How to Build Discipline When You Have Zero Motivation

You don't have to feel any type of way to drive yourself to the gym. Do you have to feel any type of way to take part in a fire drill? No. You just go. You don't have to feel motivated.

Feelings are important. We use them. They're part of the program, but they're only half. And if your emotions keep catching you up, that's real. I'm not denying your reality. I've been there, and it really sucks, because everyone looks at you and says, “But you look fine.”

Motivation shows up after you start, not before.

Build a system, not a feeling

What you need is a system. A system that gets you in there without your feelings always matching. When you have one you can actually show up to on a regular basis, and you start hitting the goals you set, you're going to start to feel very motivated.

I've felt like sh** before. I've felt like I was taking losses. I'm human too. But I never feel like that when I'm winning in life. The feeling follows the winning, not the other way around.

The research agrees. People who seem to have great self-control mostly aren't white-knuckling it: a set of studies found they rely on good habits, and it's the habits that explain their better results. (Galla & Duckworth, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2015) Discipline, in practice, is a system you stopped having to think about.

A ramp, not stairs

Think of a system like stairs or a ramp. If every stair is three feet tall, it takes a lot of motivation to climb one in the morning, especially when you're tired, you had a wild night and a few things went wrong. You'll say, “No, I don't feel like doing that right now.”

But if it's a ramp on a decent incline, you can make it one step. I want it easy. I want it accessible to everyone. I want it to feel like you're barely doing anything, just walking on an incline, and then you look up and you got where you wanted to go. That's the simplicity of your system.

You don't have to know everything

The straight-A students know every single detail. A lot of the people who built the biggest things just get the premise. Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin, has written about struggling with dyslexia and leaving school at 16. (Branson, Losing My Virginity, 1998) You don't need to know everything. You need a working knowledge, and a system that's the most simple thing you can do.

Small wins build the feeling

When you do the most simple thing over and over, you build a track record. You keep showing up, you get better, you feel better, you start to feel motivated, then you have confidence, then results. Then other people notice, even when it felt invisible to you. And then that motivation is a feeling you get to feel.

Researchers who studied hundreds of workers' daily diaries found the same pattern at work: of everything that lifts people's mood and drive on a given day, the biggest is making progress, even small progress. (Amabile & Kramer, Harvard Business Review, 2011) First place gets the rewards, but if you're not there yet, you don't wait for the reward to start doing the work of the winner.

How you do one thing is how you do everything.

Rinse and repeat (and love the repeating)

You set up a system once. Then you rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Fall in love with the rinsing. Fall in love with the repeating, because you'll be doing a lot of it. Get present with it. If you're not present with your work, you can build something beautiful and never be able to see the beauty of it, because you ignored your whole inner world.

And a missed day doesn't erase it. In the classic study of how habits form, participants took a median of 66 days for a new habit to become automatic, and missing one day did not materially set them back. (Lally et al., European Journal of Social Psychology, 2010)

The infinite game

Sometimes you want a challenge with an end date: hit the goal, and done. But you're going to be doing this for the next 50 to 60 years of your life. When you realize that, you play it differently. In an infinite game, the only people who are successful are the ones who keep on playing.

Pick one thing this week

Here's what I need from you today: pick one thing and set it out for the week. If you want to know what I use, I use the 90-Day Level Up planner. I plan my week and look at my month, and I don't check how I'm feeling first. I show up, I feel however I feel, and I execute.

Get yourself some tools: some easy ones, some harder ones, depending on how fast you want to go. And look at it this way: my health was probably the thing that caused me the most sadness in my life, and it became the source of my greatest happiness once I came out the other side. Your greatest pain can be your greatest opportunity. Now is a good time to start.