In such a fast-paced society, it is evident that there has been an exceeding reliance and importance placed on achieving esteem. This is also true of wanting to be a productive and proactive person. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be? Especially with responsibility and communication being incredibly valued traits, our society has been enabled to consistently keep moving towards achievement.
We, as individuals, often find ourselves saying that we are “waiting for the motivation to hit” or “had the motivation” to achieve something. The statements at hand have a very underlying complexity that must be dissected. This is relevant because it is very important to understand exactly how this type of language frames our thinking in our daily lives. Like many things we say, there can always be a different meaning that can be implied from it that is less obvious than its original meaning.
With that being said, the first problem of the statements at hand– or any like them— is the viewing of the word motivation as an object. By framing our thinking around the idea that motivation is an object that comes and goes, we might as well say that motivation is a butterfly of the same kaleidoscope as happiness. This is incredibly harmful because if allotted the opportunity for expressing motivation in such a way, it becomes more likely that people choose to play into or become subject to laziness. The second and more prominent problem rooting from the statements is the idea of motivation as the only solution or concept that can be used to drive our day-to-day tasks. In reality, there is another solution: self-discipline.
Self-discipline is the idea that we as individuals motivate and drive ourselves to complete tasks through ignoring our temptations (with a few exceptions) in order to strictly and efficiently complete tasks that are delegated to and are necessary to us. Self-discipline encourages us as individuals to have high levels of responsibility and willingness to actively implement such tactics consistently and insistently. I, like many others, would definitely not classify it as a “simple” concept, especially when regarding individual mental health disparities and possible lack of practice or education on the implementation of using self-discipline in our daily lives. A friend of mine even alluded to how it can limit creativity in comparison to motivation.
However, though all of these counterarguments are significant in evaluating all sides of the concept, I believe that self-discipline ultimately takes measures to ensure that we are taking back control of our individual progress. This is to say that I believe with certainty that the benefits of self-discipline make up for the very obvious faults. This encourages and leads to becoming more satisfied within our personal goals and successes.
All in all, self-discipline is a very powerful and freeing thing. It is also a more consistent way to measure and help ourselves to achieve our goals of success and proactivity. The term encourages and defines a more permanent way of looking at productivity and encourages us to base completion of tasks on feelings of necessity and not on the justification of giving into temptation. Self-discipline is objectively better than motivation because it is built around logic as compared to emotion, which has historically been a more valued thing in our culture.
