Don’t Just sit back and expect or wait for motivation to come to you. It doesn’t work this way.

You gotta feed your brain with a constant supply of reward for it to be able to understand and comprehend that you are supposed to do certain things to feel better.

You think that you can sit down and retain all your powers without doing anything.

That you can figure out what you want in life when you’re in a state of doing nothing that makes you feel better.

It’s not about action being more important than thinking or planning.

The process of thinking itself is a form of taking action.

The only problem with that kind of action is that it doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t add to your reward. You receive nothing in return for thinking.

When you’re tired, the process of recharging your energy might feel pleasant. You tend to think during this time because there’s nothing else you can do. But it’s not the thinking, even if positive, that makes you feel happy.

It’s the renewed faith in the possibility of regaining your strength after exhausting yourself.

You cannot sit back and get motivated by thinking about getting or reaching something, nor during working on attaining or reaching anything. You get motivated after the reward that makes everything easier and better gets released into your brain.

If that doesn’t take place you won’t feel motivated to do the same activity or pursue the same goal or outcome again in the future, unless it’s a habit.

That’s why you get the constant advice to put some easy items on your to do list and that you should begin with them first, so that you can get any reward, even if tiny, from something you can finish fast, with disregard to or without having to worry about or care about its quality. The huge project doesn’t pay off until it’s over, and this might take a little while to take place, starving you considerably in the process.

Treat your OCD thoughts like you’d treat a narcissist.

Don’t engage. Don’t convince. Don’t argue with or react to the narcissist or what the narcissist says. Grey rock every time. Protect your energy. Don’t explain or defend yourself. Don’t give these thoughts any attention, just like you wouldn’t give the narcissist any attention. Don’t fight those thoughts or resist them. Let them run. Do not interfere. They are just background noise. Ambient. Your mind won’t just sit there and do nothing. You dream when you’re sleeping even though you’re tired and you’re supposed to be sleeping. Don’t try to say the correct thing in your head or to yourself, in order to fix or correct the false or wrong thought or feeling. Go no contact.

Don’t feed the narcissist. Don’t feed your OCD.

What’s the ROI of everything you do? Will anything pay off eventually? Why am I doing this? When will the money come? Is every single thing that I do essential to get me to the kind of life that I always dreamed of? When will I ever solve my problems or make my life better? When will I ever get out of the tough situation I’m stuck in?

Intention matters. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Every time you make a piece of content, you ask yourself: how is that going to solve all my problems. How is that going to make me reach all my career goals. How is that going to transfer me to the financial independence that I have always wanted.

It won’t.

Getting a job might make a ton of instant gratification in terms of fixing all of your financial problems right away.

That kind of one solution fixes all, in one step, in just a minute, is not found in entrepreneurship. It’s not found in any alternate route to fixing your problems, getting your life together, or figuring everything out aside from the get a job route.

I’m not saying any job would do the trick. All I’m saying that a job can do the trick. Entrepreneurship can’t.

No single step would make you no longer worry about financial struggles or issues again.

In fact, no single step would ever get you anywhere.

There is no transformation.

You keep trying, over and over again, until the change takes place so gradually you didn’t even notice it.

To the extent that you don’t feel that there’s anything happening in your life.

No difference. It is all pointless.

And then you take a look at others who seemingly made it in one year, or even two years, and your spirit of giving up is complete. You don’t need further convincing. Everybody made it but you. And it’s going to remain like this forever.

Unless every single step is an achievement in itself. Unless you have intrinsic motivation for all those countless useless single steps. Attrition will take good care of you. It will leave nothing behind.

It’s not about doing what you love. It’s about every single step of the way being enough in and of itself.

Every video you make is enough.

Every DM you respond to is enough.

Every zoom call is more fun than gaming.

There’s no agenda. There’s no ulterior motive that you keep pushing yourself through each and every one of those steps, tasks, or projects, until until you reach it someday.

Every achievement is its own reward.

If it is not, then I think it’s time for you to get a job.

Writing is hell only if you avoid writing because of your natural fear of repetition. Put up with that challenge, and it will be your bliss.

There are two ways that I’m familiar with when it comes to determining whether or not your article or the few pages you’ve written today are flawless, correct, or contain no irredeemable mistakes. You either write everything perfectly from the start with complete awareness and concentration so that you’re sure enough everything is correct from the start, or you review the entirety of your article or what you’ve written after you finish writing it for the first time, and that review is not you scanning it looking for mistakes, but reading it as if you are reading anything else that you haven’t written yourself or that you’re not the author of it. Repeat until satisfied. You don’t want to get reward from something you have no idea what it looks like or is like in its final stage. You get reward from having written a masterpiece, or at least from having put everything in your mind down on paper (metaphorically speaking) or in text or written form without missing anything out in the process. And you can’t know whether or not that has really took place without confirming that this is what really happened in the external or real world. If you do not want to go through that inevitable revision stage, then you have no choice but to write perfectly from the start. Which is not impossible. You can do it. Everybody recommends getting a first draft over with, with disregard to the quality or how ready the material is to be published, as long as you have successfully managed to gather all the ideas that you wanted to talk about or present in that text in a way that is salvageable and can be expanded upon later on in an acceptable manner that can make sense to someone other than yourself. I disagree with this hugely. As David Allen describes it in his book “Getting Things Done”, this will lead to the existence of open loops or continuously running circuits of the unfinished or not totally dealt with project or task, which will keep draining your energy in a manner that you’d be totally oblivious to, until you become aware of how much that was a burden, when you muster your courage and complete those unfinished tasks or projects. You have to forget about it to create something else entirely outside of it. And that will not take place unless you have no reason to fear forgetting about it because there’s nothing else that could be done about it to make it better. The only way you’ll be able to move on and create your next masterpiece is to reach a point of total peace concerning all previous creative works, pieces, projects, content, or things. And that won’t happen until you have nothing else to do about them to make them any better. Nothing is still left hanging in the air, waiting for you to come back to it someday to deal with it. That is, the only way out is to complete the creative piece of work or content beyond perfection. This is the only cure for your writer’s block that keeps getting worse the more you create. You cannot get reward from something new if you didn’t get your awaiting reward from old stuff first, at least what counts as creative work. At least this is true for writing. At least this is true only for true bred writers.