By 
Motivation can be a real bitch to find sometimes. Whether we’re looking to start our own business, get women slightly interested in us, or just trying to be less of a sedentary hog, it can be hard to actually want to go through the necessary process to accomplish anything meaningful in life.
It’s hard to work towards your dreams knowing full well how far off they are.
It’s hard to look for love when there are just so many people out there who suck.
It’s hard to eat right when the returns on doing so are so far off, and Cinnabons are oh, so close.
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Sorry, I zoned out thinking about Cinnabons there for a second.
We desperately try to find motivation from Instagram quotes, petty vengeance towards our exes, and videos with orchestral music added to some asshole’s TED talk. We tell ourselves we’re going to show the world who’s boss, and we imagine the mansion-shaped light at the end of the tunnel of work.
But that wanes, and the rewards are far off, and maybe even unattainable if life swings the wrong way.
So instead, we stay at home, unmotivated, unproductive, feeling unable to get anything done. We over-clean our house, or listen to another podcast, or play dumb phone games, waiting for that mythical magical moment for a drill sergeant to enter our home and scream at us to actually do something beneficial.
This highlights our inherent problem here: Ultimately, to rely on motivation is to rely on outside factors. It’s to rely on the chemicals in your brain aligning properly. It’s to rely on something happening in your life that will push you forward. It’s to rely on what you can’t control.
So here’s something you don’t hear very often:
Motivation is Totally Overrated
Don’t get me wrong. Well-placed motivation certainly doesn’t hurt. Maybe you really want to prove you’re capable to your dad, or you have a big promotion in your future, or you’re pretty sure a hot person will like you if you start working out five times a week.
If so, great.
But if it’s not there, what do you do?
You wait, and wait, and wait forever, and nothing ever happens.
We mythologize motivation because we have this list in our heads of all of the things we need to do to create the life we want, and we know they’re going to suck. Eating salad? Displaying human emotions to someone you’re trying to bone? Actually risking failure, thereby risking your money, and worse, a hit to your ego?
Blegh. Fuck. Jesus. That all sounds terrible.
To wait for motivation is to wait for a time when doing all of those things suddenly sounds good—when taking that risk is something that you want to do, and will feel good about doing.
Totally ridiculous. Never happening. Waiting for your motivation will lead to nothing but a lifetime of waiting. You’ll be 84 with emphysema going, “I’ll stop smoking soon. I just need to be inspired first.”
So then what do we do? How do we take action without motivation? I believe the answer is this:
Habitual Relentlessness
Greatness doesn’t come to people because they’re motivated to do good things. It comes when people do good things regardless of how they feel right now.
That’s it. That’s the whole shebang.
So, put another way, real greatness and real change in your life comes from habitual relentlessness.
Habitual relentlessness is about getting up every day, and doing what you need to do—not because you’re angry, not because you’ve been wronged, not because of any rewards you’re going to get, but because being great is what you do.
You get up every day and you work out because you’re used to getting up every day and working out.
You put in the work for your big ambitions because that’s your everyday life.
You eat right because, once it has become a habit, it almost doesn’t even occur to you to eat a gooey, sticky, fatty, carby, mouth-watering Cinnabon (I have yet to succeed with this habit formation).
Here’s how you can develop the habit of being relentlessly great.
1) Schedule Your Greatness
Every time you want to make an improvement, it’s imperative that you work it into your schedule. If you just develop an idea that you’re going to start doing something, it doesn’t matter how serious you think you are. It doesn’t matter how much you really believe you’re going to do it.
You’re fucking lying to yourself until that action is penciled in at 3:00pm on a Tuesday. It doesn’t become real until you buy the right food that you’re going to eat, and buy none of the crap that you normally eat. It doesn’t become real until you get that loan for your business, or school, or your house, and you start having panic attacks about whether you just made a huge mistake.
The panic is good. That means you’re actually alive and doing things.
2) Start to Put the Work In
We only await motivation for things that suck. That’s what this is really about. You want to suddenly feel like sucky tasks like running and asking for a raise don’t suck, and if you don’t feel that way, your current plan is to hold off on doing the sucky thing.
But that’s stupid, because think about it. What is something you do that you fucking hate every day? Maybe driving to work? Brushing your teeth? Talking about the weather with that one deeply sad guy who wears newsboy caps into work?
My point is that you still do all of these things because despite how you may feel about whatever it is that you want to do in life, you can do things that suck. We all can. We do them all the time, and we survive them.
So know that, plug your nose, and accomplish the hardest thing about making any progress in life: getting started.
It’s when you first have to choose to eat the salad instead of that burger that sucks. It’s when you first step out your front door and force yourself to start running. It’s when you have to do something towards your new business besides just telling the THOTs on Tinder about it.
Getting started will develop two habits with you at once. First, it will of course develop the habit in whatever it is that you’re doing—whether it’s working out consistently, working towards your side business, or doing your weekly hot yoga with your grandmother.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly than any individual resolution you might have, sticking to your new habits will develop your relentlessness.
3) Foster Your Habit of Relentlessness
It’s only in starting to be relentless–in doing things that suck regardless of how tired, or bored, or horned up we are–that we can develop a habit of doing this, and we can conquer just about anything.
The decision to become a relentless motherfucker will get you through a day when you’re feeling lazy, but it can also get you through rejection and failure. It’s adopting an attitude of relentlessness that can have you immediately accept failure as a quick setback rather than a permanent state. This attitude could be the difference between doing nothing to improve your situation, and completely altering the course of your life.
Relentlessness is how you bounce back before you’ve even really fallen.
Work every day to live up to your relentless identity, to keep chugging along no matter what demotivating distractions end up on your tracks. Before eating better, before working smarter, and before being a better listener, that is the most important change you can make in your life.
Be relentless.
