motivation – Glen Matthes

How to Think Backwards

The past few weeks I’ve been learning a new piano piece: The 3^rd movement to Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata. It’s a fairly long piece at 7 minutes and is 10 pages of sheet music; 2 of which are played twice. That’s about 30 seconds of music per page played.

Now normally when you learn a piece of music, you start at the beginning. You learn the notes of the first few measures and get those down. Then you move to the next few measures, learn those, then continue.

Then somewhere about 2-3 pages in you’re at the point where it takes a while to play the stuff you’ve learned. Then you hit the stuff you haven’t learned yet and it’s like crashing your car into a brick wall. It’s also discouraging.

Why Do We Please People We Don’t Like?

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The other day I was thinking about how I was going to miss a self-imposed deadline that I had told a lot of people I was going to meet. As I started thinking about how I was going to tell them I would miss it, I started thinking about what their reactions might be. In my mind, everyone except one person would say something like, “it’s ok. At least you’re making progress and moving toward something you really want.” But one person would say something like, “I knew you couldn’t do it.”

Whether these reactions are real or not, it bothered me that this one person would say something so negative. Then it dawned on me that I don’t really like this person much. They’re friendly and can hold a decent conversation for a while, but I don’t consider them anything more than an acquaintance. So why would their reaction bother me so much?

Talent is Overrated! Use This Instead

When you see a great athlete or musician or mathematician, do you think “wow, they’ve got talent!”? You may wonder how some people – other people – got their talent. I mean surely they have some innate gift that allows them to be so good at what they do, right?

You, on the other hand, couldn’t throw a ball or play an instrument or calculate a square root if your life depended on it. After all, you’ve got no talent.

This is complete and utter bullshit.

The only reason those folks can do what they do is because they spent a lot of time practicing and improving themselves. We get a glimpse of this when sportscasters do the stories of Olympic athletes. They’ll tell about how the person spent 4 hours every morning before work practicing and training. Then, after they were done working, they spent another 4 hours training. And if they’re lucky enough to not have to work, they’ll spend 10-12 hours per day training and practicing.

How to Get S**t Done (Even if You Don’t Feel Like It)

We’ve all been there. You need to do something, but you have no motivation to do it. You just don’t feel like it. So you put it off until later when you’ll “feel more motivated”. But secretly you know that you’ll never actually be motivated. What’s a poor unmotivated person to do?

The obvious answer is the right one – do it even though you don’t feel like it.

It doesn’t matter what “it” is, just that it’s something you need to do.

Tag Archives: motivation