Don't wait until you feel internally motivated to read.
Welcome to Day 2 of the My 30 Pages a Day Reading Challenge!
One of the biggest reasons most people don’t read 30 pages a day is simply because they’re waiting until they feel internally motivated to read. Unfortunately, when it comes to building new habits, very few things we set out to do in life are rarely ever intrinsically motivating at first.
In the book “The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth,” John C. Maxwell says, "The whole idea of motivation is a trap. Forget motivation. Just do it. Exercise, lose weight, test your blood sugar, or whatever. Do it without motivation. And then, guess what? After you start doing the thing, that’s when the motivation comes and makes it easy for you to keep on doing it.”
John C. Maxwell is talking about how the idea of intrinsic motivation, the motivation that is going to get you to want to sit down and read, is a trap.
When we set a goal for ourselves, in this case reading 30 pages a day, we almost always have to be externally induced to get through the early stages of our goal pursuit.
|This is why on Day 1 of your My 30 Pages a Day Reading Challenge, I told you to share your goal of reading 30 pages a day with someone else.
In the beginning, finding external motivations such as this is always going to be better for you than internal motivations because external motivations will force a different kind of commitment out of you|.
But interestingly what happens is that eventually over time, the activity will become intrinsically rewarding in itself.
Like Maxwell said, "After you start doing the thing, that’s when the motivation comes and makes it easy for you to keep on doing it.”
Without that external spur to get us started, however, we may never get over the hump to the point where we want to do it for ourselves.
We all need to be externally motivated to do an activity until the activity itself becomes intrinsically rewarding.
So, if you don’t know how to externally motivate yourself, then here are a few things you can do:
1 Have concrete goals for yourself and set a deadline for them. Then implement a system such as getting a calendar where you can visually keep track of your progress. This idea will greatly help you feel more accountable for your actions.
2 Tell people what your goals are. At the very least, tell your family about what goals you want to achieve. Studies show that people trying to make life changes, such as losing weight, were more likely to succeed if they told their families what they were doing first.
3 Take it one step further. Don’t just tell your family what your goals are, tell your significant other, friends, even acquaintances. Write a status update on social media letting people know what you’re up to. The knowledge that you’re being held accountable for sticking to your goals will make a huge difference in your success.
4 Get a friend to do this challenge with you. Even more useful than keeping track of your goals and telling people what you want to do is having someone in real live who has similar goals as you do. These people will provide support and encouragement to you in a way that people who have different goals than you can’t.
