The Motivation & Inspiration Trap

You don’t really hear this often but motivation and inspiration can become a trap. They are a great little boost, but if you rely on someone motivating you to get something done, you become reliant.

The extreme of this can be seen in people who are always seeking a mentor or some sort of secret to success or life or whatever t may be. Instead of putting in the effort to making the thing happen that they want, like working out to become more healthy, or working more to earn more money. They spend all that time looking for someone else to either do it for them or to give responsibility for their failures. Mentors won’t do it for you. You may get some people to do it for you for so long but then you’re just further down the line with nothing more gained. When people do get a mentor who only aims to teach and they don’t want to put in the effort, they blame their failures on the mentor’s teachings.

The key concept behind all of this is responsibility. Taking responsibility for what happens to you and owning your existence so that you can work to make real change in it. If you can get into the mindset of believing that everything is your fault, then you can put it on you to do all the work needed to change things. If you blame something that can’t change, then nothing will change.

The point of this video and post is to highlight the point that motivation, inspiration, and anything of the sort is external, just like drugs. Relying on it too much can be detrimental. You need to focus more on getting to the point where you can achieve what you need to do without external motivation. Whether it’s building a routine or building up a sense of internal motivation, it’s so important to find a way to motivate yourself without anything or anyone else.

Now if you’re stumbling upon something motivational or inspirational, I’m not saying to run from it. I would call this discovery which is very different from seeking in that it is accidental and not forced. Genuine results only come from unforced happenings. In other words, you cannot command someone to love someone else. If they do, it isn’t true otherwise you wouldn’t have to be told to do so. It’s called a double bind and we live with them constantly entangled in our day to day lives.

Everyone is always seeking and this seeking is what’s causing the problem. Going around looking for problems and creating them just to solve them is what humans do all the time. When we can finally get to a place where can simply be present and not seek, then you’ll finally be in the place that sought out.

A little dose of philosophy and what you might call motivation, but I’ll call this an educational thought experiment. Let me know what you think about seeking motivation and inspiration versus discovering it or building it on your own. Share your thoughts in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe, like, and share.