The past month and a half has proven to be a quite stressful in terms of work and life. I won’t go into terrible detail about it only that projects at my workplace have started demanding more mental capacity than before. As a result, I’ve found myself often too drained to sit down and write anything meaningful. I often found what I had written conflicted with what I wrote in earlier chapters. Concentration became such a difficult chore that my mind simply wandered all over the place. I found it increasingly difficult to focus. It was demotivating to say the least, I couldn’t make myself sit down and write or draw or do anything I found meaningful. I was satisfied to simply drown myself in YouTube videos as so many of us do.
During this time I contemplated what it was that had changed. When I say this, I’m mostly referring to things within my own control. I started trying to determine what it was in my life that changed that is stopping me from achieving my goals in the day. Then I stumbled onto this video :
The part that spoke to me the most from the video was the difference between Push and Pull motivation. Starting at 4:50 (although I recommend watching the whole video as it is quite informative) he starts discussing how that pull comes from something exciting that drives you to push yourself. The idea of having something that you’re excited about every day you wake up really made me realize I had lost sight of that over-arching goal. In a previous post I talked about how the idea of discipline over motivation was an amazing idea and I still believe that to be true. But I realize now that discipline alone is more like Push motivation, the willpower required to stay focused and work hard solely for the purpose of being productive. I have to admit it’s proven to be incredibly hard to sit down and write or draw after and exhausting day of work.
But over the weekend I had a moment where I was actually very excited and felt that drive to work. I told myself I would improve my drawing, I would practice my line art. On Saturday I went out to a Blenz, got a hot chocolate and just drew for a couple hours and came up with a drawing of one of my characters from the sequel of my first book. Now I didn’t finish the drawing but the progress I made got me excited about my book again and reminded me about my end-goal once more. I want to be an author, I want to write and share my story with people. I then went home and started writing and then on Sunday I wrote more as well. And then Monday, after work I went straight home, took a shower to wake myself up, and to my delight started writing again.
I think its important to have that discipline to maintain a strong work ethic towards your goal, but I think now I’m realizing that its also valuable to have that goal clear and always in your mind. I lost sight of that goal and because of that, I lost whatever concentration I had. I love this idea of pull motivation, having that goal always in mind to wake up every day feeling excited and motivated to work towards it.
I hope this reflection helps others stuck like I was 🙂
– Raphael
PS: Here’s that line art I started of my character in book 2 (still far from done though!)
Raph's Cozy Musings 