"I can't do this, Sam": A Post About Motivation

This post contains Lord of the Rings spoilers!

Last weekend, I finished watching the The Lord of the Rings trilogy with my family. And man, is Frodo relatable. He’s always struggling to get motivated, especially in the second and third movies.

How do you make yourself want to do what you have to do? It’s a question I’m learning to answer all the time in the age of COVID.

Before I proceed, I want to clarify that I’m talking about motivation, not responsibility. This post is for the person who knows what they must do and that they alone are responsible for doing it. You volunteered to get that dang ring to Mordor, and you’re going to make it happen.

That said, it sure would make your life easier if you felt motivated.

For this responsible but demotivated person, I have a word of encouragement that comes from researcher Susan David’s theory of emotional agility.

She has found that it is beneficial to treat negative emotions as signposts of your values instead of identifying with them. So instead of saying to yourself, “I’m not motivated today,” you might say, “I’m noticing that I’m feeling demotivated. What does this mean about what I value?”

(The same thing goes for sadness, anger, and other negative emotions. Right now, I want to focus on demotivation.)

By this logic, you would lead yourself to the conclusion that you value passion and purpose in your project. When you identify the value, David says, you can then choose a course of action more effectively.

So that leads you to another question: what are some courses of action that connect you to passion and purpose?

For me, as a Christian and a reader, one action that comes to mind is reading a favorite passage from the Bible, such as Romans 8.

I can also remind myself of the reason I’m invested in the task at hand. What incentivizes me to get this dang ring to Mordor?*

“Well, Mr. Frodo,” says Sam at the end of The Two Towers, “we have to save the Shire. And this will make a great story later on.” (My paraphrasing.)

There you go. Two reasons Frodo will want to get to Mordor.

Note that Sam might have also said, “Well, Mr. Frodo, we’ve got to save Middle Earth.” And he’d be exactly right. But Sam knew that it would be more effective to remind Frodo of their small corner of the world and their personal investment in the journey.

Although I believe that the above approaches are effective, I recognize that they might seem abstract and intellectual. If you’re already deep in a demotivated rut, you may not be at all inclined to step back and read or think about your values on your own. I know I’ve been in that spot before.

In light of this, I want to conclude with a more concrete method which Rachael Stephen shared on YouTube. Stephen is a novelist, and when she doesn’t feel like writing, she uses “the bus stop method.” She envisions herself waiting at a bus stop for her “writer self” to arrive.

The key here is that the bus stop represents the state of sitting at your desk and putting sentences together, even if you know they aren’t any good. If you’re in this state long enough, good material will come together eventually.

Stephen adds that if you’re still having an especially difficult time, you can go deeper into the metaphor and assign a time interval that you plan to wait at the stop. Then, you can say to yourself, “I am going to wait at x number of 20-minute stops, and if my bus still hasn’t arrived, I’ll call it a day.”

This strategy isn’t so much about finding motivation as it is for getting yourself in a productive rhythm until you feel motivated. And sometimes, that’s what the situation calls for.

So here’s what I’m learning right now:

• Noticing that I’m not motivated is a sign that I want to be motivated; this is a good thing.

• Remind myself of my personal investment in the task.

• If all else fails, keep going while I wait for my motivation to arrive.

*In case you were wondering, this is how I would have titled the works in The Lord of The Rings series:

• Book 1: Don’t Put on That Dang Ring!!!

• Book 2: Keep that Dang Ring Off Your Finger!!!

• Book 3: Can Someone Please Throw that Dang Ring into the Volcano???