May 15, 2026 May 15, 2026 2026-05-15

In September 2009 I wrote 33 ways to get and keep yourself motivated. The angle: motivation is a renewable resource, you can deliberately recreate the state of peak drive, and here are the techniques. That was more than optimistic — it was based on a model that doesn’t survive over 15 years of real life testing.

“Get and Keep” Was the Overly Optimistic Frame

The problem is the verb. “Get” suggests motivation is something external you acquire. “Keep” suggests it’s a steady state you maintain. Neither is accurate.

Motivation is random and unpredictable. If anything, it can follow some loose cycles, but it’s never steady. It varies with sleep, health, season, what you’re working on, and who you’ve been spending time with. Trying to maintain a constant level of drive simply doesn’t work. It will sooner or later lead to burn out (and from my experience it is rather sooner than later). And when the energy drops you start feeling like you’ve failed. The drop is natural. Treating it as a malfunction, not really.

A better framing for this would be to acknowledge that motivation has phases. High-energy phases are for output. Lower ones are for recovery, reflection, and letting things settle. You don’t need to fix the low phases, you’re simply in assess mode. No need to panic during them. And definitely don’t dismiss them by forcing artificial energy back in.

Which of the 33 Methods Actually Lasted

A few held up across fifteen years without needing to be forced.

Ignore the unimportant. The list led with this and it’s still right, but the definition of “unimportant” has shifted. In 2009, the unimportant was mostly bad email and pointless meetings. In 2026, there’s an entire attention economy built to make low-priority things feel urgent. What to ignore is now a much harder question than the original post implied — and answering it well is most of the work.

Clear goals. Still foundational. Vague direction produces vague motivation. The more precisely you know what done looks like, the easier it is to generate energy toward it. This hasn’t changed and I don’t expect it to.

Exercise. The most reliable item on the entire list. The relationship between physical movement and mental drive is real and consistent across every phase I’ve been through — high output, low output, everything in between. Just keep moving that body.

What Led to Burnout

The short-term techniques are literally self-manipulation — applying pressure to your nervous system to produce a state it isn’t naturally in. Things like affirmations – I know, many of you won’t agree, and that’s fine. In the same category is artificial urgency – act now, tomorrow will be too late kind of talking. Or motivational content as a daily habit. These may work for a day or two. Ok, maybe for a week. But used as the main strategy across months, they train your system to need constant stimulation, which is the burnout pattern. You prime yourself for falling down, not for keep going.

Burnout isn’t a failure of motivation. It’s what happens when you keep forcing motivation past the point where it should have rested. The 2009 post, read literally and followed faithfully, would have probably led you there.

Motivation as a Signal

The revision I’d make to the whole framework: treat low motivation as information rather than malfunction. It’s just a signal, integrated in a bigger dashboard.

When you’re consistently not motivated to do something, one of a few things is true: you’re under-recovered, something else may be hijacking your attention, the goal has shifted and you haven’t updated your commitments, or the thing isn’t actually what you want to be doing. Any of those is worth investigating before reaching for a technique to override the signal.

The things that have kept me genuinely motivated for fifteen years — writing, building, running — don’t require techniques. They simply pull you in, like gravity. What required techniques turned out to be things I was trying to force.

What Works in 2026

The single most reliable source of sustained motivation I’ve found is alignment between what you’re spending time on and what you actually care about. Not what you think you should care about, not what was on your goals list two years ago — it’s what actually pulls you now.

And that’s really not a technique, it’s awareness. Or if you prefer a more technical term: ongoing clarification.

And it doesn’t feel like motivation management. It feels like just paying attention.