I'll start you at the end: as I see it, the psychological master-task of every person in the world is to decipher his own operating manual.
And we do have such a manual, make no mistake. We have an internal book in which is written what lifts us and what brings us down, what does us good and what makes our lives deteriorate, what is our optimal way of interacting with others and what wrecks our conversations and relationships.
Manufacturer's warning: we shall probably never get to writing the perfect operating manual, mainly because a certain part of it is unconscious, and also because we have a disgraceful habit of resisting the truth we perceive, and wrapping the way we think about ourselves in a great many defences.
Why does that happen? Because our need to preserve a decent self-image often outweighs our need to reach the truth.
And that's a pity, because only the truth will save us. If we don't find the right things to do in our lives, we shall be more and more miserable. Simple and cruel.
But enough preliminaries. I have come today to update you on a lie we sell ourselves about motivation, or more precisely, about the connection between motivation and success.
And contrary to what was ground into your brain at school and in a host of alternative fields, that connection is far looser than you thought.
Here it is, straight in the face: motivation is not a necessary condition for success, happiness and flourishing. Really not.
In fact, clinging to the idea that "there's no success without motivation" will get you stuck deep in the swamp, and may even freeze your heart against climbing to future regions of joy.
A moment before you wreck the discussion with awkward questions in the style of "but who decides what success is?", let's agree that any life scenario a person is reasonably satisfied with over time counts as success — whether that's an interesting career, a stable and loving relationship, a flourishing business, and so on.
And that coveted success — and I wish it for you with all my heart — is not a matter of one blow and done. It isn't a precious prize requiring a one-off burst of motivation to move from a state of "not having" to a state of "having."
A successful life scenario requires hundreds of days and thousands of hours of constant investment, a great deal of thinking about identifying the right things to do, and tons of effort, sweat, restraint and lip-biting in order to apply the right things. Minute by minute. Hour by hour.
And that is one of the greyest paragraphs I have written. It doesn't make it any less true.
But to return to the headline, there is no way all that psychic investment is made in a state of high motivation. Even medium.
Don't believe me. Go and ask people who achieve those coveted results, and they will tell you how many times they got up for work without any desire to, how many moments of aimlessness and losing their way they experienced in their relationship.
And here is my conclusion from meeting quite a few such people — it isn't that they have high, medium or low motivation. They simply made motivation irrelevant.
And when a sentence that important appears in the middle of a piece, it is a sacred duty to repeat it:
Successful and happy people learned to make motivation irrelevant.
They focused on the long and necessary tasks of life, and largely switched off the emotion button. They held good conversations, made right decisions, and avoided impulsive, life-wrecking acts, not because "their heart is in the right place." Their heart, like everyone's, stayed in the same place — the chest cavity, since you ask.
They stuck to their wise internal guidebook despite the emotion, and they did it again and again. And again.
And later, they enjoyed the results. Enjoyed them enormously.
Because they internalised one important thing about motivation in general, and emotions in particular:
You cannot wait until you feel good in order to act.
The other way round.
You will teach yourself to act, and then you will discover that you feel good.
Really good.
And if you want to call that "happiness," I won't argue with you.