The Motivation Leak

I’ve spent the last 10 years bouncing between making a living in professional poker, and exploring a number of different mindfulness practices. From playing for thousands of dollars, to multiple 10-day silent meditation retreats, disconnected from the outside world, and completely submerged in the internal one. And in the last year, I’ve had the pleasure of being able to coach others in everything I’ve learned along the way.

Through all of this, I’ve come to understand there are really only a couple things we desire:

1. 1. We have the desire to feel happy, connected and fulfilled in the present
   2. We have the desire to grow, learn and accomplish stuff in the future

We want both. And we’ll often feel an internal struggle when choosing between things like going out with friends, or spending time advancing our career. The real decision being made is, ‘What do I want to prioritize at this moment?’

But here’s the thing we often forget – we want to accomplish certain things because of how they’ll make us feel when we achieve them. Or more specifically, how we think they’ll make us feel.

The future doesn’t exist, but the idea of it is something we love to escape to – always imagining what we’re going to feel like once we get everything we’ve been working towards. Yet there are endless stories of high-achievers reaching the pinnacle of their field, only to find they don’t feel anything like they thought they would.

I can’t speak on winning any world championships, but all of my own achievements throughout my life followed the same trajectory. Finishing a degree, getting hired at a nice job, passing difficult exams, or winning a bunch of money – they all felt great in the moment. But then the next day happened, and it was back to life as usual.

Priorities of the Present

It turns out that no achievement will ever be so grand that it was worth sacrificing how we feel in the present moment. As such, what we choose to prioritize makes all the difference to our life experience.

Choose to consistently prioritize the present, and your thoughts, feelings and actions begin to align in a way that truly serves your own well-being. Live like this for a span of time, and you can retroactively check off a bunch of things you would consider accomplishments, yet all of those were merely byproducts of living in a way that was completely aligned with who you are. You didn’t need any of those accomplishments to happen, yet you fully enjoyed every moment of them.

Choose to consistently prioritize the accomplishments, and you’ll be playing the game in reverse. Always looking towards some imaginary future that you think will bring about happiness and fulfillment as soon as you get there. Yet those small blips in time never quite have the impact that our inflated expectations promise. As soon as we check off one thing, we’re right back to a new cycle of desire and pursuit.

In a world so achievement focused, it’s easy to lose sight of all this. Grades, school applications, test results, resumes, job titles, trophies, net worth, etc. – before you know it, your entire self-worth can be tied up in what you’ve achieved. It’s no wonder that some of the most common regrets from people at the end of their lives are wishing they didn’t work so hard, wishing they lived a life more true to themselves, and wishing they let themselves be happier.

It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.

The premise sounds simple, so where do we go wrong? In short, there are endless beliefs and motivation systems we’ve absorbed from the world that completely derail us from feeling good without ever realizing it. I’ll outline a few steps you can play with to prioritize how you want to feel right in this moment, as well as some underlying beliefs you may resonate with.

First, get really clear about the things you want to feel. Find the words that really strike a nerve when you say them out loud. E.g. Excited, Confident, Passionate, Engaged, Free, Loved, Energized, Light, Ease, Fun, Strong, Smooth, Spacious, Creative, Focused, Competitive, etc. 

These are the things that, when you’re feeling them, light you up and effortlessly propel you into doing more. When we lose the willingness to experience those things in the moment, but still continue to press on, we’ve unconsciously decided that the achievement is more important than ourselves. We gatekeep that feeling until the task is complete, only for the next day to come as we look towards a new cycle of achievement.

That doesn’t mean we’re going to feel what we want all the time, or lose interest in the pursuit of things because we got so wrapped up in a feeling. Rather, we will always be moving forward in a way that is most aligned with our well-being.

When it comes to ideologies that sabotage our happiness, one of the most pervasive belief systems in our society is how to motivate ourselves into action. Whether it’s a small project, or a massive life goal, we have the choice in what the driving force is behind getting it done. If we let that driving force be the feeling all those words conjure up in ourselves, we’ll feel more and more energized every step of the way.

But when we allow the achievement itself to be the driving force, we begin to disregard the present, and spend that whole cycle of desire and pursuit in a state that slowly drains us of energy, feeling worse and worse along the way.

Dirty Fuel

The best breakdown I’ve come across for how and why this happens comes from Jason Su’s book The Joy of Poker. He denotes all these draining forces as ‘Dirty Fuel’ – beliefs or stories that motivate action, get stuff done, but leave us feeling a whole lot worse in the process. These 7 Dirty Fuel sources are – 

1. 1. Proving it to someone else
   2. Proving it to yourself
   3. Surpassing others
   4. Overcoming obstacles
   5. Survival
   6. Reaching your full potential
   7. Doing it for others

Some of them might seem a little confusing at first. Wanting to reach your full potential sounds like a great thing to want. And wanting to be of service to other people is one of the highest forms of living in my experience. 

But when these are the things that fuel us into action, we require those conditions to be there, and as a result experience some very unpleasant byproducts in the process.

Proving it to yourself or others comes with the constant experience of doubt, either from yourself or the people around you. Always needing to do a little more before you let yourself feel at ease. Many people describe thoughts like ‘I don’t deserve this yet’, or ‘I’ll show them!’. 

Surpassing others will always require you to be looking ahead to the people in front of you – endlessly comparing your results to others, and never appreciating the work you’ve put in. And if you end up reaching that goal, you’ll either jump right back into finding someone else to be better than, or lose your motivation to continue on until you’ve dropped to a level where you can start chasing someone again.

Enjoying difficult obstacles isn’t inherently a bad thing, but when you require those obstacles as fuel, nothing can ever feel easy. Life will feel like one giant uphill climb, always seeking the next thing in your way. If it seems too easy, you’ll never feel satisfaction or fulfillment from it. 

If you need to feel the pressure of survival, you’ll constantly feel like your back is against the wall. Fueled by anxious thoughts and feelings of fear that something bad might happen if you don’t get this thing done soon.

Reaching your full potential might sound nice, but when that alone is your source of motivation, you’ll feel like an incomplete version of yourself in the present. Always chasing some improved version in the future, along with some haunting sense that you’re never going to accomplish everything you want before you die.

And when you’re fueled by doing things for others, all of your relationship dynamics will be set up in a way that requires everyone around you to need something from you. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t want to help, but it becomes unhealthy when it comes at the expense of your own well-being in its pursuit. The version of you that’s completely at peace with everything in your life is going to be the version that’s best able to serve others.

The main thing these fuel sources have in common is that they all drain us of our energy in the pursuit of the desire. If you feel like you’re trapped in constant cycles of burnout and unpleasant thoughts as you move through life, there’s a good chance you’re tapping into one or more of these fuel sources.

It’s true that high-performers across all sorts of fields take the approach of putting their accomplishments over everything else, resulting in huge accomplishments. It’s also true that most of those top performers have an absolute mess of a personal life away from the games they play arising from spending the majority of their lives never prioritizing their own happiness.

There is no achievement so big that it makes up for all the lost time and suffering it took to get there.