Motivation and the Three Tier-System

| Dec 6, 2017 |

Motivation seems to be a hot topic these days. There are motivational speakers and motivational authors. People constantly are looking for motivation. And motivation does have its uses. It’s great for getting started on a project or even a career.

But there’s a problem: motivation doesn’t last forever, and then what happens when you don’t feel motivated? A lot of sports stars use the idea of “Go hard or go home,” but nobody can go hard indefinitely. For most of us, it’s more like “Go hard, eventually lose motivation, and go home.” If you are counting on motivation as a lifelong stimulus, I think you’re destined for disappointment.

Motivation is important, but it’s not the only way or even the best way to get things done. A better approach is what I call the Three-Tier System. The three tiers are motivation, discipline, and habit.

The first tier, motivation, is a good way to get started on most projects. It can carry us during the early stages, when we’re excited about the project. To me, it’s a little like having a crush or falling in love—it’s a thrill and a rush. But then you form a relationship and maybe get married, and over time the thrill begins to fade—to be replaced, we hope, by a certain maturity. Joseph Campbell called this going from passion to compassion. Maybe you show compassion by washing the dishes or mowing the lawn, which are not exactly a thrill. This is where the second tier comes in: discipline.

As a composer, I can’t count on always being motivated to sit down and write. My schedule can vary greatly from day to day or even month to month, so I often need discipline to get the work done. I can distinctly remember several evenings when I had two hours to compose and basically had no creative ideas at all. Two hours of practicing the trumpet with bad chops is certainly no fun, but two hours of composing with no ideas can seem like an eternity. In spite of that, I look on those particular sessions as being very important for me. I was beginning to build my discipline muscle.

But even discipline will only take us so far, which brings us to the third tier: habit. It has been shown that we have a limited amount of discipline, much less than we think. The challenge, then, is to build a system that still works when discipline fails. That system is habit. You don’t have to be motivated or even disciplined to brush your teeth every morning; it’s simply a habit. And so, if we can move our important work into the area of habit, that work will get done. In my career as a trumpet player, practicing was a habit; if I didn’t practice a lot and consistently, not only did I not play as well, I just didn’t feel right.
It would be nice if we could move every long-term task from discipline into habit, but I’m not sure that’s possible. With some tasks, as with my composing on a schedule that may change every day, I have to rely more on discipline than habit.

The three-tier system can be used not only for specific projects but also for the building of a successful career: motivation gets us started, followed by the hard work of discipline, and finally the routine of habit. Following that pattern means that when motivation fades, it’s not the end of the game; it’s simply part of the transition to attaining mastery.