There is this myth, that the only thing between you and your goals is motivation, or rather the lack of it. In this article, we show you a different way of thinking about motivation, that could help you achieve more success.

An entire industry has been built on motivation, YouTube is chock-full of motivational videos, hundreds of motivational books are published every year, live and online motivational seminars are held with the dozen. No question, motivating people is an enormous business. The question is whether people really need it to be successful and achieve their goals.

The drug, that’s called motivation

To be motivated, to feel that we want to create something new, to achieve something that we haven’t yet, feels good. In fact, feels really good. Here lies the main source of the problem: motivation is a feeling and as such is not sustainable. It wouldn’t even be normal to maintain a feeling all the time, it’s a fundamental part of being human that our emotions change on a spectrum.

Since it is not sustainable to have continuous motivation, it is not a good idea to base achieving what you want on it. If we do use it as our guide, our results will be just like our motivation: periodic and contingent.

Motivation can still play an important role in achieving something. The initial spark that motivation can give us is important, it helps us set the goal we want to go towards. What is important in achieving a goal is a process that we can follow every single day, regardless of our mood or motivation.

Let’s be honest, goals are a bit overrated

Of course, goals are necessary, but just like motivation, they are overemphasized. No wonder: it’s exciting to think about what you want to achieve and it feels good to feel motivated. What they both have in common is that they don’t require a huge investment of energy. However, working out a thorough process is not nearly as sexy, quite the opposite: it’s time-consuming and oftentimes boring.

But it is the process that will actually get you there.

Let’s take a poker example: you want to play 50% more in the next month, and you’re extremely motivated because you hope that this will mean at least 50% more profit for you. You’re making perfect progress towards your goal in the first few days, and if you keep it up, you’ll even surpass your original goal by the end of the month! Then comes the inevitable: one day you wake up feeling not in the mood, you don’t feel like playing, you just move on to do different things.

The next day, you’re still a bit moody, playing only a quarter as much as you did a few days ago. You do the math: despite a very good start to the month, you are now significantly behind. The goal that motivated you at the beginning is now downright daunting, you’d have to play so many games without rest days to reach it.

What happened? The motivation and the goal were there. All that happened was that, on the one hand, you relied on an uncertain feeling to achieve your goal, and on the other hand, the goal itself was meaningless.

Make it easy

You need to have a good plan, a process where you don’t have to think, you don’t have to be motivated, you just have to execute. If you look at its bare bones, all you need to do is that once you get motivated and set a goal, you first check if the goal is realistic.

It’s much easier to move forward in small steps than to fail over and over again at a monumental goal. Once you have a realistic goal, then you can work out a plan that you can implement every day, regardless of your mood or motivation. Think about how much you can play on a bad day, make that your target for every day of the month and you won’t be surprised.

The bottom line: motivation is just a spark, it’s the process that gets you there.

If you’re not quite sure where to start and what a realistic goal for you in terms of poker is, we highly recommend you to try our 30-day commitment-free program, where you can experience the life of a professional poker player. At the end of the 30 days, you will have a much better perspective of where you want to take your poker carrier. If you like it, you can join our stable, if not we say a hearty goodbye and that’s it, it’s commitment-free!