You Don't Need Motivation To Get Things Done. You Need Energy!

If you think that motivation or inspiration is the boost you need to start doing something—you’re wrong. Well, not entirely. Your brain does need a boost, you need energy to do things, but is it about motivation and inspiration really?

I used to be obsessed with the concept of motivation. It turned me into a mindless consumer of any motivational content that I could only find on the Internet. TED talks were my bible. Anything that could fill me with this sense of power and hope or motivate me to start doing something. Even though I didn’t really do that much—it’s just that motivational content helped me to shuffle reality in my head and trick myself into believing that I was changing. I thought I was learning real landmarks of a successful and happy life.

Spoiler—I didn’t.

But at that time it seemed to be working. I felt pretty energized. The problem was it didn’t work in the long run. This flooding force of motivation, energy, would eventually tire me. I would try then to look for slower things to inspire me, like nature, and movies, and books. But it didn’t give my brain the needed boost. I had so many ideas but I lacked the energy, motivation and inspiration as I would call it, to start actually doing anything.

It made me feel lost.

Motivation didn’t work. Inspiration didn’t work. Did it mean that I just wasn’t made to be successful, active, and creative in my life? No. It’s just that constantly searching for motivation or inspiration as the main source of energy to do things in your life just doesn’t work and here’s why.

Our mood, feelings, and emotions are not stale, they are changing all the time. Have you noticed how pumped you feel after watching a motivational video of an athlete working out in a gym, and how it makes you feel this almost immediate urge to go to gym yourself? You give yourself a promise to go to the gym first thing in the morning, but then the morning comes and you don’t feel the same about this idea anymore. To sustain the effect that motivational/inspirational content has on your brain you need to spend hours every week consuming this content. But even then it’s just a matter of time until your brain gets oversaturated with it and stops being responsive to this kind of stimuli.

Do successful people rely on motivational content to help them stay successful?

The answer is no. Just think about it—successful people, and by successful I mean people who know how to generate energy through actions and hence consistently achieve small and big goals in their personal and professional life, they don’t need motivational speech to help them do it. Why? Because they’ve learned or know (some people are just natural in it) how to accumulate energy through their actions, focus, and attention.

In this article I would like to give some examples of how to do it. But first, let’s have a look at things that have the opposite effect.

Things that drain you

1. Neglect

If you don’t give necessary attention and care to yourself, to things you do, and to your feelings, generating energy will be extremely hard, quite impossible really. Neglect is an exceptionally draining thing that over time builds up into a condition in which a human isn’t able to show or rely on their best qualities anymore and undermine their value by indulging in the worst.

2. Anxiety

If you have an anxious mind, it’s time to invest some time into learning what an anxious mind is and how to deal with it. Anxiety defocuses your brain’s activity, which can be extremely draining not only mentally but physically as well. Intrusive thoughts, endless distractions, brain fog; all that takes away even more energy than any labor would and if that’s the case it must be addressed immediately.

3. Lack of activity

It is not only about physical activity, though it’s super important too—it’s a huge part of your physical and emotional health, but it also is about participating in your own life. Trying to escape the physical world by minimizing your physical presence in it will eventually lead to a severe shortcut of energy. But I’m not talking about disabled people who are forced to stay home most of the time due to their health issues. I’m talking about those of us who simply chose to spend their life daydreaming, doom scrolling on social media, watching TV, or playing video games as a way to escape reality. Of course this is energy draining. And it makes you lazy—chronically.

Now, let’s talk about things that, on the contrary, help you to generate more energy.

Things that help you generate more energy

1. Stay present

If you integrate staying present into your life, it’s gonna change your life. Learning how to be meditative and attentive, present in everything you do, is the opposite force to neglect. It will spark your interest in life and, as a result, help accumulate more energy and see purpose in everything you do. Life will suddenly make sense and honestly, there’s nothing like excitement and curiosity to boost our brain with endorphins, which are a great energy fuel for us.

2. Acceptance

World is full of things you can’t control. Accepting this will help you finally see the things which you can control and this will be a huge relief on your anxious mind. Because ignoring the things that fully depend on you makes you feel like you have no control over anything. Learning to accept your current situation, your and other people’s feelings is essential to finding inner strength, energy, to do something about it. Learn to accept reality. It may hurt at first. Learn to accept it too. But if you want progress in your life, if you want to be energized and able to build a better life, acceptance is an absolute MUST.

3. Prioritize

Let other people live their life and focus on how you’re living yours instead. Your mental health, your physical health, your time, your life must be your first priority. Don’t fall into this trap when your focus shifts towards other people. It doesn’t matter what others think about you as long as you’re in harmony with yourself and satisfied with your life choices. If something hurts you, don’t stay silent, because you will never be someone else’s priority unless you learn how to prioritize yourself first. Life can be super draining when you let other people or circumstances drain you, you know. Prioritizing yourself will absolutely help.

Does a stone lying on the shore have energy? No. But what if you pick the stone and throw it into the air. See, now it’s full of energy because it’s moving. We are like stones.

So now when I feel like I need motivation or inspiration to follow my dreams or start a new project I have been thinking about for quite some time now, I don’t go looking for it on the Internet. Instead I start creating an ecosystem within my mind, which connects me more to reality and helps me to generate the needed energy from actively participating in this said reality.