“Personal motivation structure” is like the tactics in service of the strategic doing of what resonates with you. Tactics are the actual means to achieve a short-term goal. Strategy, on the other hand, is the overarching plan to achieve long-term goals. You can’t do without either of them. If you don’t have a realistic plan, you won’t be able to achieve anything. If you don’t have a big picture, you’ll be bogged down by inflexible, expired plans.

What should inform your big picture then? A number of things: focusing is an excellent north star guide to determining what resonates with you. That often involves a lot of journaling and looking into your past: what excited you as a kid? What were your main hangups? How was your relationship with your family/caregivers and friends? With school, studies and work? What were your idiosyncrasies? The older I get, the more I believe "we just need to stop self-sabotaging ourselves". That requires us to unlearn old habits, learn new patterns of behaviour and relearn our existing ideas.

It’s very easy to default to watching TV shows or idly scrolling social media/youtube/reddit when you have nothing to do. It’s not particularly fun or boring (it can be), it’s just meh. I myself am guilty of that recently when I was watching Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA) and idly scrolling manga subreddit. That one night of binge reading Gunka no Balzar brought back nostalgia to how I’ve been spending my time for a long long time. It’s not meaningful in any way but it’s comfortable like an old friend. I didn’t feel excited reading it, but neither was I really bored. It did not spark joy or excitement, I was just letting it pass through me - I wonder what this phenomenon is called.

I’m thinking if I have to tighten my emotional feedback loop. It feels like I’m taking too long to make adjustments. I have no idea how I’m going to do it except bringing back attention to focus on understanding my emotions more often. This afternoon I stopped watching ATLA after a while to write. However, I didn’t feel inspired and couldn’t get into it; that led to more distractions. The problem is my Notion note is too messy and full of many different ideas. What I can do is list the top few most urgent writing prompt and pick one from them. Next I can and should create a clean slate note for it.

Last updated: 25 July 2021