One of the hard things that any human being has to struggle with is motivation to get the shit done. But what if you have to be motivated to be motivated? Gobbledygook you say, but it is a serious problem. See my biggest challenge is to find a motivation to find a motivation. Let me explain. (also this blog will be such a good exercise for me to learn to spell properly… how many times can you spell challange incorrectly!)
Back to motivation. You’re burnout, you’re thinking about a change and your mental health is on a brink of extinction. So you reach for the first element that school taught you – motivate yourself, how hard can it be. But what if it is actually hard to motivate yourself. What if you can’t find the motivation to motivate yourself.
Here’s a real-life, personal example. There was this client we have had for a long time. He’s constantly driving the price down by complaining about the bills and he constantly refuses price increase. By all means, he is not a bad customer, with his lower bills he still pays a lot of money. So the motivation to change it is very low because he is a profit knocking to the door, but his hourly rate is the lowest of all customers. This is a terrible situation because the motivation of doing his work is low (he’s the lowest paying customer) and the motivation to change it is low too (he’s a customer paying good money). So I got myself stuck for months trying to find that motivation to motivate myself to do something about it. It was precisely almost six months before we had the “take it or leave it” conversation and yes, he did agree on price increase, but no one ever will give me back 6 months of my life.
So how to deal with it. Well look at the paragraph above, I’m the last person to ask. But seriously get the shit done and by that, I don’t mean to jump the gun. I mean set yourself some goals. Simple ones. Little by little it’s much easier to motivate yourself. See for me motivation has to be big, I have so much shit to do that I don’t even know where to start. You see with the customer X it took me a long while to find motivation but in the meantime it affected so many other important stuff that I wish I did it sooner. But the only way to that was to actually get up to speed with his work, finish one by one all of his tasks and once we had a clean slate it was easier to talk about something else rather than ongoing work.
That’s why writing this useless blog enforces me to do little things. Be consistent and regular with something small (well it actually is not small but well…) so the bigger goals are easier to tackle. And me comparing to other people? I have tons of shit to do but I don’t have kids, imagine if I had kids, now then I had shizzloads and a half things to do. So I can’t complain, regroup and onward forwards.
Now, this turned out to be quite a motivational blog post and it was not intended to be. See the popularity of my original blog I guess was that I just wrote what I thought and now I do it again. I barely even proofread myself (yeah yeah make fun of my poor writing skills). But that just made me realise that I do a lot of things impulsively and that is what the main thread of this blog will be – impulsive thinking of Ralf or if you prefer – thoughts vomit. In the end, my head is so full of it that I need to use it somewhere.