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Happy New Year to you!
This week I want to talk to you about How to Stay Motivated in 2022.
I don't know what you value in life, but for me - autonomy, feeling appreciated and doing deep work all rank highly. It's likely to be different for everyone and that's OK, for instance: my wife values certainty and maintaining connections with family. Different things motivate us all.
In my 2022 highlights, I shared with you that I listen to Tony Robbins' Podcast. Having heard most of the episodes, I decided to delve deeper to 2019 where they interviewed Daniel Pink. He actually wrote a book named "Drive - shattering new way to think about motivation", but that is not what he was sharing in the podcast.
You've heard of "morning people" and "night-owls"? Just like what we value, it turns out that some people peak in the morning and others peak in the evening, but what does that mean to you and me for how to stay motivated?
Daniel shares that:
- Morning is the Peak - the right time for analytical work, we're most vigilant and this time is best suited to focus and get heads-down.
- At lunch we hit the Trough - at this time, the last thing you should try to do is anything that requires deep focus and concentration. Instead, do administrative work that requires little thought - replying to emails, booking meetings, adding Receipts to Xerox or Concur.
- In the evening we enter Recovery - this time is best suited for handling insight problems - creativity, brainstorming and our mood is generally good whilst our ability to do deep work is at its lowest.
Now, not everyone is this way - around 20% of people work the other way around. But to stay motivated, why not try organising your day around these three peaks and troughs? Listen to the podcast: Why timing is everything
"If you have the ability to make your life worse in the next two weeks, then you can also improve it"
That's the statement Zig Ziglar opens with in his series on How to Stay Motivated. I found his tapes on spotify and have started to listen to the first couple of recordings. If you've not heard of him, he was a world renowned teacher, coach and motivational speaker, but also someone who believed in helping others get what they want from life.
He's attributed with having said: "If you help enough people get what they want, you can have anything you want in life"
The set is available on Audible and Spotify
If you believe that you can improve your motivation, career or personal life in 2022, I'd highly recommend it and am listening to it all myself too.
In Roman times, the word "optium" referred to "leisure", but they didn't see it the same way that we do today. With our focus on productivity and work ethic, many of us struggle to relax or take time off.
Otium is richer, it means the act of active rest, consideration and leaving space for experimentation and invention. It was around the time I read the book Time Off: Rest Ethic Finding Success Without the Stress, that I started the growlab project and woodworking.
I never expected to be making dovetail joints 6 months ago. It's amazing what you can achieve with a little interest and motivation.
Woodworking helped me rest over the Christmas period instead of programming and worrying about how many GitHub Sponsors cancelled over the past 30 days.
Neither of these activities led to direct or indirect business profits. So why did I do them? Because I was trapped, and maybe you are too - in the thinking that everything I did had to be productivity and useful.
Despite what Elon Musk would have us believe, we are not built to work 120 hour weeks. Remember Daniel's study into the importance of rhythm - peaks, troughs and recovery? In Time Off, we learn why we are so poor at resting and what to do about it.
Get a copy, applying it certainly helped my motivation last year.
If you're feeling philosophical, then you may also like Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, if you work in Open Source or deal with the public, then here's a quote. If you value autonomy like me, you'll find it empowering when someone trolls you on the Internet:
"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."
One of Zig Ziglar's closest friends was Jim Rohn, Jim was also a motivational speaker, and turned his life around through setting goals, healthy boundaries between work and family and by believing that he could do better.
I was listening to his tape yesterday and one thing he said hit me:
"Give yourself time. Allow yourself the time to do the things you've set out to do." - this is something that I've had to say to myself countless times since I quit my job in 2019 to work on OpenFaaS independently.
If you've not tried Jim's material yet, try a quick 30 minute video: Jim Rohn - Time Management
The most important thing you can do for 2022 is to start, the rest will take care of itself.
Thank you for continuing to sponsor me this year, it's only by your contribution that I can give so much of my time over to community building, mentoring and Open Source. Around 30 people cancelled their sponsorships over the past month (I don't know why, perhaps due to Christmas spending?), so I'm grateful that you're here - making openfaas, arkade, k3sup and all my free tutorials possible.
You may also like these two articles I wrote this week - reflecting on Inlets and OpenFaaS over the past 12 months:
Great 👍