by Voyage | Nov 7, 2017 | Blog post, Book to Film
A LOOK AT THE ‘DO SOMETHING PRINCIPLE’ & SELF- MOTIVATING By nature, writing is a solitary exercise. Most of us don’t sit in an office full of other writers to bounce our ideas off of. Similarly, there’s no boss to get on our case about making those edits to our screenplay or completing our next chapter. So in order to move a project forward, we have to motivate ourselves to get it done. But sometimes self-motivation can feel like the most daunting task in the world—like an un-climbable mountain… But what if there was a way to eliminate the necessity to self-motivate to achieve a goal? What if there was a way to alter the way we think about the relationship between motivation and action? Consider this… Action isn’t just the effect of motivation, but also the cause. What if, instead of identifying motivation as the cause of our actions, we thought of our actions as the cause of motivation? Think of it this way: action is always within reach. It is always possible to do something. Even if that something is writing a few crappy pages, you can take the action of writing and harness your reaction to it as a way to begin motivating yourself. Plus, you will often find that you’re actually inspired by the act of writing itself and are able to turn those crappy pages into your next masterpiece (and even if it’s not a masterpiece, it’s something!) The mere action of writing will inspire new thoughts and ideas. But that new insight will never come if you simply sit around and contemplate it....
