It’s not coming.
The energy you need before you can put on those running shoes for a morning run, the inspiration you need to finally begin that article that’s “gonna be really good” once it’s finished, the motivation you need before you can start on that project that’s been at the back of your mind for the last three years — they’re not coming.
No one — and nothing — is coming to save you.
A lot of us are addicted to the wait, that if only we had more of this or that, we’d have the life we want. We wait for the right moment or mood, but the wait is nothing but the convenient scapegoat we blame for dreams unfulfilled.
Passion is another big one. We are obsessed with waiting for passion. We’re told to find ours and to follow it. Turn it into a job, and even a career. Find it, they say, and work won’t feel like work.
There’s a talk by Cal Newport on Youtube entitled “‘Follow Your Passion’ is Bad Advice”.
His thesis is: instead of following your passion — which is really vague advice, given that most of us have no clue what our one true passion is — develop a valuable skill, which we can pivot towards what resonates with us.
Newport cites many examples, but the one on Steve Jobs is my favorite.
Even Steve Jobs, who, in his famous Stanford commencement address basically told the entire graduating batch to follow their passions and don’t settle for anything less (at least this is how it was interpreted by most people), didn’t follow his own advice.
“His biographers tell us that in the period leading up to Apple Computers, Steve Jobs did not have an unusual passion for technology entrepreneurship. Apple was something he stumbled into. One of his biographers put it this way: Apple was a small-time scheme that unexpectedly took off.”
There is also no evidence, Newport adds, that passion is in any way required in the beginning to persist in developing and mastering a skill.
Instead, passion grows as a by-product of skill development.
By the time we’ve developed the skill, passion will have also grown on the side, giving the false impression that passion had always existed.
“Of course, no one doubts that Steve Jobs ended up quite passionate about what he did for a living, which tells us, the lesson here is it’s not how you get started that matters maybe what matters is what you do once you get going.”
Passion is a side-effect of action.
The same is true for the other goodies that drive us forward — motivation, “good vibes,” inspiration. If we’re lucky, they’re readily available whenever we need to get work done. But this is hardly ever the case.
We have to produce this luck.
Action comes first.
I imagine the scene in the third Harry Potter movie, where Harry travels back in time and finds out that the stag patronus that had saved him from dementors was himself. We do the same thing for ourselves all the time.
We think to ourselves, we’re lucky to be inspired or motivated to get started. But this energy remains as mere potential until we decide to pick it up and do something with it. Behind any form of momentum is the first decision to act. Despite our overwhelming lack of control over the world, this first choice to start is reserved only for us.
It’s not coming.
Nothing is coming to save you. Only you can save yourself.
The good news is, you decide when.