How To NEVER Lack Motivation Again | Andrew Huberman

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:08I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. And if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life, and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you want to make it easier, you want to make it flow, you want to feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is going to help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to this episode of The Daily Motivation Show.

0:50You've all heard the sayings, you know, journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, or how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? What's lost in those short descriptions, however, is that every step is not equivalent. If it were just that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, everyone would pursue their goals. Everyone would push back against adversity. You can read the inspirational stories as many times as one needs, and I do think inspirational stories are of very high value. In fact, I think they're vicarious dopamine. I think they give us the sense that we could, which then orients us to the world again.

1:25To start, yeah. Maybe it's possible for me. That's right. The thing to remember is that dopamine is this incredibly powerful molecule that allows us to buffer the effort process. It allows us to be in effort longer, and it allows us to actually eventually enjoy the process of effort. And not think about the reward, but just say, oh, I'm enjoying the process. Be very careful about how much you focus on the end goal. Keeping the goal in mind is important for a proper orientation. You have to know the ultimate destination. But if at any point we were to evaluate our progress relative to that end goal, or if we don't know what the end goal is, there's a huge gap there.

2:03And it can feel overwhelming. And depressing. And I'm not good enough. That's right. I should just give up. What am I doing this for? That's right. And those thoughts will affect us. And they're very realistic. Positive self-talk, oftentimes, unless you do it correctly, you're badly wrong. Lying to yourself won't work. Saying, I'm a winner, I'm a winner, I'm a winner. or you haven't won yet is great, but that's not the most effective use of these systems. Well, you're also being out of integrity with yourself. You're telling yourself a lie. And if it's really extreme, there's a name for it. It's called delusional.

2:34And people will start to point that out and then it becomes harder to recruit people into your goals. So I think the key thing is to attach that sense of reward to the effort process. It's saying, look, I am oriented in the right direction and rewarding the things you're not doing. I'm not back on my heels. I'm not just staying in bed in the morning. A good example of this came to me recently. I have a good friend. He did nine years in the SEAL teams. And we were talking about, you know, the Admiral McRaven thing, you know, get up and make your bed. And they really do that. And I think the way it was described was, you know, so at the end of the day, even if everything doesn't go well, your bed is still made.

3:07For me, that's not that big of a reward, frankly. I felt like there was something else there. So I asked him, he said, well, it's very interesting because part of it is about not just making your bed, but it's the things you're not doing. by making your bed, you're not lying in bed and ruminating. You're not back on your heels. You're not on your phone. That's right. What you find is that we can all be either be back on our heels, flat footed, or forward centered on mass. And when you look at people who are in these high performance communities, they try and keep their center of mass forward. Almost through what seem like trivial things like making your bed or making the cup of coffee, but it's not just about what you're doing.

3:42It's all the things you're not doing that can put you down the path of ruminating or put you down the path of unhealthy behavior. The key to this is if we want to be very concrete, we should probably focus on actions. And I'll use fitness as an example because it translates to everybody. Let's say somebody really wants to take on a fitness routine. They hate running or they want to lose weight in a healthy way, this kind of thing. So we've all heard the example, well, you put your shoes by the door on day one. Day two, you put them on. Day three, you go out the door. Day four, you walk around the block and then eventually like they're running marathons.

4:13Okay, great. but to sustain that behavior or even to make the behavior pleasureful and to give you energy. The key is to subjectively reward those steps. So it's not going to be, let's say I go out and I run a mile and my goal is to run 10 miles in a few weeks. The key is as you're in the strain of that mile, the hard part, you want to tell yourself, this is the good part. This is the part that gives me energy. And I'll be very surprised if people don't actually feel like they could continue further. So a journey of 1 ,000 miles is made up of single steps, but the key is to reward the harder steps, not the easier ones and not the ones where you get the thing that you want.

4:55Don't reward yourself for putting your shoes on and taking a step outside. You could if that was a huge barrier for you. If it was very hard. If it was very hard for you. Running to 10 miles, it's hard. Find the wall and push a little bit further through that wall and reward that process. Subjective reward needs to be done at the hardest portion of a process, the tough conversation with a significant other, when it's really tough, that's when you want to start telling yourself, this is the good part because I'm not speaking or this is the good part because - I'm not reacting. Right, I'm not reacting or this is the good part because I'm probably not doing it correctly, but I'm on the right path.

5:29They're upset, they're not feeling your empathy, you know, this kind of thing, or you're not really understanding what's going on, you're getting frustrated. But if you tell yourself, this is the neural pathway getting ground in there, Like it really dialed in so that the next time I'm going to breeze right past this. That's really how the process works.

5:59Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of the daily motivation. And I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on the School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

6:50Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

7:05Thank you.