How to Get and Stay Motivated

Find your WHY.

Figure out a compelling purpose. Turn this into a one-liner.

For example, when I fall off the horse, I remind myself I’m here to “make others great.” This gets me back on track, sharing the best of what I know.

Change your WHY.

Sometimes you’re doing things for the wrong reason. Are you doing that task to get it done, or to learn something new? Just shifting your why can light your fire.

Change your HOW.

You can instantly find your tasks more enjoyable by shifting from getting them done, to doing them right.😀😀😀👋👋👋

Goal setting and mental health
There can be a downside to goal setting. Some researchers have found that when people focus too hard on personal goal pursuits, they tend to ignore or neglect other areas of life, particularly their relationships. Some authors have also noted that focusing too much on certain types of business goals can lead to competitive or unethical behaviour, or conflict in the workplace. Therefore make your goals realistic, achievable and in balance with the rest of your life (see SMART goals below).

A reduced ability to achieve everyday tasks can be an indication of stress, depression or mental illness. Visiting a doctor or mental health professional can help to rule out underlying problems.😀

Goal setting and mental health
There can be a downside to goal setting. Some researchers have found that when people focus too hard on personal goal pursuits, they tend to ignore or neglect other areas of life, particularly their relationships. Some authors have also noted that focusing too much on certain types of business goals can lead to competitive or unethical behaviour, or conflict in the workplace. Therefore make your goals realistic, achievable and in balance with the rest of your life (see SMART goals below).

A reduced ability to achieve everyday tasks can be an indication of stress, depression or mental illness. Visiting a doctor or mental health professional can help to rule out underlying problems.😀😀😀

I begin each day of my life with a ritual; I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st street and First Avenue, where I workout for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual.
It’s a simple act, but doing it the same way each morning habitualizes it — makes it repeatable, easy to do. It reduces the chance that I would skip it or do it differently. It is one more item in my arsenal of routines, and one less thing to think about.😀😀😀

Not all wildly successful people are early risers, but it seems a majority of them are. Richard Branson has said, “No matter where I am in the world, I try to routinely wake up at around 5 a.m. By rising early, I’m able to do some exercise and spend time with my family, which puts me in a great mind frame before getting down to business.”

Branson is joined by other celebrated early risers, such as Apple CEO Tim Cook (4 a.m.), Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (5 a.m.) and Starbucks executive chairman Howard Schultz (4:30 a.m.).

Research suggests many successful people wake up well before the work day begins. By doing the same, you can make time to exercise, walk your dog, meditate, spend time with family and get a jump on the day before you get worn down by your duties.😀😀😀

Reward and motivation
Do rewards enhance learning outcomes? This is a question that has long sparked controversy in education literature. According to recent findings in cognitive neuroscience, the answer seems to be yes. Indeed, there have been a number of studies, including ours that have shown that rewards enhance learning due to the modulation of hippocampal function by the reward network in the brain. On this basis, some argue for the value of reward in education.
But research in social psychology has also found that extrinsic rewards can sometimes undermine intrinsic motivation when people are engaged in an interesting task. This phenomenon, called the undermining effect or overjustification effect, suggests that extrinsic rewards are not always beneficial for learning.😀😀😀

Motivation and learning
If you are motivated, you learn better and remember more of what you learned. This sounds like an obvious fact, but our lab showed that the reality is more nuanced. The critical fact is that not all motivations are created equal.

In the literature of achievement goals, for example, people study primarily for two different goals — to master materials and develop their competence, which are called mastery goals, and to perform well in comparison to others, which are called performance goals (Dweck, 1986; Nicholls, 1984). Mastery goals and performance goals represent the same overall quantity of motivation, but they are qualitatively distinct types of motivation. We conducted a series of behavioral experiments to examine how these two different types of motivation influence learning (Murayama & Elliot, 2011).

In the study, participants were engaged in a problem-solving task and received a surprise memory test related to the task. Critically, participants performed the problem-solving task with different goals. Participants in the mastery goal condition were told that the goal was to develop their cognitive ability through the task, whereas those in the performance goal condition were told that their goal was to demonstrate their ability relative to other participants. The participants in the performance goal condition showed better memory performance in an immediate memory test, but when the memory was assessed one week later, participants in the mastery goal condition showed better memory performance. These results indicate that performance goals help short-term learning, whereas mastery goals facilitate long-term learning.😀😀😀

How to Make Motivation a Habit
There are three simple steps you can take to build better rituals and make motivation a habit.

Step 1: A good pre–game routine starts by being so easy that you can’t say no to it. You shouldn’t need motivation to start your pre–game routine. For example, my writing routine starts by getting a glass of water. My weightlifting routine starts by putting on my lifting shoes. These tasks are so easy, I can’t say no to them.

The most important part of any task is starting. If you can’t get motivated in the beginning, then you’ll find that motivation often comes after starting. That’s why your pre–game routine needs to be incredibly easy to start.

For more about the importance of getting started, read this.

Step 2: Your routine should get you moving toward the end goal.

A lack of mental motivation is often linked to a lack of physical movement. Just imagine your physical state when you're feeling depressed, bored, or unmotivated. You’re not moving very much. Maybe you’re slumped over like a blob, slowly melting into the couch.😀😀😀

Competition and motivation
In our society, it is common for authority figures to introduce competition as a means to increase people’s motivation and performance. But does this assumption that competition is an effective way to increase people’s motivation and performance have an empirical basis? A large empirical literature has addressed the effects of competition on performance, but these studies have been conducted rather separately and no integrated theoretical perspective has been offered.

To address this issue, we conducted a meta-analysis to quantitatively synthesize the previous studies on the effects of competition. When we computed the average effect of competition on performance, with 174 studies (more than 30,000 participants) including both experimental and survey studies, we found a very small average effect . We tried to identify potential moderating factors, but none emerged. However, we observed considerable variability in effect sizes across studies.😀😀😀

Motivation is a powerful, yet tricky beast. Sometimes it is really easy to get motivated, and you find yourself wrapped up in a whirlwind of excitement. Other times, it is nearly impossible to figure out how to motivate yourself and you're trapped in a death spiral of procrastination. This page contains the best ideas and most useful research on how to get and stay motivated.

This isn't going to be some rah-rah, pumped-up motivational speech. (That's not my style.) Instead, we're going to break down the science behind how to get motivated in the first place and how to stay motivated for the long-run. Whether you're trying to figure out how to motivate yourself or how to motivate a team, this page should cover everything you need to know.

You can click the links below to jump to a particular section or simply scroll down to read everything. At the end of this page, you'll find a complete list of all the articles I have written on motivation.😀😀😀