Ever read those happy-go-lucky forward emails or walked into the self-help section of any bookstore? Then you must be familiar with the reign of the motivation boosters singing Go Johnny Go Go at the top of its lungs. It goes something like this:
I’ve been there too. I was one of those lazy quitters and I must tell you: I didn’t feel well at all. On the surface, it’s easiest to quit, that’s true. It’s easy to be lazy and wait for things to happen instead of pushing the world to make them happen for you. But deep down, quitting is more like a disease. A chronic type of pain which is slowly eating you up.
This is how I started to fight quitting. By realizing it’s a disease, something that will literally make me ill. Have you noticed how lazy people have headaches? That’s not by hazard, I can tell you. Being a quitter will work against your normal physiology, it will stop some natural processes, creating whirls of free, unused energy, which will most likely transform into body imbalances. Which we also call illnesses."
It's part of a nice article afterall. All motivational pat-on-the-backs; be it films, books, articles, males or females; true or fake; serve an inherintly good purpose. They want to make you who you want to be. Before you start listening to "The Eye of the Tiger", I have a couple of questions.
- Why do you want to become who you want to be?
- Do you have a clear sense of who you are now, so that you can come up with the right action plan to take you from A(who you are) to B(whom you'll become)?
- Will motivation really work regardless of your choice?
Looking around, I see too many failed attempts around me, too many heads down and too much misery. It's a fact: sometimes motivation doesn't work. The attempts "to become" or to "quit quitting" fail... They fail not because "life sucks" or because of the reasons why we have a word in every language for "impossible". They fail because some people make an enormous effort to go the wrong way: the way that contradicts with who they really are and what makes their heart beat. Take any full-minded-but-half-hearted story and it will be more or less the same. People should stop taking the road to supposedly-fulfilling-destinations. It's the only way you'll ever find your own story. We keep forcing ourselves into being who we are not, forcing ourselves into sort-of-wanting what we really don't want with good but wrong intentions. When our choice is right we won't have to force ourselves at all. We won't have to bear with the price. We won't have to calculate the adequate amount of fairness involved. We won't be fooled with sticks and carrots. We will achieve the flow stage, synchronize our minds, body and hearts. When the choice is right, we won't even remember what quitting was.
