During our quests for personal growth, we often find ourselves in a vicious cycle of spurts of motivation, taking extreme action, burning out, then completely dropping our goals or making little progress.
Sound familiar? We’ve all been there.
The worst part about this is that these days of high motivation can*—*and often do—set us up for failure the rest of our days. They set unreasonable expectations for ourselves that not only make us fall short on off days but also crush our desire to chase after the goals that got us going in the first place.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from teaching myself how to code, hitting a new 1 rep max, building a startup, or transforming my daily nutrition, it’s that extreme progress has very little to do with taking extreme action, and everything to do with creating a simple, sustainable system for growth.
Wealth is just consistency... I don't want to be rich. I want to be wealthy.
- Quavious Keyate Marshall (“Quavo”)
A Lesson From Thermodynamics
To understand how to properly chase our goals, we need to understand how progress and consistency work in humans.
Let’s say John has been wanting to start a side business for a while, and he’s having a great day and feels super motivated. He creates a Facebook page, gets a DBA, does some market research, and even starts putting together a business model.** **
Dang, this is fun! Why didn’t I do this before? I’ll have customers in no time.
Fast forward a month, and he’s barely made any additional progress. He committed to putting in his weekends and evenings to this thing (which hasn’t happened of course), but just doesn’t feel like doing it most days.
It’ll happen eventually. I just need another spark of motivation, he thinks to himself.
Now, let’s see why the laws of thermodynamics say that John’s set himself up for failure.
In a chemical system, equilibrium is achieved when the rates of forward and backward reactions are equal. It makes perfect sense that when you upset this balance in one direction, the system wants to move in the opposite direction to maintain that balance.
The intensity at which that opposite force works is proportional to the amount of unbalance introduced into the system.
John introduced a huge amount of disturbance into his system because he happened to feel like it one day. He felt great after it and convinced himself that he’d keep it up, but set unreasonable expectations for himself.
This, in turn, crushed his motivation when that backward force inevitably came crashing back on him.
See what I mean?
Extreme Progress ≠ Extreme Measures
Humans aren’t meant for drastic, sudden changes like this. Most of us aren’t great at it (I’m definitely not), especially when it’s something that we don’t have to do. No one’s forcing you to get off the couch and improve your life, after all.
The first step towards continuous self-improvement is realizing that the spurt of motivation that drives you to go balls to the wall today isn’t going to be there tomorrow. You need to set realistic expectations for what you, every single day, can achieve.
In the figure above, on your really good days, you’ll be able to climb mountains this big and make a ton of progress.
Don’t get me wrong—this is awesome! And you** *****should*** take advantage of these good days. With that said, it’s so incredibly important to set expectations for yourself and not use these days as a benchmark for growth.
In the same vein as constantly comparing yourself to someone much better than you at something, you’ll set yourself up for disappointment and likely call it quits before ever reaching your goals.
With all this said, this doesn’t mean we can’t adapt and create drastic positive changes in our lives. Humans are incredibly good at adapting. The challenge is that we aren’t often deliberate about or aware of what is needed to craft successful paths toward our goals.
What to Do Instead
Instead of setting unrealistic expectations for pursuing your goals, focus on introducing stimuli into your life that push you in the right direction.
The stimuli should be easily measurable and directly bring you closer to your goal. Most importantly, they need to be sustainable. You need to be able to do them every day.
In the figure above, I want you to focus on the Activation Energy. This is the “I don’t wanna do it factor”, the crux of continuous progress and growth. You always need to be recalibrating your activation energy and be aware of it when you set plans to take action toward your goals.
On days when you feel extra motivated, you’re going to be able to tolerate much higher activation energies.
But—I can’t stress enough that you can’t build systems or expectations around these good days. Tomorrow, when your motivation is lower, you’re not going to be able to surmount that enormous activation energy that yesterday’s motivation signed you up for today.
Maximum Sustainable Activation Energy
The key to being able to maintain internal harmony with your life while continuously pushing the bounds of your personal development lies in what I call the maximum sustainable activation energy (MSAE for short).
That is—the maximum amount of mental effort you’re able to push yourself through to take action on a given goal, daily.
We know that long-term success is comprised primarily of consistency in taking actions that move you closer to your goals. Think of this as the optimization calculation that constantly changes as you grow.
The tricky part is that this takes a ton of self-awareness, as it’s a running average, and your progress is never linear.
With that said, if you subject yourself to growth stimuli daily, over time you’ll find that your average maximum sustainable activation energy increases. Be brutally honest with yourself and obsess over measuring your consistency, and you’ll be able to keep a good grasp on what your max is, and, in turn, push these bounds week over week.
I’m a huge believer that chasing your goals should not only be rewarding, but fun—and that’s the best part of this growth system. It quickly becomes a game. A productive outlet introducing a constant stream of positive joy into your life.
Apply This to Your Life
Remember: Progress is the sum of your systems and habits over time.
Instead of waiting until you have a burst of motivation to take drastic action, you need to formulate a lifestyle you can commit to every day, that gets you closer to your goals.
Start by breaking your goals down into the smallest actionable things you can do to get closer to them and create systems around those things. Then make these systems your rock. They must be really important to you, otherwise, they lose their effectiveness. Gameify the shit out of it if you have to.
If you find yourself making excuses not to stick with your system, you need to lower that activation energy and make it so small that you can’t say no to it.
Consistency trumps everything when it comes to forward progress, and it’s easy to get caught up in that vicious cycle of motivation-burnout.
You don’t “need the motivation” to make huge progress toward your goals. You don’t need to be extreme to achieve amazing outcomes.
You need to be deliberate about your goals, be clear about the actions you need to take to get there, and put in the time to create sustainable systems that will get you there.
This was originally published on my weekly newsletter Circadian Growth