Do you suffer from low motivation, not knowing your passions, laziness, and other forms of just not feeling like putting the effort in? Do you want to have more motivation and passion?

Most people tell me they’re lazy about a lot of things and don’t know their passions. Luckily, you can change that. Personally I don’t like being that way or hanging around with people like that. I connect with people on their passions.

I’ve written on this topic before. Today I want to state very simply where motivation and energy, and their lack — laziness, lethargy and lack of energy — come from. Unlike chemical energy, you can’t measure emotional energy in calories.

Your amount of motivation to do something is so simple and important, and understanding it so fundamental to doing something about it I’ll bold and indent it.

Your motivation to do something is your expectation of success.

It’s as simple as that. If you don’t think you’ll be able to achieve a goal, you won’t feel like starting it. If you think you’ll do it, you’ll want to. If you have many overlapping or conflicting goals, your motivations will overlap and conflict. If you have one big goal you think you can achieve, you’ll be focused to do it.

To me, recognizing this source of motivation helped a lot. Instead of ascribing to myself some vague property of laziness (nobody is lazy about everything, we all get out of bed when we have to go to the bathroom, no matter how comfortable or lazy we feel, so we get motivation sometimes), I could see in the project something I could identify clearly and do something about.

Once you get the connection, you start learning to change projects to increase your motivation. You learn to make increasingly challenging projects manageable, increasing your motivation and energy to do increasingly large, complex, and challenging projects. Next thing you know, you have an overarching life passion and a lifestyle supporting its accomplishment. And you’re surrounded by equally passionate people achieving their life projects.

If you want to do something but don’t feel the energy or motivation to do it, look at how much you expect to succeed at it. If you realize you don’t see much chance of success, work on that. Lower barriers. Remove obstacles. Reduce big challenges into many smaller, more achievable ones.

But don’t just say, “I’m just lazy,” “I have no motivation,” or “I can’t do it.” Motivation and its opposite arise for reasons in your environment and your perception of it. They aren’t internal traits you can’t do anything about.

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