People Don't Need Motivation, They Need High Quality Information

Motivation is big business and with the changes that have been thrust upon society leaving their habitual mark, the business of motivation will only grow as people seek outlets to deal with and overcome many of the difficulties these changes have levied upon them. But people don’t need motivation, they need high quality information. I am frequently described as one of those “motivation” people. I understand why and I somewhat resent the label because I believe it to be misleading. I write and speak about human behavior. More specifically, I write and speak about the empirical mechanisms of human behavior and how understanding this helps us to optimize our lives in the ways we desire. I am an avid seeker of knowledge and high quality information and I simply share what I learn. People have been duped into this world of motivation because it is in fact big business. I view this as a branch off the tree of the opioid of the masses. We live in a celebrity culture. People want what others have or have perceived to achieve. People are constantly presented with the “should” of their existence. We all have wants and desires. Too often we confuse our wants with our needs and vice versa. Few of us lack motivation for wanting something but we lack knowing how to go about getting it……but we think we know and that’s where our obstacles are. The population of the United States is three fourths overweight and more than a third is clinically obese. The money spent on the fitness, weight loss, and nutritional supplement industry, which is over one hundred billion dollars annually, speaks to people’s wants about improving their health and losing weight. The motivation is obviously present. Reading a personal development book or listening to someone speak is not what makes someone want to get healthier. The emotional trigger from the book or speaker can serve as an impetus for initial action but emotions and feelings wane and when that happens so does the behavior it triggers. We all have within us mechanisms of behavior. These are processes no one on the planet has control over. These are things like habits and our mindset. No matter who you are you have habits, and you have a mindset governed by a narrative that largely determines how you think and perceive things. What you have control over is how you color these mechanisms and processes. This is high quality information. A few years ago, I challenged myself to read one hundred books in twelve months. This experience served as the premise for my first book, Change the Narrative. I realized that the very first thing I needed to do to start to absorb as much high quality information as possible was to acknowledge how little I knew. I needed to accept how ignorant I was about an almost infinite number of things. It was the only way to manually flip the learning switch to enhance the behavioral processes within me that we all have within us. There are many reasons most of us never manually flip that learning switch, but it is the only way to successfully navigate a world in which we have too much access to too much information. Ninety-nine percent of the information out there is noise, it’s junk food for the mind and you will not be able to separate the signal from the noise until you start to build a repertoire of high quality information. The more information you ingest, the more your filters will start to separate items and you will start to questions those things that don’t fit. In time the noise will stand out so boldly that it will irritate you and making the differentiation between the two will occur habitually. You already want to improve yourself and be better at making decisions. You don’t need to be motivated, you need high quality information and just have to hone the process of obtaining it.