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Unlock Unstoppable Motivation
642 Plays11 months ago
Have you experienced that burning, optimistic, powerful energy, feeling like anything is possible?
The problem is it usually doesn’t last. We get a quick burst of optimistic energy, then the smallest setback or just the passage of time brings us back to a “normal” state.
The result is we accomplish less and fail to reach our potential.
What if there was a way to create that level of motivation systematically?
In this episode, we discuss a model for creating and sustaining motivation based on what’s worked for some of the world’s most successful people and proven, scientific research.
Get the model and step-by-step instructions on how to use it to reach your potential here: https://www.mattaclark.com/motivation
Timestamps
(0:05:21) Three ingredients of motivation
(0:08:34) The Power of Choice
(0:22:04) Three sources of resistance to getting things done
(0:25:08) The Motivation Model
(0:30:12) Shrink the middle problem to make goals easier
(0:37:02) Testing the model with a real, very recent setback
(0:40:26) One antidote to getting derailed by setbacks
(0:44:39) Better than work-life balance
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
So.
Introduction to Motivation
00:00:15
Speaker
Have you ever felt that intense, optimistic, energizing feeling where anything is possible? Well, in this episode, I'm gonna tell you how you can get that feeling and sustain it anytime you want so you can achieve more and reach your potential. I'm Matt Clark, and on this podcast, I dive deep into self-development and business subjects that can transform our lives. My goal is to use what the best thought leaders in scientific research has to say about improving our lives to create simple, effective, step-by-step processes that we can use every
Living Up to Potential - Are You Missing Out?
00:00:47
Speaker
single day. My goal is to help you achieve more success, create more freedom, and be more fulfilled faster. Enjoy.
00:00:57
Speaker
Right now, do you feel like you're living up to your potential or do you feel like you could be doing so much more and contributing so much more? You've seen in your life sparks of energy where you felt like anything is possible. Then, either with just the passage of time or a big setback or even a big dose of reality, you fall back into a half-committed state just going through the motions every day. You could go through months, years, or decades even like this. In that whole time, you could miss out on the juice of life, feeling like you're on fire, contributing at your highest level. You could look back 10 years from now and think, where did all the time go? Worst of all, all the people you could have contributed to, including your friends, your family members, and those you don't know but who could use your inspiration, will miss out on what you could have provided.
Daily Inner Drive: How to Achieve It
00:01:48
Speaker
What I'm here to talk about today is how to unleash your inner drive. I want you to wake up every day with a fire burning so hot inside of you that you get 10 times more done and feel way better about it. My goal is that you run out of time rather than run out of energy every day. Now, the benefits of this type of energy, if you've experienced this before, you probably know most of this, but you get bigger and more expansive possibility thinking. When you're in this sort of energetic mindset, you believe more is possible, you come up with more ideas and more solutions. ah You have more energy to pursue those solutions, you're more optimistic about those solutions working out, and when inevitable setbacks happen, because no matter what we do,
00:02:29
Speaker
We're not just going to have a never ending sort of string of ah progressive steps. We're going to have stuff that gives us setbacks. And so when you're in this sort of mindset, you'll have more resilience when those inevitable setbacks happen. So part of the spark of this episode is something that happened on April 9, 2024. I did something I'm incredibly embarrassed to admit to. I bought a book on cleaning your house. It's called A Monk's Guide to a Clean House in Mind. Then I made a purchase that marked the very bottom of my motivation. A purchase we must never speak of again. I bought a feather duster.
00:03:07
Speaker
Over three years, I put myself in a position where I didn't have to do anything. I had my cash invested in public companies that were growing and doing well. I had ownership in three private businesses run by other people. Life was good, but I was unmotivated. Such to the point that I threw away my electric toothbrush and all brown shoes to minimize my already sparse possessions, I was thinking that you know minimalism was the way to feeling something different. I even bought a book on cooking, which I have no interest in doing. and the final straw that broke the camel's back, I bought a feather duster in an effort to give meaning to my life by focusing on the most minute details of my life even further. Fortunately, I'd been there before and was able to recognize where this was heading. Now, I'm never going back. Since then, I've had the level of drive and energy I know produces massive results, progress and impact. I've seen this in my life before and I've seen it in others and that's what I want for you too.
00:04:05
Speaker
Most of us understand the power of having a high level of positive drive and energy because we've all experienced it before even if it was in just short spurts. We move faster, we accomplish more, we feel better and life is literally more vivid. The problem is we don't know how to create that level of drive and I didn't either until recently. It usually just kind of comes in waves. But what if we could systematically create that level of motivation in us? I'm here to tell you that this is 100% possible and that's what we're gonna talk about next. So to recap what we've discussed so far, when we feel the optimistic fire burning within us, we're feeling amazing. We take bigger action, dream bigger dreams and bounce back faster from setbacks. The problem is that level of drive and motivation usually just comes on randomly and it goes away pretty quickly. But what if we could create that level of drive whenever we wanted to?
Understanding Motivation: Self-Determination Theory
00:04:59
Speaker
In psychology, there's a general theory of motivation and personality called self-determination theory. In the 70s, a bunch of studies were done looking into whether people are intrinsically motivated or extrinsically motivated. From that research, they found that we all have three key psychological needs. First one, autonomy, meaning the feeling that we have choice over our behavior. Second, competence, meaning that we experience a sense of mastery and being effective in what we're doing. And third, relatedness. We need to feel connected and a sense of belongingness with others.
00:05:33
Speaker
The author and researcher Susan Fowler calls these, she has her own sort of names for these but they're basically the same thing and I kind of like hers because they're easy to remember. ah She says choice, connection, and competence. So if we feel unmotivated, it's likely because one of these three ingredients is missing and often it's two or three of them at the same time. So in April of 2023, I was in a huge stadium indoors with about 40,000 eager people all in suits in Omaha, Nebraska. This wasn't a rock concert or a basketball game. We were all sitting there waiting for two guys in their nineties. One had been pushed in a wheelchair to take their seats behind a small cloth covered table on the stage. I was at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting for shareholders. We were there to see legendary billionaire investors, Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger.
00:06:22
Speaker
So even though the experience of seeing those two in person was incredible, I couldn't help but feeling something not so positive while sitting there surrounded by tens of thousands of people, including my dad who was right next to me who had brought it as a guest. I felt lonely. I'd just spent two years basically as a full-time investor. I read every book I could find on Warren Buffett. I read thousands of pages of his annual letters and reports for his company Berkshire Hathaway. I dug through company filings, I listened to podcasts, including those featuring people that I could literally see there in that audience. Yet, I felt like an outsider. I didn't know anyone other than my dad there. I wasn't on the inside of this value investing community and I felt like I may never be.
00:07:03
Speaker
I had lots of choice. I chose to be there and had the freedom to pursue this interest in my life. I had a decent amount of confidence. While I wasn't as experienced as a lot of these people, I was learning really fast as a value investor and was actually beginning to produce, surprisingly, market-beating returns. But I didn't have any connection. I didn't know anyone who was also a value investor. Most of the time I was alone reading my annual filings at my home office, watching YouTube videos of famous investors. And at that point, sitting in awe of two investors with such incredible lives, feeling like I didn't really belong.
00:07:34
Speaker
And that was the piece that was missing for me there. And that's when I believe my motivation for pursuing that path further sort of started taking a dip.
Motivation through Choice, Connection, and Competence
00:07:44
Speaker
So the first step to understanding and harnessing the power of lasting motivation is to know its ingredients, choice, connection, and competence. Now, choice has been talked about a lot by self-development people over the years. There's a book that I read, first self-development book I ever read right in college when I was kind of at a rough time called Success Principles by Jack Canfield. One of the very first things he mentions in there, I believe it's actually the first Success Principle, is to take 100% responsibility. That gives you the sense that you have choice over what's happening in your life. If you're in a relationship you're not happy with, if you have a business who you're not happy with,
00:08:20
Speaker
If your health or your finances are not where you want them to be, the first thing to take into account is that you have 100% responsibility because that puts choice back in your life, which is exactly what Susan Fowler has talked about. So if something is ever going wrong in your life, realize first that you do have choice. Most of us aren't locked him in jail or in terrible life-threatening situations, So, I'm not going to talk a lot about how you can control your mind and even the darkest situations, like Viktor Frankl and his monumental book, Man's Search for Meanings. Most of my problems have been self-inflicted, so I'm going to focus on what most of us face, which is a clear ability to influence our lives through choice.
00:09:00
Speaker
Blaming and making a bunch of excuses doesn't get us anywhere. All that does is make it so we don't have to exercise any choice. In almost all cases, we have two choices. To either change our actions or change our thinking. Either option can work. You often feel a certain liberty even if it's just fleeting when you think of a big problem you've been facing and realize this is my choice. I decided to be in this situation and I can decide whether to stay in it or to get out of it or to just change my thinking about it. I can do whatever I want to do here. So realizing you have that level of choice is the first ingredient of the first part of getting yourself incredibly motivated at any point that you want to.
00:09:40
Speaker
Second, connection. More than 40% of fully remote workers polled in a 2023 survey of working parents by Bright Horizons said they'd go days without leaving the house. In a reddit thread I was reading, one guy said, I've gone entire weeks without leaving the house. It doesn't bother me. I think I'd be perfect to work on a nuclear sub. Yet the US s Surgeon General said in May of 2023, widespread loneliness in the US poses health risks as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. This is a big deal. We need this level of connection with others. Two-thirds of adults in the US say that having close friends is essential to living a full life, and that's more than who cited the same thing for marriage, children, or money.
00:10:26
Speaker
Yet 53% have only between one and four close friends, and 8% have no close friends at all, so everyone kind of thinks that it's important, but we're not doing much about it. The reason is, is today, is that we don't need connection to others just to operate in life. We can do everything for work on Slack and email. We can avoid all phone calls and Zoom meetings now, in most cases. We can order grocery delivery. We can order food delivery, and I don't know about you, but I remember the day, like two years ago, not that long ago, three years ago, When the food delivery person would actually come to the door and wait for you to answer the door, now that's like awkward for everybody. Now they just drop the package at the door and they sort of take a picture and scurry off and you're sort of hiding behind the corner waiting for them to go away so you don't have this awkward face-to-face human interaction. It didn't used to be like that so it's getting almost worse. um You can work out at the gym with headphones on, have zero interaction whatsoever, you swipe your card, mumble something to the person at the desk, go in there and never talk to anybody.
00:11:22
Speaker
And you if you travel, like I do, on the planes I almost always bring my noise cancelling headphones and so you can literally be sitting next to somebody for five hours and have zero human interaction because you can put this technological barrier between you two. You drive alone in cars to get places and we even go through a lot of drive-throughs just to keep minimal human contact. I mean I don't know about you but recently I've been to a Starbucks and when I drive up to the drive-through The person will ask, rather than being like, hi, what do you want to drink? They'll ask, how's your day going? And then it's just kind of jarring. You don't expect this level of human interaction. And you're almost kind of like, yeah, yeah, who cares? Like, let's let's order my drink, which is kind of crazy because that's obviously not a nice way to think. But it's kind of how we've been wired lately. And yet the importance of genuine connection with others can't be overstated.
00:12:11
Speaker
The Grant study has been running since 1938, which makes it the longest running study on human happiness ever conducted. They've tracked thousands of people across their entire lives, basically. And what's the conclusion after all these decades of analyzing people's lives? It's all about the people. Your relationships matter more than anything to health, well-being and longevity and motivation. So why do so many of us not connect with others? It's because it's easier to turn on the TV rather than go grab lunch with a friend. It's easier to send an email than to make a phone call. It's easier to work out at the gym or home alone than figure out a day or time to go on a bike ride with a friend, for example. All of these quick fixes disconnect us from others and tons of people are lonely and miserable as a result. And so to feel great in that positive burning energy and to thrive, we have to have a way to connect with others. So the two ways that I found most effective to use connection to create greater motivation
00:13:09
Speaker
and happiness in my life are number one, opt for more intimate forms of communication whenever possible. Rather than doing a phone call, try to meet up in person. Rather than sending a Slack message, try to do a Zoom call. um For business, we do live events, not because they're great for money and they're way more expensive than just doing like a webinar or an online group call. And so we try to add those in whenever possible to give ourselves and the other people there a level of connection. And they also do something for motivation for people that just can't be replaced online because they're sitting there seeing these people face to face on stage. And in our case where in most cases helping people build businesses and a lot of times it's the person's first business they've ever built.
00:13:52
Speaker
And so they see somebody who was in their shoes and is now on stage incredibly successful in some cases with a multi-million dollar business that they built from scratch. And they're like, oh, now I believe it's possible. Now I know this thing is real. We've heard that too many times. That's why we try to incorporate live events rather than just online for everything. So that's the first ways opt for more intimate forms of communication whenever possible. Second, aim to help others. So try to do work that benefits other people rather than this is a big thing for me and one of the key ingredients of motivation that I'll talk about here soon in the model that I've developed for this. But the general idea is that you could be pretty motivated early on and I've talked about this before pretty motivated early on.
00:14:36
Speaker
just by learning a lot of stuff, you're seeing a lot of progress in something new, building a business. But at some point, you're gonna have the idea of like, what is the point of all this stuff? And I believe that the only way out of that is if at some point you connect what you're doing with the benefit of other people. And I try to remind myself of this literally on a daily basis. Like before I started doing this, I could have done some other stuff here rather than recording this podcast, because I make zero money from doing this podcast. And so it's just a way that I think that I can learn more myself and give that information to other people to hopefully help them. And I could have done marketing for other products or grown my e-commerce business or grown my software business, but I thought like, what am I here for? And it's really to benefit other people. And so connecting what you're doing to helping other people is an incredible motivator that we'll talk about more. So this can just trying to connect the work you're doing with benefiting others, creating better products, creating useful content and, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
00:15:35
Speaker
There was an additional tier that he introduced many years later after the sort of basic one we're all familiar with. and you know On the first model that he had created, the highest level was self-actualization, sort of reaching your full potential as a human being. The tier that he added later, which he said some people can actually skip up there, is called self-transcendence. These are people like you think of like Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa. These kind of people that at some point or another, they kind of made their life's purpose 100% about helping other people. They transcended their own needs.
00:16:13
Speaker
in service of others and i'd argue that they lived a better life as a result and so i think that's what we're we may never get there but i think that is a worthy goal. One other way to connect yourself with other people and to help them is very simple and small and it's been talked about for decades. I mean i read this and i'd read readad how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie many times. I mean, it's like a core self-development book and I got very into self-development, you know, 15 years ago or so. And so I'd read this before, but sometimes you have to reread these things before they really sink in. And he gives basic advice. Like, hey, how about you praise others? He has a quote in there that says, be hardy in your approbration and lavish in your praise.
00:16:52
Speaker
and people will cherish your words and treasure them and repeat them over a lifetime. Repeat them years after you have forgotten them. This little bit of praising others, because my mind naturally, for whatever reason, wants to go to finding faults, to finding criticism, to finding areas of improvement is how I'm probably processing it. And so somebody sends me over some piece of work they've done for me. I may think that it's really good, but if I don't consciously remind myself to tell them, I'll just focus on ah Fix this, fix that, this could be better, this is no good. And then they don't get any positive feedback, and they probably spent hours and hours working on this thing. And so try to notice the positive in others, daily interactions, such as you know with people you work with, employees, maybe even bosses, your spouse, your kids, and I believe your life will be a lot better.
Creating Sustained Motivation
00:17:39
Speaker
So we've talked about choice, and we've talked about connection, and the third ingredient of motivation is competence. So this is feeling like you're doing well at something.
00:17:49
Speaker
Now in the very first podcast episode I released after I kind of cleaned up all the shorter, I feel like not so good episodes I did before, is on focus. And so you can go back to that. That should be two episodes before this one. And so to create competence, it's going to require a level of focus. So in that episode, I dug into the scientific research, my own experience, and sort of came up with a model for ah using focus to drive your life forward. Assuming you're applying those lessons, competence is about doing what you're good at. And after everything I've sort of read about this, it's kind of, you know, what do you naturally want to do? Because in most cases, what we're good at is not just something naturally we're born with. In most cases, it's for some reason, early on, we naturally liked this thing and that made us do it more and that's how we became good at it.
00:18:38
Speaker
the more you study success, the more you realize that it's really about just putting time in there. um That's what contributes to 90% of the results in most cases. And so if there's something you naturally want to do, chances are that you'll just want to keep doing it again and again and again and again if you let yourself and you'll become pretty good at it. Second, what doesn't feel like work? What do you not have to force yourself to do? And lastly, where have you produced good results in the past? So if you were to think through those sort of questions, what do you naturally want to do? What doesn't feel like work? What do you not have to force yourself to do? And where have you produced good results in the past? You're likely going to see the areas that you're good at. For me, these areas seem to be marketing. For whatever reason, I put a lot of time into that and sort of naturally gravitated towards that.
00:19:22
Speaker
Learning, which may sound crazy, but I mean, I've gone through periods where I'll literally read a book a day. um That's not natural for a lot of people. I just really like learning. I feel like it's almost like, you know, I'm in the matrix sort of gaining these new skills. Also teaching. I think I've got delivered pretty good results in these areas. But for me, the kicker here is and I've talked about this in a previous episode because I was like, I don't know if I should ever do any marketing because it's kind of like I've done this thing for so long, but it's not very fulfilling. For me, I've discovered that marketing must be in the service of others. And I thought when people said that before, I was like, I have BS. They're just kind of making an excuse because they're sociopaths who just want to take a bunch of money from people. And um I do think there is a possibility here because if you're selling good products and you believe what you provide can help support, inspire other people,
00:20:06
Speaker
then you gotta get the word out. And that's basically the function of marketing. And so for me, it's like I have to remember to connect. Marketing is not just about making money, it's about being in the service of other people. Because if I don't do that, I mean, I've got plenty of money. I don't need to work anymore, do any of that kind of stuff. And so, if I'm gonna do any marketing, it can't be because I just wanna make more money, because that doesn't really do it for me. It's got to be because I believe this is going to help me greater connect to other people and serve them. Because if I don't, I become miserable because of that disconnection. I feel like I'm just taking from other people and that disconnection sort of makes me unhappy. And you may experience the same things with certain tasks in your life. If you're selling stuff, if you're working in a business, if you feel like you're just doing it and it's not good for other people, you may be a reason that you're not excited about doing it anymore.
00:20:55
Speaker
And for me, some things that maybe are less good, finance and investing, I'm okay at that stuff. I don't think I have the same natural desire to sort of dig into those things eight hours a day. Like some of those people may be at the Berkshire Hathaway annual event. Some of those people I think are happy reading annual reports for eight hours a day, five days a week. That's not for me. I find it interesting to learn, but at some point I feel like I need to be creating and contributing something, not just taking in any information. in And it doesn't mean there's a right or wrong. I mean, some of those people are, I admire them in that space because I believe they have really good values and they're in general taking the money that they're making, in some cases a lot of money, and doing good things in the world. And so it's an amazing space. There's no right or wrong. That's just sort of our natural inclinations. I like to create and sort of connect with other people. They maybe like to just analyze and learn and and and learn as much as possible about these businesses.
00:21:47
Speaker
Just different, but I think as long as we're doing it in a connection, a way of serving others, there's no right way to sort of approach that. So to systematically create powerful motivation, we need choice, connection, and competence, which is fantastic, but you're like, Matt, how the heck do we actually get those things? And that's what we're gonna talk about next. A 2015 Forbes article mentioned the three sources of resistance to getting things done. First one was the feeling of I have to, being forced to do something because you know maybe something that was formerly fun is no longer that fun anymore because you feel like you have to do it. The second is I don't feel right about this.
00:22:25
Speaker
Meaning that you're kind of opposing your values and beliefs. And the third and last one was, I can't do this. Feeling unequal to a task or that you'll certainly fail. Now if those sound familiar, it's because they're directly related to the three psychological needs we need to meet to create motivation. Choice overcomes the feeling of I have to do this. Connection overcomes the feeling of I don't feel right about this because if you feel like you're connected to others and you're doing good things for other people, you're probably going to feel good about it. And third, competence overcomes the feeling of I can't do this. So 40 years of research confirms that if we want unstoppable motivation, we need to meet those three needs. But how do we actually do that?
Clark's Model for Motivation Improvement
00:23:08
Speaker
So I've developed a model, which basically is the culmination of 15 years of self-development work, four years of working with an executive coach slash Buddhist, spending $10,000 for a 360 degree psychological evaluation and going through tons and tons of scientific research on motivation for this podcast. My goal is always to create an actionable framework and specific step-by-step approach for people to change their lives, then test it and refine it on myself to make sure that it actually works. Now, there's a lot of smart people out there writing books that kind of take this approach but it annoys the crap out of me when you buy a book and they start with like, I can't actually give you a step-by-step approach. That's not how this works. I believe that that's kind of a cop-out. I believe that there is a way it can work in almost any context because I believe people are more likely to actually use it if you at least give them some action steps. And so that's my approach here, my philosophy. This is really the same approach
00:24:05
Speaker
that's used to create our e-commerce training program, which is called Amazing Selling Machine, that's helped change thousands of lives and helped people at this point by my rough estimations sell over $10 billion dollars online. If I had decided way back then, like, oh, you know, business is just like too complicated, you can actually give people a step-by-step sort of formula. then I don't think we would have ever produced those results. We wouldn't have changed so many lives, but by saying like, hey, you know, it's not perfect, but we're gonna do the best job we can laying this thing out step by step with something you can actually follow. That's how I believe we produce that impact. And that's what I'm trying to do here with the information that I'm sharing on this podcast, including right now, which is a framework for how to take all this information on motivation and apply it so you can get predictable results in your life. And I've been using it for myself and I believe it's incredible
00:24:55
Speaker
I'll give you a ah URL where you can sort of see this in graphical form if you're listening to this on an audio podcast. It's not too hard to visualize, hopefully. So part one, top of the framework, is your purpose. Very top of the page, imagine you were starting with a blank sheet of paper, you would start at the top with your purpose. Who do you want to help and why? I don't think you have to overcomplicate this. I think it all really boils down to that same thing. Who do you want to help and why? I mean, this could literally just be your family members. This could be a bigger cause you're concerned about, really anything. What is your bigger reason for doing anything meaningful? Because I believe at some point, whether you get there now, five years from now, 10 years from now, that eventually you're going to need to connect what you're doing
00:25:35
Speaker
in the service of others. Doesn't mean you have to do a complete charity. I've tried to go down that route. It hasn't felt motivating or ah right for me yet. At some point, I'm sure it probably will be, but for me, I like to connect what I'm doing with business because that's what I'm good at. That's what I've spent a lot of time at. And so it doesn't have to be a complete sort of nonprofit altruistic sort of thing, but you need to connect what you're doing with something that benefits other people. And so I'm calling this your purpose, um but it's really just who do you want to help and why. So for me, it's to help people create financial freedom and fulfillment so that they can impact others. I've seen this before and it's really what sticks in my head is the ability to help somebody, which is great in and of itself, but a lot of times whenever you do that, they tend to help other people around them. It sort of lifts everyone up with people that I may never touch or reach. We've seen this through our business training and that's what I've sort of solidified for now as my purpose. And this really, as you can probably tell, ties back to connection.
00:26:33
Speaker
of how you'll help others. Part two, so imagine your purpose is at the top, right below that is your current goal. So there's a TEDx talk by somebody by the name of Aylett Fischbach. I believe I'm pronouncing that right. She said she's a professor of behavioral science at one of the world's top business schools. and she says your journey starts with a goal. The whole ah the whole Ted talk which is really good was about motivation and she starts off by talking about goals. She says because goals kind of pull you forward and then she says most goals are abandoned not because they're not important. It's because people don't enjoy pursuing them. I've done a lot of goal research. I spent
00:27:10
Speaker
many hours, 50 hours, writing an article on goals before just because I really wanted to dig into the science myself and I did not come across this surprisingly but I think it's a good nuance on top of all the other general goal setting advice. We don't like to invest in what she calls the means. This means you want to set goals in which you're excited about the way you get there just as much as the destination. She says a lot of times that's why we abandon a goal because we don't actually like the process. And so if we can come up with a way to actually enjoy the process, we're much more likely to achieve the goal. So how do we actually put this into practice? Pick an outcome.
00:27:48
Speaker
that you want that's aligned with your purpose and one in which you actually want to do the work required to get there. So for me, remember I talked about the things that I'm, ah we talked about incompetence, doing things that you're good at, that you like doing, you naturally like doing. For me, learning, teaching, sharing, Hopefully inspiring, that sort of thing. My goal is a specific revenue target for one of my businesses, but I could get there a lot of ways. I could create crap products, I could do a lot of marketing, I could do some hard pushing, hard selling, all that kind of stuff. But for me, the way to get there matters. I want to achieve this revenue goal,
00:28:24
Speaker
by teaching, sharing, learning, and inspiring. So that's a way for me to connect doing means that I like, but still achieving the external goal. And I believe this is a really powerful nuance that I've never heard of before because you're almost setting yourself up for success in advance if you know the way to get to your goal is something you actually want to do. So other examples, you hear about over time, but I think people don't sort of take in enough. ah Say you want to achieve a health goal lose weight. For example, you could do it by doing these crazy boot camps I'll say somebody at these boot camps by the way, and I have not had a problem fortunately because I think the influence of my dad I've never had a problem with um Not wanting to work out. i I enjoy it. I feel good. I connect it to pleasure
00:29:05
Speaker
um but some people do and it's totally fine. And so you'll see somebody that's like a hundred pounds overweight, they're, you know, dripping in sweat, doing a super hard workout. I'm like, there's no way this is sustainable. And so instead, if you have a health goal you want to accomplish, think about some means that you'll actually enjoy. So it could be by learning to surf, learning to mountain bike, learning to cook, or doing yoga, or just socializing and walking with friends or something. All those are perfectly fine ways to improve your health, but they're probably gonna be a lot more pleasurable for most people then sort of grinding it out, doing this brutal workout with a personal trainer screaming at you at the gym. And so think about the way you're gonna get there is just as much, is just as important as what you're trying to accomplish. Another goal could be to build a business
00:29:50
Speaker
and you could do it by feeling like you're ripping people off or selling some product you don't care about, or you could do it by improving the means such as selling a great product you're proud of, maybe solving a problem for other people, or even just working with other people that you like working with if you're a very social person. And so all that can be great ways to accomplish the same goal. That's gonna make it more likely you actually accomplish that goal. Related to goal setting, the TEDx speaker talks about shrinking the middle problem. And she cited some research that motivation is usually the highest at the beginning of setting a goal, then it kind of drops off and then it go peaks again when you're almost done accomplishing the goal. And so the solution is to shrink the middle problem by setting shorter term targets.
00:30:32
Speaker
so So for me, for example, my goal is a revenue target by Thanksgiving of this year, which is months away. And so to shrink the middle problem, I've broken it down into monthly, weekly and daily targets. Other example, if your goal is to lose weight, you could break it down into monthly or weekly goals or break it down into daily calorie targets. If your goal is to build a business, you can break it down into shorter term targets or milestones. The goal is to shrink the middle part of achieving a goal so that you feel more progress along the way. Top of this model is your purpose, Second down from that is a goal with means you enjoy and a goal that's aligned with your purpose. Next step is like, okay, I've got this cool goal.
Building a Massive Action Plan
00:31:08
Speaker
How do we actually start doing stuff? The best model that I found and I've used for many years. I think I learned about it at least 10 years ago.
00:31:16
Speaker
is from Tony Robbins. He calls it a map, a massive action plan. And I love the exercise and so I don't have anything better for you that I've invented myself. I use this all the time. So I set a timer for five minutes and I literally just write down anything and everything I can think of to achieve that goal. Small actions, big actions, just sort of free flowing thinking. And I believe this kind of forces you to get out of the, oh, I don't know what to do. And so it's like, okay, I'm just setting a timer for five minutes. I'm trying to write as fast as possible. This I've found to be incredibly effective. And so once the timer goes off, prioritize and group the items. And so you'll have some things that are all kind of related to the same task. so It could be, you know,
00:31:54
Speaker
Say you're trying to build a new business and it could be a bunch of tasks related to building a website or creating a product or doing some marketing. So you're sort of grouping and prioritizing these items. And then sort of think about on here, like what are the biggest items that are likely to make the biggest impact? I would mark those. But then one of the most important steps of this, and Tony Robbins says, never leave the side of setting a goal without taking action towards its accomplishment. And so the idea is that you've written down all these things. Don't let that high motivation you have go to waste. Do something immediately. Take one of the smallest items on the list and do it right then. As soon as you get done writing that stuff down and that helps you start building momentum and it also gives you the feeling of choice because now you realize you're in control
00:32:37
Speaker
of achieving this goal. If you just keep doing stuff like you just did, then achieving the goal is going to be much more likely. Last note from Tony Robbins, he says massive action is the cure all of achieving almost anything and he's achieved quite a bit and I found this practice to be invaluable. where we're at in this model is we've determined our purpose, we've picked a goal, hopefully sort of chunk that goal down into shorter term targets, and then we've created a massive action plan, whole bunch of list of stuff we can do towards that goal, and the next step is to notice the results. When you start implementing and taking action, I've found in many cases, and for some reason, especially social media, anytime we've ever hired somebody to do to social media on our team, including myself, I'm guilty of this as well,
00:33:20
Speaker
is that you stop paying attention. You're putting stuff out there, you're putting posts out there, you're getting mixed results, you're kind of learning from the process, getting better, but then eventually you get distracted and start doing other things. And what tends to happen is every social media person, for whatever reason, seems to just keep posting stuff. The results go down and down and down and down, but they keep posting and posting. You'll check with them a couple months later And you'll be like, how are the results? And be like, they're terrible. I'm like, what have you been doing? The same stuff we've been doing. And there's like, as soon as something stops working, like do something different. A lot of times we do this in other areas of our lives. So we have to force ourselves to notice the results. And I think sometimes we don't like to notice the results because we don't want to have to deal with the discomfort of having to figure something else out. It's much easier for us to think like, oh, all right, that area of my life is taken care of. I can focus on something else.
00:34:04
Speaker
But if we're trying to achieve this goal and we're taking actions, we need to notice what's actually happening with those actions so then then we can create a new plan and come up with different things to do. Often we just want to hide from the results. So the goal is to notice both intangible results and tangible results. And so this concludes your well-being. And so if you're doing a lot of stuff and it's producing good external results, but you feel miserable, that's likely not going to be sustainable. So when we take massive action, we actually have to notice the output of that, which sounds obvious, but a lot of times we don't do it because we don't want to face that reality. Then the last piece of this is to adjust.
00:34:37
Speaker
So if we're taking lots of action towards this goal, if we're noticing the results, and then we just keep adjusting that process and going through this cycle again and again and again, and we're almost guaranteed to get whatever result that we're after over enough time, if we keep adjusting our processes. The place that this kind of breaks down usually is number one, we never clarify our purpose. And so whatever goal we pick ends up feeling kind of meaningless. then we don't create a big enough sort of plan to achieve that goal, which is literally just a list of potential actions. And we don't take enough action. A lot of times just kind of, you don't have the right motivation, maybe because we don't have this kind of model. And then I think where the biggest sort of thing is, is we don't notice what's happening and adjust. Because if we just kept taking action, noticing what's happening and adjusting, I believe that we would achieve almost anything we want. I call it kind of a success breakthrough in this model. Because once we do achieve that, then what do you do next? I believe you just circle back up
00:35:30
Speaker
to your purpose and start back over again. Like, is this still the purpose that I find most meaningful? Okay, then what goal can I set next towards that? And you're sort of repeating yourself through this model. And so what I found by continually focusing on this model, continually refining and developing it for myself, not the theoretical framework of the model, but actually using myself as like a case study, actually using the model in my own life, that motivation doesn't take a dip. It keeps going. um There's inevitably gonna be setbacks, but it does work. And so it's worked for me and it's based on a lot of science and is used by, in one form or another, I believe the most successful people on the planet. However, every single successful person, including any of those you admire, is gonna face setbacks.
00:36:13
Speaker
and they face them to get to where they're at today and you're going to face them too. um And humans love the feeling of making progress and you can take the least motivated person on the planet and give them something they're mildly interested to do. And if they only see forward progress, incremental forward progress that kind of never ends, they're going to keep moving forward. But it's the inevitable setbacks that test us and make us stronger and where this thing really comes to fruition. So whether we wanna make more money, build a business, achieve a fitness goal, or create more friendships, we're gonna face setbacks. So how do you keep them from permanently derailing your progress?
00:36:50
Speaker
So just recently I got to put this to test literally while in the middle of preparing for this episode. We have a mastermind group that I've thought about canceling multiple times because it makes no sense financially. We barely make any money doing it and it's a lot of work. Maybe at the point if it grows a whole bunch it'll be decent financially, still never great. I don't think that's really that great of a model. Yet I love the people that are in the mastermind and I'm seeing the big positive impact that we're making with it. so I've committed to keep it going forward. It's very personal for me because I'm kind of pouring my best stuff out there to help these people who I believe I can help. So recently we had a new potential member fill out an application and he scheduled a call with me. So I was excited. and He seemed like a good guy. ah We talked. I thought he was a great fit. He'd exited some businesses, e-commerce businesses, and was building a new one that he wanted to double or triple in the next 12 months. He seemed like a good guy and a great contribution to the group.
00:37:48
Speaker
So he paid for his first six months on the call and seemed excited to join. So the next day we activated everything for him. I excitedly kind of introduced him to the group with an announcement to all the members in our private Slack workspace. He said thank you. He said he was excited to be there and lots of members welcomed him warmly. About 20 minutes later, my assistant sent me a message saying that he decided the group wasn't for him and he wanted his money back. And so I was like, what the heck? You know, I started, you know, having these sort of thoughts, are we not good enough? Am I not good enough? Did he see something he doesn't like? And so I asked him what was going on and he gave me kind of a BS answer and said something like at the end, he was like, let me know when my refund is processed. And so that setback put me in a funk for really the whole day while driving to Steamboat Springs with my wife for the weekend. And I couldn't help but think, you know, what am I doing all this for? I don't need the stress and disappointment and pain, but then I remembered what we're about to cover.
00:38:44
Speaker
Motivation is easy when all we see is progress, but that's not life. We're not going to only see progress. So how do we keep going and stay motivated through what's bound to get in our way? And so I worked with an executive coach who integrated Buddhist principles and practices with his coaching for four years. His name is Buddy, his name is Buddy Fishera. He taught me to analyze my thoughts, words, and actions in terms of skillful and unskillful. If something did good for myself and others, that was skillful. If something I thought, said, or did was bad for myself or others, that was unskillful. So for four years, I made at least three reflections daily using this practice. So I eventually realized through this that there are five phases of changing a bad behavior.
00:39:27
Speaker
Phase number one is you don't even notice that it's happening. Phase number two, you notice it far after it's happened. Phase number three, you notice it right after it's happened and can prevent long-term sort of harmful rumination about it because you're noticing it pretty soon. Phase number four is you notice it while it's happening and you can kind of cut it off short. And then phase number five is you notice it before it's happened and can prevent it.
Handling Setbacks: Five Phases of Change
00:39:51
Speaker
So at the time, I was often kind of jealous or envious of people more successful than me. I'd see somebody with a big social media following or hanging out with super successful people and feel miserable for a day or two, I wouldn't even know why. Eventually that became an hour or two, then that became a few minutes, and then I was able to know just not to go there at all. And so there's authors of the book called Coming Alive. Barry Michaels and Phil Stutz call this part X.
00:40:16
Speaker
It's that part of you, those habitual thinking patterns, that only do damage and keep us from reaching our full potential. Or as the title of the book says, coming alive. So to overcome setbacks, we have to notice our destructive thinking. Destructive thinking kills the fire inside of us, kills our motivation. So if a kid falls over while learning to snow ski, for example, she probably gets back up and tries again. However, if a healthy adult falls over while learning to snow ski, she thinks, I suck at this. What's the point? Who needs the stupid snow? I'm going to go drink a hot toddy in the lodge and just watch these idiots out the window. That thinking prevents that adult from enjoying that activity.
00:40:55
Speaker
and likely many other activities for the rest of her life. Every ski trip with friends will be met with dread and embarrassment. She's gonna miss out on the opportunity to build her confidence with a feeling of mastery and lifelong learning. And her life, I believe, gets a little smaller. So to notice your destructive thinking, first realize that negative thinking is not normal or productive. If you catch yourself thinking negatively about yourself or a situation, notice it and realize that you don't have to do that. And you know, sure, if somebody kicks you in the shin, you're going to be pissed, hurt, angry, you're all three, but it doesn't have to last. You can experience it in the short term without ruminating on it over the long term. And there's a quote that I heard a long time ago that's kind of stuck with me, and I find myself repeating again and again ah throughout the month. And the quote goes something like, while you're carrying a grudge, they're out dancing.
00:41:46
Speaker
So if someone wrongs you while pursuing your goal, either deal with it fast or let it go. Chances are they don't even know what they did while you're sulking and sort of feeling angry for hours or days or longer. And second, if you find yourself struggling to catch your destructive thinking early, you likely want to develop a basic reflection process at least for a while. At the end of each day, write down three things you thought, said, or did that supported your goals in positive motivation and three things that you thought, said, or did that harmed your goals in positive motivation. You don't even have to come up with solutions. Just the practice of noticing will be enough to change your thinking in the future. So other than noticing destructive thinking, which will eventually reduce it,
00:42:28
Speaker
You can fuel your mind with positive thinking so that setbacks don't permanently derail your motivation to achieve what matters most to you. I try to listen to positive education or self-development material every day, usually while I'm walking my dog in the morning. I want to constantly prime my brain with thoughts of possibility and potential because there's plenty of negative stuff out there that's going to give you the opposite. So if I spend an hour a day listening to someone saying, yes, you can do this, here's how, here's how I've done it, and here's how other people have achieved great things, then when something unexpected happens that I don't like, my brain's already ready to deal with it in a much more productive manner. If I don't absorb positive information and a series of small setbacks happen in a day, which can't happen, eventually I get to the point where I'm kind of on the edge, and the next smallest thing that's negative pops up, it's gonna send me over into kind of a mild depression that can last for minutes, hours, or even a day.
00:43:18
Speaker
So we can't control what the external world brings to us. We can only control what happens in our own minds and what we do with our time. Some days we're going to get more than one thing we didn't want to happen, one more setback. We need to be ready. So priming ourselves with positive materials is one of the ways to kind of prepare for that. Another method is to force ourselves to think positively about the future. There's a great book called Happiness Advantage by Sean Akor and he talks about forcing yourself to notice the positive. I believe that section is called The Tetris Effect. I can't even remember the introduction of why that is, ah but it's forcing yourselves to notice
00:43:57
Speaker
the positive. And so he recommends, and I've been doing this recently, a reflective process that's basically noticing three good things that's happened that day. And so that's another way to kind of continually sort of prime our brains. And I kind of do this right before bed also as a way to kind of put myself in a good state before falling asleep. And so by using the model that we've discussed to clarify your purpose, set a goal based on that purpose, create a massive action plan and take immediate action, we're far less likely to get derailed by setbacks. and However, once we notice our destructive thinking and prime our brains to think more productively, we can sustain the level of effort and action to achieve our goals that can sometimes take years and a purpose that will likely take the rest of our lives. But what if this works too well? What if you're too motivated in one area of your life, such as business or making money? How do you keep the rest of your life from falling apart?
00:44:51
Speaker
So we've reached the final section of this episode. And so to recap what we've covered so far, motivation science absolutely works. You can systematically create motivation, especially with the right model, which I've shared in this episode. But the question is, what if it works too well? What if you're too motivated in a certain area of your life, such as you neglect everything else? That's a recipe for a crash. You realize one day that your life is kind of out of whack and you're ignoring other areas of your life that matter a lot too. Then you give up on your main pursuit to try to fix everything else. The result is that you end up making some progress there but then falling back into the trap of low motivation and energy because you're not fueled by your greatest passion and purpose, which is like what you were producing in the pursuing in the first place.
00:45:32
Speaker
So first, realize that this is not easy. I struggle with it every day even after studying and applying all this stuff. Just the other day, my wife said, it looks like you're working really hard, but you don't seem like you're bouncing off the walls type happy. She realizes that's a very hard standard to expect somebody to achieve, but it is what I'm after. It is what I'm trying to accomplish. I thought about for a bit and realized why. It's because I was working hard to achieve my goals, but I was slipping into my old habits of working to make money rather than working to make an impact. If I say I'm going to achieve my goal by teaching, sharing, inspiring, and learning, then I can't spend all my time writing marketing emails, marketing webpages, and creating marketing campaigns just to produce sales, even though I'm good at that stuff. That's only going to result in a crash and burnout and a feeling of kind of purposelessness.
00:46:19
Speaker
So for the past couple of weeks, I've also been skipping jujitsu, something which I enjoy a lot and not investing in my relationships. So if I do both of those for long enough, I'm only going to make myself miserable. And I think that all this work stuff isn't worth it. That's going to result in me feeling unmotivated and uninspired because it's through my work that I'm best able to achieve my purpose in my life of helping others achieve financial freedom and fulfillment. It's unreasonable to think that we're ever just gonna have one goal to pursue. We always have multiple goals, including outcomes we want to achieve or maintain for our impact, family, relationships, money, wellbeing, and other areas of our lives. The solution is not bouncing from one goal to the other, because all those things are pretty much gonna last for the rest of our lives. The solution is integration. We need to think about these goals, balancing each other out, and not necessarily conflicting with each other.
00:47:10
Speaker
For example, if we spend all our time working in zero time on our relationships, eventually we'll get burnt out and feel miserable. That'll make us want to quit our work or make some sort of irrational short-term decision that negatively affects us. And the long-term, that hurts the thing we think we want most, which is to do better work. Instead, by spending some time investing in our relationships, we have the stability and fuel to achieve mastery or our purpose through our work. Additionally, we don't have to be mutually exclusive. We can build relationships within our work. My wife, for example, runs our mastermind events, and also, a lot of the people I work with are friends. And I heard a quote about a year ago that I thought was very interesting. It was something like, before 35, never work with friends.
00:47:56
Speaker
after the age 35 only work with friends. So we can integrate these things where we're accomplishing more than one thing at a time. Another example is exercising. The better your health is, probably the better work you're going to do long term. You're going to have more energy, less guilt while you're working because you know you're not sacrificing your health and you're going to have more longevity in work. And so I had a friend that spent about four years working on a business, which he sold for a bunch of money, but he neglected his health the whole time. And it's been very hard to bounce back since then, not necessarily because he couldn't do it. He doesn't have some horrible illness or something. It's just the motivation and the habits and the patterns are no longer there.
00:48:33
Speaker
So you can integrate these things by, for example, listening to podcasts and audio books that can contribute to your work while you're working out. You can also nurture your relationships by working out with friends. And you can also work out with people you work with and can learn from to make, you know, sort of getting healthy a part of doing your work. There's a way to integrate these things. So the big result we're after here is to create motivation systematically. One of the value investors that I've studied who's been very successful as and a value investor and I believe is an incredible person, Monish Pabrai said something along the lines of, if I don't like my job, I do two things. Number one, I don't go to work the next day. And number two, I think about what needs to be changed. If you're not happy with your current situation,
00:49:17
Speaker
You need to change it. You can and should be infused with passion and energy and excitement every day for what you do. If you're not, something is wrong. You choose what you do. It is your choice. The first step of all this, like Jack Canfield said in Success Principles, is taking 100% responsibility.
Taking Responsibility for Motivation and Change
00:49:35
Speaker
And there's great power in that idea because that means you can choose to create the life you want. Steve Jobs said, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, if today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I'm about to do today? And whenever the answer had been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. So if you don't feel alive and inspired, change something. First, make sure you have a choice. Make sure you have connection and competence.
00:50:03
Speaker
And most importantly, make sure that you tie what you do to a bigger purpose. You can get away for a short period of time by just doing something and sort of hustling and using willpower and discipline to do it, but eventually that's gonna fizzle out. Eventually you need some connection with something bigger than yourself. I believe you're here to do great things, so don't settle for less than your full potential. As Howard Thurman said, don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it because what the world needs is people who have come alive. So I know it can be hard to do all the stuff while you're listening to a podcast episode. I wanted to make it easier on you. So I created a quick guide with a recap of today's lessons, including the model that I've developed to help you get fired up and achieve more.
00:50:45
Speaker
Most importantly, you get step-by-step instructions and a template to use this model to systematically create a high level of positive motivation. You can get this 100% for free at Matt A. Clark M-A-T-T-A-C-L-A-R-K mattaclark.com slash motivation. Kind of covers the model that we talked about because I know it's easier to see it in written form. I recap the steps because my goal here is not just to give you some and interesting information, not to get a bunch of podcast listens. My goal is that you actually take this information and use it to improve your life. So go to mattaclark.com slash motivation to get that 100% for free. ah Thank you for listening and hope to see you in the next episode.
00:51:33
Speaker
you