Don’t rely on Motivational posts!!

Rather than relying on some motivational post, start respecting your enemies. Yes, you read that right. And it is because they bring out the best in you.

Reading a random motivational post won’t boost you up. Maybe for a fraction of a second you will be moved by it, but a short while later you will have forgotten it entirely.

But if someone you cannot stand says something harsh about you, you don’t let it sit. You put every effort into proving them wrong. It works like a trigger. None of us want to be the guilty one in front of others. We all want to be in the good books.

Sometimes the nasty things said about you are true. Sometimes they are said purely to damage your standing with other people. Whatever the reason, we do everything we can to prove them wrong.

Why the post never sticks

So here it is. If we read a post, we do not put in any effort to actually change. If we hear the same thing from somebody else, we are moved to act. It is human nature.

I think I understand why now, better than I did when I first wrote this.

A motivational post costs nothing to agree with. You read it, you feel briefly understood, you tap the like, and the feeling of having agreed with it is almost indistinguishable from the feeling of having done something. That is the trap. It gives you the emotional payoff of change without any of the change. It is a snack that tastes like a meal.

An insult from someone you dislike is different. It has a face attached to it. It has stakes. It creates a specific, uncomfortable gap between how you are seen and how you want to be seen, and discomfort is the only thing I have ever seen reliably move a person off the sofa.

Remember: reading something and hearing the same thing from another person have completely different impacts on us. We rarely apply what we read. We respond much faster to something said to our face.

Be careful what you take from them

I want to add a caution, because this idea can go badly wrong if you run with it too far.

Using criticism as fuel is useful. Letting the critic set your destination is not.

There is a version of this where you spend a decade building a life designed entirely to make one specific person regret something, and you get there, and it is empty, because you never actually wanted the thing. You wanted to win an argument from years ago that the other person almost certainly stopped thinking about.

So take the energy. Leave the direction. When someone’s comment lights a fire in you, the useful question is not “how do I prove them wrong” - it is “is the thing they said actually true, and do I want to change it for my own reasons?”

Sometimes the honest answer is yes, and their rudeness handed you something genuinely useful in an ugly wrapper. Sometimes the answer is no, they were wrong, and you can put it down.

The point is that you decide. Not the post, and definitely not them.

What actually changes behaviour

If a post cannot change you and an insult can, it is worth asking what else works - because relying on enemies for motivation is a poor long-term plan.

In my experience, three things move people reliably. A deadline someone else can see. A person who will notice if you don’t. And having made the first step so small that not doing it would be absurd.

Notice what those have in common. None of them are feelings. All of them are structures you set up in advance, while you are motivated, so that you don’t need motivation later.

That is the honest answer to the whole genre. Inspiration is not the input. It is a nice by-product of having already started.

-kashish