Inpiration

Over the past two weeks, I’ve made the daily commitment to listen to or watch something inspiring each day.

Listening to most people, you get the sense that listening to “motivational” content is a lame thing or unserious thing to do.

Similarly, a lot of self-help content over the past few years has focused on the idea of ignoring willpower or motivation. That you should focus on your habits instead of trying to be more motivated. I think that is good and practical advice, but I also think it ignores the power and possibility of creating a consistent state of energized motivation in your life.

A good source of content for me during this challenge has been this podcast feed:

It has lots of edited talks, speeches, and ideas from a range of different well-known and not-so-well-known people.

One of the things I’m learning as I get older is to focus less on how things work and more on if they work. And for me listening to motivation speeches works.

Listening to Eric Thomas, Tony Robbins, Connor McGregor, or Kobe Bryant talk with some hype music behind it just gets me fired up.

It snaps me out of a funk.

It makes me feel energized.

It makes me want to sit down and work. So I’m doing it every day.

If you make a system for doing your important work and part of that system gets you inspired, then you’ll do better work.

There is an Eric Thomas line that goes: “People ask me E.T. you gave 110% yesterday what are you going to do tomorrow… I don’t know… give 140!”. It’s a bit ridiculous but it makes me want to run through a wall. So I listen to it every time I go to the gym.

I believe that we can restore our energy with rest, but we can also restore our energy by connecting with inspiration. We are lucky enough to live at a time when we have a ton of inspiring stuff at our fingertips.