Does that surprise you? It shouldn’t. Because motivation is crap. If you rely on motivation to reach your fitness goals, I can almost guarantee that you will fail.
Here’s why: motivation comes and goes. It’s fleeting.
Imagine that it’s New Year’s Day. You’re feeling all sorts of motivated, and you set a goal to lose 10lbs of fat. You head to the gym, get in a great workout, and think “Wow! This feels so effortless. I’m going to crush this goal”.
I hate to break it to you, but that feeling won’t last. Sooner or later, there will be a day when you don’t feel motivated. Maybe you had a bad day at work. Maybe somebody said something mean to you. Maybe you just woke up feeling off for no apparent reason. It’s a question of when, not if.
When this day comes, if you’re like most people, you’ll skip training that day. You’ll think “I just don’t have the motivation to train today”. Then soon you’ll fall off the wagon completely and be back at square one. By now you can see why so few people ever achieve their New Year’s resolutions.
Because motivation is crap! It’s like kindling for a fire. It burns bright for a short time but then it’s gone.
Motivation is the quick fix. The hack. It’s thinking “As soon someone tells me just the right combination of words, I’ll be permanently motivated and it will be easy!”.
Bullshit! That’s never going to happen. Accept this now.
This is also why almost nobody ever has their lives changed by a motivational speaker. How many times have you seen a motivational speech and been really fired up, only to watch that feeling fade over the coming hours or days?
If you want to have any hope of reaching your fitness goals, you have to be more than motivated. You have to be driven. To be driven means that you are going to do whatever it takes to reach your goals, regardless of the obstacles in front of you and regardless of how you feel. Does that sound difficult? Of course it is! That’s the whole point!
You have to learn to do things that you don’t want to do. This is what separates the winners from the losers. The winners don’t like beating down their body any more than everybody else! They just do it anyway.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we live in a soft ass society. Today’s motivational speakers want you to think that we can all just hold hands and sing kum ba yah, and everything will work out. That’s not how fitness works! You’re going to have to be uncomfortable and do things that don’t sound fun.
Let me repeat myself: it will not always be fun. There will be times when it’s difficult. This is when it’s most important to push through. Because that’s how you become hard. You only become hard by doing things that you don’t want to do. You don’t become hard when you’re feeling motivated. You become hard when you’re not feeling motivated. That’s why those days when you don’t feel motivated are actually a blessing in disguise – it’s the only opportunity to sharpen yourself on the crucible of life.
Last thing – my message is obviously a lot harsher than most “influencers” out there! That’s because mine is raw and real. I’m giving you the honest truth without all the sugarcoating you usually get. Mine might be a harder pill to swallow, but this way you have a realistic expectation. Saying that it’s easy definitely sells more products, but it sets you up for failure. If you expect things to be easy, then you’re probably going to stumble and fail when it gets hard. But when you know that it will be hard, then you’re going to stumble only to get right back up and shatter any obstacles in front of you.