Are you looking for motivation?
You’ve come to the right place.
Consider this article a shot of pure adrenaline to get you up off the couch and motivated like you’ve never been before in your life.
Let’s go!
1. Sleep well
Motivation starts with sleeping well.
There’s no way you’d drive an F1 race with only a quarter tank of gas, and it’s the same with starting your day after sleeping poorly.
When you don’t sleep well, everything else starts falling apart, too.
It’s not just how much, it’s the quality of your sleep and the amount of time you spend in the deep REM (Rapid-Eye-Movement) cycle of your sleep.
Get enough sleep and sleep soundly.
You’ll wake up feeling ready to kick ass and take on the world.
2. Get up early
The next step in becoming insanely determined is to get up early.
Imagine you are the commander of a homeland defense force that is stopping a zombie invasion.
If you don’t wake up on time it’s all over, and you’ll be responsible.
Get up early as if your life and the lives of everyone else depended on it. Put the most obnoxious, insane alarm on your phone or watch possible.
I have a blaring loud bugle that plays reveille when I wake up.
I don’t dare hit snooze on that bad boy in case I let my comrades down.
Get up early and make your bed. Just do it.
3. Eat healthily
Next up in the ways to go from super lazy to insanely determined is to start eating healthily.
Reduce portion size and start making your own meals if you have time or ordering them from a healthy meal service that you can get meals delivered by.
You need to put the right nutrients in your body if you expect your body, mind and soul to operate at high performance.
Take the time to respect food and eating, it’s incredibly important to your whole life and how it goes.
When you eat carefully and have discipline in how much you eat, combined with sleeping well and getting up early, you’re ready to get in gear with what you do.
4. Exercise every day
Think of this as a step by step process.
These are your first three steps: sleeping well, getting up early and putting good nutrients into your body.
They’re the foundation you build the rest on.
You need to do them first before we get to the next steps.
5. Find your mission
Before applying your energy and wellbeing to anything, you need to know what and why.
The truth is that most people aren’t lazy or useless, they’re just not very motivated.
There are two ways to motivate someone:
Through pressure, fear, force and necessity;
Or through inspiration, free choice, enthusiasm and growth.
The second way is much better!
If you’re only motivated because your boss forces you to be, you’re going to eventually burn out, and everytime you get home from work you’ll be a bump on a log and useless in other areas of your life.
Inspiration needs to come from within.
This means finding your mission and discovering what it is you want to do in this world with your job and with the role you serve in the lives of others.
This often relates to a strong skill you have, combined with a burning need or desire you’ve always wanted filled that you could never find the answer to.
You can create that answer.
For example a friend of mine found modern dating apps shallow and boring, and is working on creating his own dating app for people of more substance.
6. Execute it daily
When you know what mission you have in mind and put your skills towards it, anything is possible.
The trap that many people get in is to think on too large a scale and forget about the day to day.
What you do on a daily basis has a huge impact, and over time it either becomes something real or fades away into merely a dream.
For that reason, it’s important to break down your mission into granular, daily steps.
This begins with sleeping, eating well, getting up early and exercising, as these are the bases of everything.
But after that it may involve going to an office, collaborating with others, going on research trips, learning new skills or even moving to a new place or learning a new language (such as coding, or Romanian).
Who knows where your dream will take you!
The important thing is that you break it into daily steps rather than only thinking of some future end state when you’ll achieve it.
7. Use failure as rocket fuel
Many people experience a big failure and feel that they’re “destined” or fated not to succeed.
They feel sure that it’s just not worth the trouble and use the failure as a justification for quitting or changing course.
But the truth is that failure has huge hidden potential.
Not only can you learn a lot about why you failed and what you could change…
You can also use the frustration and disappointment of the failure to power your next move and to come back even harder.
This is what champion boxers, tech disruptors, great leaders and every other remarkable person knows.
But they don’t just know it, they do it.
They use rock bottom heartbreak failure as the bedrock of their dreams and mine every last ounce of pain out of it that they can to get stronger and more determined.
This ties directly into the next point…
8. Love your haters
Ultra marathon runner and former Navy SEAL David Goggins is a bestselling author and motivational coach.
He overcame a childhood of extreme physical abuse and bullying to rise up into a paragon of inspiration for many.
He holds himself to the highest standard, urging people to “stay hard” and seek out their “discomfort zone” in order to reach their true potential.
One thing which Goggins talks about in his new book Never Finished that might surprise some is how he has made audio recordings of many of the most hateful things people online and offline have said about him.
He sometimes cranks it on his home stereo system and walks around getting pumped up from it, or listens to it on his headphones while working out.
“You’ll never amount to anything, you worthless piece of sh*t!”
“You’re a pathetic excuse for a man, b*tch.”
He gets amped up from the hate. It powers him and motivates him as he takes action exercising and producing, knowing that this bitterness and hate is only a symptom that he’s succeeding.
9. Keep score
There’s a lot of advice out there in society to “go with the flow” and take it easy.
We’re often told that being competitive is mean-spirited or leads to depression.
It’s true that social media showing only our best moments is selective and miserable, but you should be keeping score.
It’s just you should be keeping score with your past self.
How much money did you earn this year compared to last?
How much weight did you lose this month compared to last?
How much more fired up are you feeling about your goals this month than a month ago?
And so on.
Keep score. Write down numbers. Make it specific. Keep bettering yourself.
You love and appreciate the old you, and sometimes you may even go downhill, but comparing yourself to the you of yesterday is a way to always stay sharp and on the ball.
10. Adapt and overcome
I wrote earlier about the importance of appreciating failure for its lessons and the fire it can put in our belly.
The key to going from lazy to insanely determined is to take charge of your life.
Nobody’s coming to save you.
Nobody else is going to do it for you, so it’s up to you to carve out a future with your own bare hands.
Turn the blank canvas of your life into a work of art. Splash some paint all over that thing, or carefully paint it on.
You have the power inside you to adapt and overcome to whatever life puts in front of you.
You’re in the driver’s seat.
Don’t forget that!
