Why Motivation Doesn’t Work

The issue with motivation is that it never lasts. Motivation comes from emotion, and emotion is temporary. It’s tough to always feel like doing what you’re supposed to be doing. Sometimes you just don’t feel like it.

When you only do things when you feel like it, behavior and results are erratic. When emotions or moods go down, productivity stops. And then it’s a mission of trying to get back the motivation that was lost. You begin to question yourself and you feel stuck. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The solution: Do it anyway. Through taking action in spite of emotion, the job gets done. You grow, become empowered and in turn can become more motivated from taking the action you needed to. Self-trust and integrity grows, and you really begin to believe you can keep to your word, and self-image and self-esteem grows along with it.

The next time lack of motivation gets in the way of doing what you’re supposed to be doing, do it anyway.

Just Because It’s Urgent Doesn’t Mean It’s Important

Stephen Covey describes in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People an important principle that can be used to prioritize tasks effectively.

He wrote that there were four types of tasks that can crop up on the to-do list. Here they are:

Q1 – Important and Urgent

These are things like completing job applications right on time, or revising for an imminent exam. Your brain tells you they are important because they are. They can be crises, or things that are unforeseen that temporary block the path to your goals. They are tasks that you cannot delegate because you are the only person that is able or required to do them.

Q2 – Important and Not Urgent

This is the quadrant of task that we want to strive to be doing most of the time – doing meaningful tasks without the urgency of a deadline or the stress of unforeseen incidents. Of course sometimes it is unavoidable so we will spend some time in the Q1 too. Examples of tasks that may be important but not urgent are: exercising to stay fit and healthy, quality time with loved ones, writing the book you’ve always wanted to publish, self-education, journaling, meditation, volunteer work, hobbies etc. These tasks are important in the long run, but skipping these type of tasks are easy to do. These tasks tend to either stay on our to-do list for far too long, or they are the type of task that we start once we “find the time”. These tasks also cannot be delegated.

Q3 – Urgent and Not Important

This is where we can accidentally spend too much of our time. Tasks like doing laundry, work meetings, catching up on emails. They tend to be interruptions, or people trying to pull us away from important tasks by getting us to attend to urgent tasks. We favor this type of task because we have a bias to what’s immediately in front of us, but in the long-term it takes away tasks from the previous quadrant. Think about whether these tasks need to be done, and if they do, whether they can be delegated or outsourced. Spending too much time in this quadrant can leave you feeling overworked but unfulfilled.

Q4 – Not Important and Not Urgent

Activities like watching junk TV-shows, mindless web-surfing, scrolling through social media, and playing video games are examples of this type of activity. They are neither important nor urgent, but are ways that we can sometimes use our time. The next time we think about how little time we have for Q2 activities, we can immediately look to the amount of time we are spending on Q4 activities. In the grand scheme of things, these type of activities are the ones we are likely to look back on in the future and see them as a waste of time. As much as these give us a nice big dollop of dopamine in the moment, we should limit these types of activities.

By spending more time doing important tasks we end up spending more of our lives doing things that give us meaning and fulfilment. By focusing mainly on Q2 tasks, we can know that we are checking the right boxes on our to-do list and in the right order, instead of procrastinating with trivial tasks in Q3 and Q4. If we end up making the progress we are looking for consistently, we can then truly enjoy our next Netflix-binge instead of feeling guilty about it.

The Three Ps: A Mental Framework to Deal With Your Problems

The three Ps come from research on happiness by Martin Seligman, described in Option B by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant. Sandberg is the COO of Facebook, and a few years ago found her husband dead on a hotel gym floor. The book is about how she dealt with the trauma and grief, and strategies to deal with adversity.

And that’s where the three Ps comes in. When people inevitably come across adversity in life, there are three common things we say to ourselves which make things worse.

The first P is personalization. Personalization means that when things go wrong, you blame yourself. After all, you’re the common factor in all the problems you come across, right? And we’ve also been taught concepts like internal locus of control, and taking responsibility of our lives too. But where there is a misunderstanding is the difference between taking responsibility and placing fault or blame on yourself.

When I was first starting out as a door-to-door salesman, I rarely sold anything. Of course, the natural self-talk was to blame myself. “I suck, wow I’m really bad at this. No-one wants to buy anything from me. Oh God, I’m way worse than I thought I’d be at this.” As good as it is to take responsibility for your results, it is important to understand that firstly, you’re not the only one finding it difficult. Many people have gone through the same struggle you’re going through too, no matter what it is. Secondly, just because someone didn’t buy off you doesn’t mean it’s all your fault. To this day, most prospects still decline the product I’m offering. When someone declines my offer, my self-talk nowadays is: “They didn’t want it.” No blame on anyone, just stating the facts. Of course, I still try to improve at sales, but I try not to beat myself up when things aren’t going well.

The second P is pervasiveness. Pervasiveness means that a problem in one area of your life ends up pervading, or spreading, to every other part of life. Work problems get taken into your home, into intimate relationships, into aspects of mental and physical health and so on. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

During the same, harrowing period starting in door-to-door sales, I slowly began to realize that I was basing my value as a human being solely on whether I had made sales that day or not. And of course, most days I wasn’t making sales. So, my value was pretty fucking low. I didn’t want to speak to anyone after work, and I was getting into a deeper and deeper hole of low-confidence where it was going to take a gargantuan effort to escape. I even ate junk food to try to make myself feel better. But it doesn’t have to be like that. It doesn’t even make any sense. There’s a lot more to life than work. And there’s a lot of stuff that you’re actually pretty good at. Nowadays, as a sales manager, I always remind new salespeople that the amount of sales they make doesn’t equate to their value as a person. I’m also much better at compartmentalizing work problems as work problems, and not letting those issues infect other parts of my life.

The third P is permanence. Permanence means that you come to believe that the problem will always be there, and that how terrible you’re feeling right now is destined never to end.

As already mentioned, I became stuck in a vicious circle where self-confidence was going so low that I didn’t know if it would ever come back. Luckily, everything in life is impermanent. There’s nothing in life that isn’t impermanent, even life itself will end at some point. So having the grit to stick in there and understand that a bad period won’t last forever gives hope for the future and inspiration for the present moment.

In what situations did the three Ps play a part in your life? And how did you overcome it? I’d love to know, comment below.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck: Mark Manson’s Refreshing Take on Life

The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck is a book by Mark Manson, describing a counterintuitive approach to living a good life. Although counterintuitive, it actually makes a lot of sense. Here’s why:

Manson raises the idea that the self-help genre always fixates on what you lack. By dreaming of riches, the perfect intimate relationship, or a billion dollar business reinforces the fact that you don’t already have all those things. And giving too much of a fuck that you don’t already have those things is bad for your mental health.

Living a good life is giving a fuck about only things that are truly important, knowing that you’re going to die one day, choosing the values in life that mean the most to you, and living those values.

Manson then introduces the idea of the Feedback Loop From Hell. Because human beings have the ability to have thoughts about our thoughts, we can get into a right pickle when we compound our negative emotions. We are say sorry about saying sorry, feel sad about being sad, guilty about feeling guilty. We get angry at ourselves for getting angry, anxious about being anxious and the vicious circle gains momentum.

We need to understand that feeling negative emotions is okay, frequent and normal. But if we keep going round the vicious circle that is the Feedback Loop From Hell, it’s going to make it far worse. So how do you end the feedback loop? Simply: Stop giving a fuck that you feel bad. This short-circuits the loop and you can start again from a blank slate.

Once you accept the negative experience you are having, it in turn becomes a positive experience. And paradoxically, the desire for a positive experience becomes a negative experience. Knowing this, the plight of the world may just simply be that our expectations are too skewed to be happy.

Manson simply tells us: Don’t try. When you stop giving a fuck, everything seems to fall into place. If you’ve ever been in the Zone while doing a task, you’ll notice that you’re not really trying at all, you’re just doing it and the results are coming. When I work as a salesman, the more I try to get people to buy my product, the more they’re deterred from actually buying it.

The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of a struggle is a struggle. So our only option is to embrace the suffering and the struggle, and give less of a fuck about them. One of Manson’s most prominent ideas in The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck is the entitlement culture in the world today. Mediocrity is the new standard of failure, because at least if you’re terrible at everything you can tell yourself that you’re special and deserve to be treated differently. Entitlement culture means that we flip-flop between feeling amazing and feeling terrible (but at least we’re getting the attention that we’re looking for).

In a recent Paddy Power advert on TV, football manager Jose Mourinho describes how special he is and how special Paddy Power’s jackpots are. He then gets rudely brought back to reality when a taxi driver interrupts him mid-speech. “That’s not special, someone wins that jackpot every single day!” That’s how we should view our problems. They’re not unique. You’re not the only person in the history of the universe to have experienced the problem you’re going through right now. The person sitting next to you might be going through the same thing. You just didn’t care to ask because you were too self-absorbed in your pseudo-specialness.

Most of the problems we have are not only common, they have simple solutions too. The more that we debate our choices in our minds, the more blind spots we accumulate, when in fact if the same problem was translated to a third person and we’re tasked with giving advice to them about it, we’d say something along the lines of: “Shut the fuck up and do it.”

Manson suggests that happiness comes from you solving your own problems. Of course, the problems never end, it’s just about choosing better problems all the time. Solving the problem of finding a job you like brings the new problems of how you’re going to fit in with your work colleagues, how to meet the deadline you’ve just been given and how you can make a positive impact in what you do.

Manson brings some hard-hitting truths in the course of the book. Words like: Your actions don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things. The vast majority of your life will be boring and unnoteworthy and that’s okay. We don’t actually know what a negative or a positive experience is in relation to the total timeline of our lives. The worst thing to ever happen to you could end up being the best. Instead of looking to be right all the time, look for things that prove we are wrong.

Manson tells us that meditating on mortality is one of the best antidotes for life. Avoidance of what is painful and uncomfortable is the avoidance of being alive at all. He quotes Mark Twain: “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” You too are going to die and that’s because you too were fortunate to have lived. Now shut the fuck up and do it.

Why You’re Suffering So Much and How to Deal With It

Picture this: A car gets stolen.

Now picture this: Your car gets stolen.

Did you feel the difference? If so, why is there a difference?

Why is the feeling more intense or important now because of a small change in the sentence?

It’s the human ego that creates and preserves the concept of I, me and mine. Ego needs separation from others and differentiation. It likes to attach to objects of ownership. It reacts to loss, and feelings of inferiority. The ego is selfish, and doesn’t care about others. The ego wants to be a victim. Self-importance and being the centre of the universe is the ego.

The ego and its mental concept of I, me and mine one of the biggest traps we fall into and causes pain, misery and suffering.

If we think of a problem that we have, we feel pain and anguish. Now imagine that the problem wasn’t yours, but someone else’s. Would you feel as bad about it?

I first came across this phenomenon while I was on a vipassana meditation course. It involved sitting on the floor and meditating for ten hours a day for ten days. Sitting completely still for so long on the floor caused a lot of pain to my joints. My eyes were closed, but I was grimacing, with sweat pouring down my face as my thoughts went to how ridiculous the idea of doing the course was. I was then taught the concept of ego and I, me and mine. I was also taught the separation of physical and mental pain.

The next day, during meditation, my face was no longer grimacing, and I was sweating a lot less. The pain that would have rated at 9/10 the day before suddenly became a 3/10. I was flabbergasted. I was doing the same thing as before, feeling the same physical pain but I wasn’t suffering nearly as much! It was a combination of recognizing that physical pain didn’t have to equal mental pain, the detachment of my pain from my ego, and recognizing that the day before when I was suffering so much, everyone else in the room was going through exactly the same thing and I didn’t care at all about them! Oh that selfish ego…

The self-importance that we can sometimes get trapped in means that we end up taking ourselves far too seriously. So how do we stop needlessly suffering because of this?

During the meditation course, I replaced the vocabulary of I, me and mine with my name instead. So instead of saying “My pain, my problems…” it transformed into “Dong Ming’s pain…”. That way, I could metaphorically stand back from my mind and body, be more rational, more detached, and more objective.

Another way that I use to make seemingly difficult decisions is to imagine that I am advising someone in the same situation. This way, you sometimes end up realizing that the answer was simple and you just got caught up in your own self-importance, took life too seriously and tricked yourself into thinking the stakes were higher than they were.

Read more about what I learned on a 10-day vipassana meditation course, or how acceptance can be the key to contentment.

Acceptance Is the Key to Contentment

Recently I read Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth in the space of about 24 hours. It’s a book that gave me a lot of joy, peace and aliveness. It gave me awareness of my ego, and in times it has cropped up in life. His wisdom and the way he brings it to the reader is very impressive and incredibly useful for anyone.

One of the stand-out topics for me was the idea of acceptance. I think it’s a concept that is so hard for most people to grasp and live out, and that’s why I see a lot of unhappiness in the world today.

Here are a few quotes on acceptance:

“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.”

“The gap between ‘I want’ and ‘what is’ is a constant source of anguish.”

“Right now, this is how it is. I can either accept it, or let it make me miserable.”

“The primary source of unhappiness is never the situation but the thoughts about it. Situations are always neutral.”

“Instead of making up a story, stick to the facts.”

“Seeking happiness leads to the antithesis of happiness.”

“If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what’s left is who you are.”

“Let go of story and return to the present moment. If the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?”

“If you don’t mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness?”

“You cannot be happy without an unhappy story.”

“Be what you already are. You can’t argue with what is.”

“Nonresistance, nonjudgement and nonattachement are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.”

Want to read more? Here are articles on the mind and on the need to be right.

Why the Need to Be Right Is Holding Us Back

It turns out that being right is the primary motivating factor in almost anything we do. Here are a few examples:

I was once on a hike up a mountain with some friends. Once we reached the final saddle, I asked one of my friends how long they thought it would take to reach the summit. My friend estimated another hour. I disagreed and said we could probably do it in half the time. Instantly, and unconsciously, I picked up the pace. The leisurely stroll turned into tough work as I tried to summit faster. After a few minutes, my friend told me to slow down. “Stop walking so fast just because you want to be right.”

A friend was telling me about some health problems they were having one time, where they were visiting with doctors to find out what was wrong. My friend had to wear a monitoring device so the doctor could have a better idea of what the problem could have been. I told my friend, “I hope everything is normal and healthy and you don’t have to go back to the doctors again!”

My friend replied, “I don’t, I just want to find out what’s wrong with me.” I was taken aback. My friend would have preferred being right about the belief that there was something wrong with them, than simply just being healthy.

People who fall out with others because their social or political views get challenged. They confuse opinions and viewpoints with facts, and don’t understand or tolerate anyone who may have an alternative view to what they have. They’d rather be right and make others wrong, even if they were initially close friends or family members.

Being right also helps us reinforce anything we believe in ourselves. If we truly believe ourselves as hard-working, intelligent and courageous, we want to make ourselves right about it and do things to confirm those beliefs. On the other hand, if we see ourselves as drug addicts, failures, or unhealthy, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and we get a small kick in telling ourselves we were right all along. We’d rather be right than be at peace.

The need to be right comes from a lack of security, and the need to feel good. This is because it feels good to be right and it feels bad to be wrong. But if we are trying to make ourselves feel good at the expense of others’ feelings by making them wrong, it comes from a lack of consciousness. We can often even make ourselves right at the expense of ourselves! Eckhart Tolle describes in A New Earth that the need to be right comes from our ego, and that we aren’t the same as our ego. The ego isn’t something we should take too seriously, it’s just something that pops up from time to time, craving your attention. If we identify with it, that where it starts to grow and we become unconscious again.

When Being Good Enough Is Better Than Being the Best

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, he described the story of Lewis Terman – an American psychologist who tracked children with high IQ scores. He found that although many of them went on to great successes in their careers, there were some who underachieved relative to their perceived potential.

Gladwell argues that after a certain threshold of IQ, it makes very little difference in how applicable their genius really is. For instance, the US winners of the Nobel Prize tend to come from a variety of different universities, not just the Ivy League schools reserved for the upper echelons of genius students. Albert Einstein had a high IQ of 150, but there are people out there with IQs of around 200 that dropped out of university and now work in menial jobs.

Of course, as Daniel Goleman would attest to in his book Emotional Intelligence, emotional intelligence is just as important as IQ in determining career success. An extremely ‘smart’ individual would find it difficult to navigate the world if he had little social awareness or issues with emotions like anger or extreme sadness.

This leads to the question whether companies should follow “affirmative action” guidelines to hire a more diverse set of individuals for their firms, at the expense of hiring the “best-qualified” candidates. While it would be foolish to hire a lawyer with an IQ of 70 because they fit a racial quota, most people who apply to be a lawyer would have an IQ above around 120 anyway. After this threshold, the more important factors are those such as communication skills, strength of character and creative ideas. A member of another social class, religion, race, sexuality and gender are more likely to add to the pool of collective knowledge and ideas too. The concept of diverse thinking is further demonstrated in Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed.

Policing for Profit: How the Poor Are Being Robbed by the Politicization of Justice

In the last few decades, a vast expansion of federal criminal law in the United States now means that the police have power to formally charge innocent people for doing everyday activities. Most of us feel relatively secure in that we aren’t criminals, but through the politicization of justice, everyday citizens are now being targeted by the state.

According to James Rickards in his book The Road to Ruin, paramilitary style police raids in the United States went from 3,000 to 45,000 annually between 1980 and 2001. That’s over 100 raids per day across the United States in 2001.

The growth of police power in the United States isn’t just limited to raids. People in poor neighborhoods get targeted on the streets, and end up paying fines that essentially tax the poor to meet revenue targets outlined by the city. In neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York – where almost half the population is African-American – police patrol the streets to stop and search anyone that “fits the description”. This even happens to people that are walking the twenty yards from their car to their apartment after work, or people that are smoking a cigarette on their porch.

Poverty-stricken citizens have been known to be arrested, strip-searched, and then charged with crimes such as “obstructing pedestrian traffic” (on an otherwise empty street). Although unconstitutional, police deliberately choose poor neighborhoods because their victims don’t have the option to pay $1000 for a lawyer and take the time off work and find the transport to go to court to seek justice. Instead, their hand is forced to pay a $500 fine and accept a criminal record that harms their job prospects.

So why are the police doing this? In recent times, the United States has had a problem with the amount of sovereign debt they are taking on, and cities are running on budget deficits too. The police in the cities are therefore tasked to generate revenue from the poor. They’re even incentivized and rewarded, and competitions are held for officers to try to generate the most revenue.

Police in the United States also have the ability to seize assets after an arrest before conviction. Even if proven innocent, the accused often do not have the resources to fight to get their assets back. The assets get shared out among people involved in the investigation to boost revenue in resource-limited localities. Highway patrol effectively enact a state-sanctioned highway robbery.

Not only is there obvious cost to the poor, there can be a cost to police too. Violence against officers is much more likely when people know that the police are effectively corrupt and unconstitutional. The reports of police brutality in the United States don’t seem to be going away any time soon either.

It’s hugely disconcerting to know that the state has the power to formally charge anyone they wish to – we are all effectively felons. The ever-increasing surveillance state has been demonstrated by people like Edward Snowden, a whistleblower that worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. The government are able to collect data from social media websites, the NFC and GPS on your cell phones, CCTV with facial recognition and even toll booths you have driven through. The digitization we have experienced in our lifetimes means that there is no such thing as privacy anymore. The only question is whether your time has come yet.

What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Intelligent?

Emotional intelligence is a phrase we see loosely throw about in conversations, but what does it actually mean to be emotionally intelligent?

Yale psychologist, Peter Salovey, split emotional intelligence into five domains:

Knowing One’s Emotions

The more we understand our own emotions as they arise, the more self-aware we become and better able we are to describe how we are feeling. We are also better equipped to deal with whatever emotions crop up from moment to moment. An inability to recognize emotions in ourselves leaves us at their mercy. Being in tune with our emotion leads to more certainty in decision-making and we trust ourselves more.

Managing emotions

This builds on the self-awareness of emotion. When we recognize that we are irritable, sad, angry, or anxious, can we soothe ourselves or find a way to act towards a goal despite of these negative emotions? An inability to do this can lead to impulsive decisions or a constant battling of distress.

Motivating oneself

Success towards a goal is largely attributed to delayed gratification and impulsive control. The more we can manage our emotions and still do what we set out to do, the more chance we have of succeeding. Emotions can hijack the brain and without the willpower we can go astray. Being able to enter a ‘flow’ state is another skill emotionally intelligent people are adept at, so that time passes by without distraction.

Recognizing emotions in others

This is probably what most people think of when they hear the term ’emotional intelligence’. How empathic are we? Can we recognize when someone is starting to get irritated, or feeling sad or happy? The more that we understand how someone is feeling, the more we will understand what they need and want. This is crucial for career paths in sales, management, teaching, and caring professions.

Handling relationships

This all culminates in how we are able to handle our relationships effectively. Our quality of life is often attributed to the quality of our relationships, so the better that we can manage the emotions of ourselves and others in our important relationships, the more fulfilled we will be. Having a high emotional intelligence will enable us to become better intimate partners, better to work with, and better to spend time with.

Each individual varies in how well they rank in the five domains of emotional intelligence. Some people may be better at soothing someone else when they are upset, but when they are upset themselves they may find it difficult. Others may be self-aware but oblivious to the subtle cues that others give to them in a social setting.

Even so, what we should all recognize is that our emotional intelligence can be learned, even if some people seem more naturally adept than others. Our brains are remarkably plastic – they can be shaped and biologically influenced based on our input.

Personally, I found that I became much more attuned to other people’s emotions after working in sales because I was engaging in much more face-to-face communication, and it was important for me to get better at it.

Daniel Goleman puts forth in his book Emotional Intelligence that EQ is much more predictive in success than IQ. As a social species, it’s hard to disagree.