We all can find ourselves in a rut from time to time, lacking motivation and having difficulty getting things done. When this happens to me, I try to remember the best way to find motivation is to make progress.

While motivation might pop up from time to time, that isn’t reliable. The most reliable way to find motivation is to create it with action. If you feel like you can’t get yourself to move forward, just write a list of a few things that will move you forward.

A little bit of progress and checking the tasks off the list will not only create motivation over time, it’ll compound. A little bit every day turns into a lot over a week, month, or year.

I saw a quote today that felt like it would be helpful for people. It said, “don’t take criticism from someone you wouldn’t ask for advice”. In recent years, criticism doesn’t really bother me, but when I first got serious about posting content around 2019, it did tend to bother me.

Before posting a video, I would wonder how it would be received and often second guess it. If I had this quote back then, I feel like things would have been easier. Most of the negative comments are either from anonymous accounts, so those don’t matter at all. The ones that you can see are never people I would take advice from.

I would imagine you will find the same. If criticism is holding you back on anything you want to do, be sure to ask the question: Would I take advice from this person? Then act accordingly.

I saw this video the other day. It was a race car driver saying “I’m just gonna put my foot on the floor and I’m not lifting until I see god or the checkered flag”. It got me thinking about this kind of all in mentality that can be really difficult to achieve.

How do we get this kind of mindset when the shit we need to do is the last thing we want to do? I’m still trying to crack that code—one thing that might help is to shift our thinking to focus on the payoff of the action rather than the effort. This was something a guy named Scott Adams talked about.

The reason a lot of us don’t go all in on things is we get trapped into thinking about everything it will take. The actions aren’t fun. The work is hard. If we focus on the payoff, it might push through the procrastination.