The "Do Something" Principle

This text was taken from a blog post from Mark Manson, on How to Get Motivated and Take Action.

“Action isn’t just the effect of motivation, but also the cause of it.” - Mark Manson

Most people only commit to action if they feel a certain level of motivation. And they only feel motivation when they feel an emotional inspiration.

We feel lethargic and apathetic towards a certain goal that we’ve set for ourselves because we lack the motivation and we lack the motivation because we don’t feel any overarching emotional desire to accomplish something.

We typically think motivation works something like this:

Emotional Inspiration → Motivation → Desirable Action

How to Get Motivated: The “Do Something” Principle

But the thing about the motivation chain is that it’s not only a three-part chain but an endless loop.

Your actions create further emotional reactions and inspirations and move on to motivate your future actions. Taking advantage of this knowledge, we can actually re-orient our mindset in the following way:

Action → Inspiration → Motivation

See video from “Better Ideas” to illustrate this idea: