Why achieving goals has nothing to do with motivation.
Gurus will have you believe that the reason you’re not accomplishing all your goals is that you’re not motivated enough. As you may guess, this is only half true, and mostly garbage.
The reason why people don’t achieve goals is they don’t know what it takes to achieve them. – Truth Cake
What this means is that for someone that thinks they want to lose weight, they may think that they only have to workout 2x a week and cut back on soda. When they realize it takes feeling starvation pangs, working out 6x a week, giving up beers on the weekend, and so on, they give up.
It’s not that they’re not motivated – it’s that they didn’t know what it REALLY was going to take to achieve the goal to begin with. If they knew precisely what it would take to lose weight and already knew the pain of it and what they’d have to sacrifice, start down the path, and THEN give up, then that’s a motivation problem.
The real problem is simply not having a REALISTIC plan that details all the sacrifices (and/or pain) that must be endured.
Why do I use the word “pain?” Because every goal requires pain or sacrifice, otherwise you would already be doing / having it. If a goal has neither of those apparent to you, then you’re not seeing the real plan laid out. You inherently have to give up something to have something else. You may be giving up an abusive spouse to have a better relationship, which may be easy and painless to give that up, but it’s still a sacrifice of some sort.
Gurus will tell you to try to get you to write out your ultimate end goal, which is terrible advice on its own. Most don’t get you to write out the process of achieving those goals. If the process doesn’t look favorable, you may not want the goal. Want to be a huge bodybuilder and that’s the goal? The process is gobs of steroids and potentially dying younger. Is that acceptable to you? Want to make a million dollars in 1 month? The process will likely be filled with enormous risk / stress, and/or bending your ethics. Is that acceptable?
A goal is just a pipe dream until you know the path to achieve it, and that path is typically only legitimate when you can see the sacrifice / work / pain that’s involved. If there’s none of that, it’s likely an erroneous path (ie. magic diet pills that don’t sacrifice your long term health, etc).
Pick your goal, find the legitimate plan to get there, determine what you’re willing to sacrifice, and THEN decide whether to do it or to amend your goal. – Truth Cake
What’s a goal you set for yourself that you abandoned, NOT because you weren’t “motivated,” but simply because you didn’t know what was TRULY required to achieve that goal?
