The Dangers Of Motivational Hype
By: Brian Kim - February 18, 2007
When I look at the self improvement industry, I see it mostly divided into two sections.
The “pump you up” section and the knowledge section.
You know what the “pump you up” section is all about. It’s anything that gives you a good old fashioned kick in the butt and motivates you to take action. Passionate speakers, lots of exclamation marks, catch phrases, etc.
At first, this “pump you up” section is very appealing. It gets you excited. It tells you that you can do it and you get inspired and take some action, but then the novelty wears off after a while until you get your fix again. It’s a pretty wild roller coaster ride.
This is where the majority of people start on the road of self improvement but soon after, the roads start to diverge. One camp continues to rely on the “pump you up” section, and the other camp begins to crave more solid food so to speak, so they start poking around the knowledge section. Paradigm shifts, time management, prioritizing, NLP - they soak up this knowledge like a sponge and armed with this new information, they begin to work on their goals, but don’t have as much “kick” as they get from the “pump you up” section and as a result, take little or no action to apply it.
If you rely too much on the “pump you up” section, it literally becomes an addiction and you don’t take any action until you get your next fix.
Too much of the knowledge section and you get a lot of theory, but little or no application. (You’ve experienced this before – you read a book packed with so much information that you didn’t know where to even begin on how to apply it)
What’s the solution?
You want to play off these two camps in order to maximize your results.
Get pumped up, take action during the “high” and absorb some knowledge that you realize you need, get pumped again, apply the new knowledge you learned, and you’ll soon find that you’re weaning yourself off the “pump you up” section. Why?
Because when you apply the new knowledge you learned, you begin to see those results are greater than the results you had based on your “pump you up” high and because you see that big of an improvement, that starts to motivate you instead of anything outside of you. I know that’s a pretty big mouthful so here’s a simple example to illustrate what I’m talking about.
Let’s say your goal is to write a book. You get pumped up and you start to write a couple of pages but stop because you run out of ideas. Then you realize that you’re only taking action during the “pump you up” high and that you’re very disorganized as well.
As a result, you realize the knowledge you need to seek out revolves around organization, time management, brainstorming, etc. You find the books, read them, and you learn how to prioritize, how to brainstorm, how to free write, learn the importance of being clear on what you need to do with each item on your to do list, learn the power of focusing on one thing at a time, etc.
You get pumped up again and use that time frame during the high to apply the new knowledge you learned and you become much more efficient than before. You have a plan, you have brainstorming sessions, and you stick to your plan and get it done. You get more done in a day then in a week’s worth time and because of that, you get excited at the results and those internal results begin to motivate you and pump you up rather than the external world.
Sure you’ll need a good kick in the pants every now and then when things start to wane, but you won’t need it as much anymore. You want to leverage the knowledge you get so you don’t have to rely on the motivational hype so much.
Motivational hype – you really don’t learn anything from it. After a while, it loses its effect. You get diminishing returns with this method and as a result, you need stronger and stronger doses to help get you to take the same amount of action as you did in the beginning. This can effectively chain you without you even knowing it.
Learning how to motivate yourself (most of the time)– that’s the ultimate goal. Sure they’ll be times when you’re down and you’ll need a good dose from the “pump you up” section, but you won’t need it as much anymore. I’m not saying you should never use it. By all means do. It’s great. There’s nothing like a good pump up high but be careful not to get addicted to it.
You don’t want to be in a state where you can’t take any action unless someone on the outside forces you to. You want to be in a state where you’re motivating yourself to take action. As you keep on gaining more knowledge and applying it, you get exponential returns and as a result, your dependency on the pump you up section drops in proportion.
Instead of seeking to be motivated by everything outside of you, use the hype from the “pump you up” section to venture into the knowledge section of the self improvement industry to find the knowledge you need, apply the knowledge to get things done and let those internal results motivate you instead, so you start operating on your own power, not that of those outside of you.
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February 18th, 2007 at
[…] The general principles of personal growth and development aren’t complicated. They have been known for millenia. Often we don’t know, or forget that the work, once learned, has to been done by us in our daily life. Brian Kim touches on the negative effects of looking outside ourselves for motivation to do what we already know in The Dangers of Motivational Hype […]
February 24th, 2007 at
[…] 1) Brian Kim - The Dangers of Motivational Hype […]