5k. Let's say you committed to running every single day for a month and now you have a decent 5k time. You will feel great that you have achieved that milestone and that natural competitive curiosity within you will prompt you to work on 10k runs and beyond. This is true of all pursuits in life too.

To reiterate though, the biggest superpower you can give yourself to achieve all this is just starting small, but absolutely consistently. Consistency is the key word here and at the start in needs to be forced. It will be daunting and it will be uncomfortable at first but it really will not take as long as you think to develop. Even if you are currently the most lazy or inconsistent person with anything.

Now one caveat here, because I know a few people who fall into this category too. I know many people who are in fact very successful, in a variety of ways, but who are just by their very nature very erratic in terms of their schedule or their output. I particularly find this with very creative people like artists. I know, because I have had this exact conversation with them, that their creativity is not linear and that they cannot just output the same quality every single day and therefore forcing themselves to do work every single day particularly on a creative project is not productive.

I do understand this, but I would say this. If we are getting very specific, let's say again in the context of writing a book as I mentioned above where the work cannot be solved just through sheer force of will, which exercise can be, still commit to working on it everyday. That work might not mean you put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard, who writes with a pen anymore anyway) every single day. However, reading other peoples work, or doing some more of the mundane tasks associated with writing a book like editing or fixing spelling mistakes that have automatically been identified by the writing software. Things that require very little brain power or creative juices flowing to achieve, should still be done. It will still get you closer to achieving that goal quicker.

In addition, focusing on that project everyday, keeps it in your mind constantly, even subconsciously. I have found, particularly on creative projects that if I do something towards it everyday, that each day I actually write for example, I can jump right into it, because it is always on my mind. If I only worked on it sporadically I would have to waste time each session refreshing myself on what I wrote the week before and it also inevitably means there are some discrepancies with the tone of voice etc.

Conistency really is key with any pursuit.

Consistency and discipline callous the mind and make it more resistant to weakness and setbacks. It does not happen overnight but once developed after only a few weeks you create a rhythm and pattern of work towards your goals that will make you achieve more and more importantly you will achieve them quicker. Even if you haven't achieved the goal, you feel better along the way I can assure you.

Sure, the ultimate satisfaction comes from actually achieving things but when you start to view every single day as it's own individual challenge, then achieving every single thing you set out to do on a daily basis in itself gives you confidence and reduces stress. Just try this for one week. At the start of everyday or ideally the night before write down everything you need to do. Identify short, medium and long term goals and make finite objectives on a daily basis to achieve them. Examples might be go to the shops (short term), write another 500 words on my essay for school (medium term) and stay in shape by working out (long term). Now, I guarantee if you tick all those off for just 7 days, you will have immense satisfaction and a sense of achievement and after only 7 days you will be hooked on that feeling and want to do even more. You will tangibly feel closer to your goals and that is what is addictive.

Motivation is unbelievably fickle and it fades over time no matter how strong the motivation is. There are always setbacks in any goal and over time, new priorities and perspectives come into our lives so things that may have motivated you before won't be as effective. Consistency and discipline on the other hand, grow stronger and stronger over time. They never lie to you, in fact they are breathtakingly simple. Their message is so simple that no matter if your goal changes, you will autocorrect and keep going forward . For example, if your current fitness goal is to be as huge as possible because you were inspired by seeing your favourite bodybuilder. As time goes on anyway, that inspiration will fade. Nonetheless, let's say you train consistently towards that goal. Then one day you decide that a healthier option for your lifestyle and for your body is to focus more on running and having a lighter frame. Motivation will pop up like this, always promoting a new idea or a new mission.

Consistency and discipline gives you a calm head. If your goal adjusts as per the above. No problem, instead of daily weights, it's now daily running. No biggy. I'm still getting healthier, I'm still getting in shape.

Discipline and consistent action will allow for relentless momentum forward but the end point can adjust for sure. Motivation alone will have you going on an entirely different path altogether and consistently having you stop halfway down each road.

Don't rely on motivation. Think of it only as a nitro boost to your car when driving. Sure it's nice to have, and every once in a while when it kicks in it provides you a burst of speed further down the road. Instead rely on that cruise control of discipline. It doesn't mean you go slowly. Just relentlessly and never with a backwards step.