The Key To Starting Work Without "Motivation"

I came up with a model for how drive, goals, and motivation will help you start work on and complete a project. This thinking was generated from the book The Motivation Myth by Jeff Haden, with the section named "How to start when you're 0 percent motivated".

As a quick aside, that book refers to motivation as a feeling you experience after doing work. To account for this, I call the feeling to accomplish something drive.

The question I seek to answer is "what is the key to starting work toward a goal when you do not feel 'motivated' to do so?"

Here is how the cycle of work happens.

You start with a drive to accomplish a goal. You want the goal to happen. If you don't have strong enough drive for a goal, you are not likely to do all the work needed to get there.

With the drive to accomplish a goal, there is something that starts you working on that goal. This will be unknown for now, but I will come back to it shortly.

With that initial push to work, you can successfully finish a task toward that goal.

With that success, you get a feeling of motivation that helps spur you toward working on the next task.

From there, the cycle feeds on itself: work leads to success, success leads to motivation, which leads to more work, and so on. After enough work is done, your goal is achieved!

Back to the mysterious force that starts you in the work/success/motivation cycle, and this is how it related back to The Motivation Myth. That force is willpower.

Once you have a goal that you want to accomplish, you need to start work. Initially, you may have latent energy or excitement from starting on a new goal, and that helps you start work for a few days. However, after the initial drive, it dies down, and starting on the task feels like a chore. I myself have experienced this; it usually lasts about a week.

When you don't have any latent energy or excitement to start work, you need to use willpower.

This is a purposeful jump-start to your engine to drive you to work. To use somewhat anachronistic comparisons, it's like turning a crank to generate electrical power, popping the clutch on a standard shift vehicle, or pulling the starting cord on a gasoline lawnmower.

Note that willpower takes an effort, and thus is limited in supply. Sometimes you will need to rest and gather willpower first. However, once you have started work, and begin to enjoy success from that work, it will generate motivation and will feed on itself.

So, the answer to the question "what is the key to starting work toward a goal when you do not feel 'motivated' to do so?" is "a short application of willpower".