Daily Dose of English 86
Motivation
Daily Dose of English 86
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about motivation. That's a fun word. Motivation. What motivates you? Motivation or the thing that motivates you or something that motivates you is something in your life that makes you want to do something in the moment. When you wake up in the morning and you're laying in bed and you're tired and you think, oh, I have to do this thing or I get to do this thing, that can be considered your motivation. It's something else in the world that pushes you to do something or to take action in some way. However, motivation is overrated. Motivation is very, it's a very popular thing to talk about, right? You're not motivated. How to be motivated. Get your motivation here. People call themselves motivation coaches or motivational support and all these different things about motivation. How to get motivated to go to the gym. How to get motivated to learn a language. How to get motivated to improve your life. There's all these different things about motivation. But the problem with motivation is that it's not a good thing to rely on. And a lot of people rely on motivation. It's like the people that rely on energy drinks to stay awake. Maybe somebody's only sleeping for four hours a night or three hours a night and they're always really tired and so they drink energy drinks every single day to have enough energy to do things, to stay awake. It's sort of similar with motivation. A lot of people have something else wrong with their life, life that's not helping them have enough motivation to do things, and so they're not doing things rather, and then they're relying on motivation to push them. Let's give an example, right? So a really common example is, kind of relates to what I talked about yesterday in hobbies. A lot of people want to have hobbies, so they want to do things, but they say, oh, I don't have the motivation to do this. I'm just going to go on the internet instead and watch some YouTube videos. I'm just going to go on TikTok and scroll for a little bit because I'm not motivated to do this thing that I want to do. But that's the wrong... thing to do because yes, you'll have motivation every so often just like you'll have days where you weirdly have a ton of energy without taking an energy drink, sure, but you can't rely on motivation to get you to do everyday things in your life because motivation is sort of like a battery. It's a very small battery though. It fills up pretty quickly and then it can be depleted. It can be used very quickly as well. and everything in our lives takes a little bit of motivation, a little bit of motivation to get up, a little bit of motivation to go to the kitchen, a little bit of motivation to turn on the lights, a little bit of motivation, a little bit of motivation, and it adds up. And by even the mid-morning or some random part of the day, you're just not going to have much motivation for anything. And so it's this, A battery that very quickly dies, basically. Imagine trying to use a phone that just has the battery lasts 10 minutes, 15 minutes. That really wouldn't be useful because it would always die. You'd always have to be looking to plug in your phone and charge your phone. but instead you want to rely on other things that make your experience better. So in this case, you'd want to get a better phone to get a better battery in your phone. Or in the case of, um, like having energy problems, probably want to sleep more and take better care of your body so that you naturally have more energy. And for motivation, instead of having motivation, you need to sort of have discipline and these things that you will just do and habits, essentially. There's a little more, it's a little more complicated than this because there is more to it. But you basically want to do things even if you don't have motivation. Because if you always are relying on motivation, you're gonna end up not doing things way more often than doing things. There's a quote that I like which is, doing things is 100%, or not doing something is 100% easier than doing something. Right, like if you think about it, doing a thing is like to do the thing is a 100% difference from zero to 100 on not doing that thing. Right, I could have either recorded this episode or not recorded it and I could have done some, what anything else. That would have been in so many ways so much easier. I could have just done nothing. But I know that I want to record this episode. I know that I want to have these episodes ready to go out so that you can listen to English every single day in a nice, simple, easy way. I didn't necessarily have motivation to do it, but I knew that I wanted to and had to in a way. I said that word had lightly. or I said that word, I don't say that word had lightly, because I didn't necessarily have to, but I sort of gave myself this obligation of recording. The same thing goes for waking up. I wake up at 6 a.m., more or less, pretty much every day. Some days I let myself sleep in, usually on Sunday, and sometimes I'll fall asleep for like five, 10 minutes more, but I am really trying to get myself up every day Through discipline, mostly. I know that I feel fine after I wake up. After I wake up and I'm in my morning routine and everything, I've had water, I've had coffee, I feel better. I know that. And I know that when I sleep in, I don't really feel any different. And so I don't really need this motivation to wake up because I'm not relying on motivation to get me up. It's my action. Sure, I definitely fail at that and I don't take action sometimes. However, that's a different thing, right? I'm not relying on my motivation. I'm relying on my discipline, which is sometimes weaker. And so I'm working on getting that to be stronger so that I can really be totally reliant on my own discipline and desire to do things because I want to do these things. And that's something that I think is important to always think about, especially with motivation. Because with motivation, you might be tricked into doing something that you didn't want to do. Again, going into that idea of energy and versus doing stuff being similar, right? If you have a lot of energy after your energy drink, you might end up doing too much or saying too much because you have too much energy. If you're super motivated one day to pick up a new hobby, to learn the guitar. Today I'm going to learn the guitar. So you go out and you buy a guitar, you buy stuff, you spend a bunch of money, and then the next day you realize, I don't even like the guitar. Why did I buy a guitar? I don't care about the guitar. And it's almost like this motivation trap where you're allowing yourself to be driven by your random thoughts and whims. That's a good word. A whim is a thing that you have, like a desire you have that's really quick. Right? So you're on a whim, you go buy a guitar, right? So you don't actually really want a guitar or anything like that. You didn't think about where you'd put it. You don't have space in your apartment. You don't know how to play music at all, but you go out on a whim and buy a guitar. That would be not a great use of your time and your money, but your motivation might push you to do it. And that's where a lot of impulse spending comes from. I don't know if that's a big thing in your culture, but in the U.S. and really a lot of the richer English-speaking world, impulse buying and too much buying stuff is really common. A lot of people just want to buy things because they feel that want or that need to buy something and they get motivated to renovate their house or to decorate their room or to pick up a new hobby like I said and they buy stuff and then they end up with garbage essentially. And so, especially when it comes to things like language learning and self-improvement, I highly recommend that you try not to even use motivation. If you have a burst of motivation, put it to something that you know you wanna do already. Have a list of things on your desk or with you, on your phone even. On your phone, you have a list of things. You know what, whenever I have motivation, I'm gonna do one of these things. And maybe there are small things like cleaning your house or washing the windows on the outside of your apartment, things like that that are hard to do except for when you have motivation. And use the discipline and your habits and your other things to accomplish the stuff that you want to in life, your self-improvement, your exercise, dieting, English, whatever it is. So anyways, I'm gonna get off my high horse, my soapbox, Um, that's what we say when somebody is talking, they're like telling people how to make improvements and things like that. So I'm going to get off my soapbox where I'm yelling about motivation and that sort of thing. And I'm going to say, thank you very much for listening to this episode of Ben's language lab or so a daily dose of English here at Ben's language lab. I hope that you enjoyed it and maybe you learned a thing or two, maybe a cool word like whim. Um, but I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Buh-bye!
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