Mark Manson - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F__k (2016, HarperOne) - libgen.li

was entirely responsible for all of my own decisions, as well as the
consequences of those decisions. I was responsible for teaching myself web
design, Internet marketing, search engine optimization, and other esoteric
topics. It was all on my shoulders now. And so I did what any twenty-fouryear-old
who’d just quit his job and had no idea what he was doing would
do: I downloaded some computer games and avoided work like it was the
Ebola virus.
As the weeks went on and my bank account turned from black to red, it
was clear that I needed to come up with some sort of strategy to get myself to
put in the twelve- or fourteen-hour days that were necessary to get a new
business off the ground. And that plan came from an unexpected place.
When I was in high school, my math teacher Mr. Packwood used to say,
“If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start
working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of
working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”
During that early self-employment period, when I struggled every day,
completely clueless about what to do and terrified of the results (or lack
thereof), Mr. Packwood’s advice started beckoning me from the recesses of
my mind. I heard it like a mantra:
Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.
In the course of applying Mr. Packwood’s advice, I learned a powerful
lesson about motivation. It took about eight years for this lesson to sink in,
but what I discovered, over those long, grueling months of bombed product
launches, laughable advice columns, uncomfortable nights on friends’
couches, overdrawn bank accounts, and hundreds of thousands of words
written (most of them unread), was perhaps the most important thing I’ve
ever learned in my life:
Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.
Most of us commit to action only if we feel a certain level of motivation.
And we feel motivation only when we feel enough emotional inspiration. We
assume that these steps occur in a sort of chain reaction, like this: