Originally posted on https://www.theifod.com/beast-mode-motivation-and-the-key-to-success/

“Everybody wants to be a beast, until it’s time to do what real beasts do.“

-Eric Thomas

“There’s always some beast in everybody.”

-Michael Jennings (my father), last night at dinner

 

Many (most?) people, suffer from a sense of frustration of not having achieved what they want to achieve in various areas of life (I often feel this way). We fail to be all that we can be. The days, weeks and years roll by without attaining our most important goals whether they are health related, like losing weight, career-related, relationship-related, financial etc.

What can we do?

The Most Important Question of Your Life

I love the quote at the top of this blog post: “we all want to be beasts until it’s time to do what real beasts do.” So true. Wishes, desire and motivation aren’t usually the problem with achieving our goals. We all want to be beasts. As Mark Manson explains in his excellent article The Most Important Question of Your Life, it is deciding what you want to give up and what pain you want to endure that is the hurdle. We focus on the result when we should be focusing on the process. From Mark’s article:

A more interesting question [than what we want], a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?

Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out . What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life.

Based on this life perspective, when we have a goal like losing weight, saving more money or getting ahead in our careers, we should not ask whether we want that result, but rather what pain are we willing to suffer to achieve our goals? We should ask this every time we have a goal. If we are not willing to change, to give up something, to endure the pain or effort, maybe we should conclude that we just don’t want it enough and throw out the goal.

Source: Truth Training, East Hampton, NY

What do real beasts do? They train. They practice. They work. They take chances. They fail. They get back up and do it over again. If we don’t want to be a beast in furtherance of our goal, we should switch to a goal where we are ready to go into full beast mode.

Success is About Process

Thus, the key to achieving success is not goal setting – it’s process setting. Success results from creating habits and processes.

As Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip “Dilbert” and author of a number of books says,“Losers have Goals. Winners have Systems.”

Similarly, Jeff Haden in his book The Motivation Myth relates that “Incredibly successful people set a goal and then focus all their attention on the process necessary to achieve that goal. They set a goal and then, surprisingly, they forget the goal. Sure, the goal is still out there. But what they care about most is what they need to do today—and when they accomplish that, they are happy about today. They feel good about today.”

“Losers Have Goals. Winners Have Systems.”

-Scott Adams

 

A related point is that counting on willpower to get you to your goals almost never works. We only have so much willpower and draining it in one area usually depletes it availability for another area. It also tends to decline as the day goes on. Read more about why using willpower isn’t a good way to achieve goals: Willpower! Instead, we must establish habits and focus on process.

The Truth About Motivation

In the The Motivation Myth, the author argues that true motivation actually is the result of success, not the cause of success. Once we start something and have some success, even small, we become motivated to continue because we crave success. At some point, our continued success will shape our identity and foster habits that will reinforce the new behavior. From the book:

The process looks like this:

Success → Motivation → More Success → More Motivation → More Success = Becoming

Thus, choose a goal, create a process and then set your goal aside. Then just start. Focus on the process. Love the process. Embrace the process. Revel in little successes the process creates daily. Break it down hour-by-hour and day-by-day.

You get to choose your goal—but after that, what you want to do is irrelevant. What matters is what you need to do to achieve your goal. You can’t have dessert with every meal and lose weight. (Well, theoretically you can . . . but jeez, that will be hard.) You can’t complete a triathlon without doing an awful lot of running, biking, and swimming. (Well, theoretically you can . . . as long as they give you a week to complete the race.) You can’t get promoted without outworking everyone around you. (Well, theoretically you can . . . but don’t you want to earn the job instead of politicking your way in?) So don’t start unless you’re truly willing to pay the price.

-The Motivation Myth

Enjoy the Journey

A key mindset for success is that of enjoying the journey – even the bad parts of our journey. Enjoy what real beasts do! Love the process!

Artwork by Liam Ashurst

I wrote about this mindset previously in Mile 21 Thinking – tell yourself that you want to be doing what you are doing and experiencing what you are experiencing – even if it is painful or hard. Tell yourself that there is no place you’d rather be. If you decide to get in shape, tell yourself that you love the exertion and pain. If you want to get a professional certification, immerse yourself in the studying and tell yourself how lucky you are to be learning when studying late at nights and on weekends.

If that doesn’t work and what you are doing still sucks, then embrace the suck. As the Navy Seal from the fantastic book Living with a Seal says: “If it doesn’t suck, we don’t do it.” Beasts love suck! Be a beast (we all have some beast inside us)!

Again from Mark Manson:

Who you are is defined by the values you are willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who get in good shape. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who move up it. People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainty of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it. This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes. So choose your struggles wisely, my friend.