7 Mental Hacks for Mastering Motivation

Do you find motivation elusive?

Do you start a new project and work intensely for a few days, weeks, or months only to lose steam before seeing the project through to fruition? Here we’ll break down seven mental hacks for mastering motivation...

1. Negative Visualization

You hear endlessly about positive visualization, but fear is a stronger emotion and it can be yielded for motivation. Fear can be our friend when it comes to motivation.We tend to hope for the best and try to stay positive but anxiety builds and our unconscious mind rebels when we mentally retreat away from threats into delusional cognitive dissonance. In the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic, examples of this are abundant, we all know someone who is choosing navette; they claim “It’s no worse than the common flu,” they refuse to food prep and are totally cavalier about their immune health. But they are far from unworried, they are noticeably anxious, stressed, and binging on fear-mongering media all day long. Maybe they share memes on Facebook acronymizing fear into...FalseEvidenceAppearingRealThey are misapplying the advice of the stoic philosopher Seneca, who wrote

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

The stoic philosophy is NOT to ignore fear, but instead to face fear, visualize the worst possible scenario and if possible find a way to simulate that scenario, then take deliberate action. Seneca, apparently, would spend time regularly living like a homeless derelict even though he was a wealthy man, just so that he could immunize himself psychologically to the possibility of abject failure.Fast forward to the present, how would a stoic face the global pandemic?

Imagine the worst. Imagine you and your family getting the disease. How would that feel? What would you have to do to stay alive? What if the crisis causes civilizational collapse? How bad could it get? How would you keep a roof over your head and food on your plate? How would you protect your family?

Importantly

* Instead of just doing negative visualization, journal, or write it out.

* Once you have a worst-case scenario start preparing for it, take action!

* Don’t overindulge in rumination and negative visualization. Once you’ve countenanced the worst-case scenario, take action, prepare, and move on mentally.

“Visualization is the human beings vehicle to the future – good, bad or indifferent. It’s strictly in our control.” - Earl Nightingale

2. Meditate in a Cemetery

People always look at me funny when I suggest this. A lot of philosophy of psychology revolves around this idea of existential anxiety - that we all have an inescapable fear of death. That is all theoretical of course, but considering our own demise has a tremendous motivational and clarifying effect.

How would you live if you knew that you were dying in 5 years? 1 year? 1 week? Tomorrow?Deeply considering that one day, you’ll have no more time left, would you want to spend your finite time using social media, playing video games, watching sports, or in crappy relationships with low-quality people.

Death really puts all the silly distractions, amusements, and trivial worries we have into perspective.To yield this fear of death as a motivational tool, search for a cemetery near you and go visit on. Find someplace quiet and semi-private to sit (sitting in the grass is not great as bugs will crawl on you) and do 20-30 minutes of meditation.

* You would want to start with eyes-open meditation, just take in the scene while breathing deeply. Listen to the birds chirping and the wind rustling the trees. Cemeteries are usually serenely beautiful places.

* Look at the tombstones around you, consider the dead. Imagine all those coffins in the ground that surround you. Imagine the decomposing bodies within them. Death literally surrounds you!

* Consider that you will eventually be just like them. You will be in a box in the ground. Philosophy and science and are pretty divided on the possibility of an afterlife, it’s certainly worth hoping for but death may just end up being eternal slumber.

* Meditate on gratitude, and be thankful for being above ground. Give thanks for the good things you have in your life.

“Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace.” - Nelson Mandela

3. Don’t Fantasize, Plan

It's all too easy to while our lives away looking at pretty girls, expensive cars, or travelporn on Instagram or television. Perhaps you go to bed wishing you had the perfect girlfriend or boyfriend, house, or dream job. All this fantasizing doesn’t accomplish much other than making you feel inadequate. Instead, plan and create medium-term goals for yourself. I suggest using a mind-mapping tool to visually map out what you want your future to look like. Make realistic, yet optimistic predictions of how your life could look in these areas...

* What you’ll do for work - how you will make money.

* What sorts of hobbies will you have?

* Your health condition. How you’ll stay in shape.

* Where will you live?

* What sort of relationships you’ll have. Will you have a girlfriend, wife, husband, or maybe even a family of your own?

Here’s mine...

4. After Planning, Habituate

A flowchart that visually breaks down a best-case 5-year outlook is useless if it’s not accompanied by a lot of action. You need to translate your 5-year goals into daily and weekly must-do’s that you can habituate and measure, like

* Spend an hour daily working on my book.

* Go to the gym three times a week.

* Make love to my wife four times a week.

* Limit alcohol consumption to twice weekly.

I like the tool Coach.me for this it. It’s a free (and ad-free) smartphone and web app for habit tracking. I’ve used it for years and it’s made me remarkably disciplined.

“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.” - Warren Buffet

5. Do a Productivity Sprint

1-3 month productivity sprints are a lot more effective than marathons. If you say to yourself...

For the next 5 years, I’m going to wake up at 6:00 AM and work to become a successful entrepreneur!

You are almost sure to fail. You want to plan your year around several productivity sprints lasting not more than three months.

* Come up with an ambitious goal that you can realistically accomplish during the sprint.

* Stay totally disciplined and commit to doing all your positive habits daily.

* Importantly, during the sprint abstain from everything that makes you weak; junk food, alcohol, weed, and porn along with time-wasting and petty friends or family.

It’s a whole lot easier to stay motivated and consistent when you know that you only have to do this for 90 days or less. You can look forward to savoring some well-deserved indulgent hedonism when the sprint is up.

“Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you” - Thomas Jefferson

6. Don’t Brag, Yet

In the first week of January, what do you see a lot of on Facebook? People announcing their New Year’s resolutions and maybe posting photos of themselves taking those fi