Establish You Why

Behind anything and everything we do there is always a “why”. Our why is our reason for doing something, it is the thing that motivates us to push through when adversity arises.

But if we aren’t careful, we will forget what our why is, or we will never find it in the first place.

I found that when I was younger, I didn’t have to search for my why. I always had a mission between school and sports, and my why behind everything had to do with being the best I could be in those two areas.

I lifted and did cardio because my why was wanting to get better at football. I studied hard in high school because I wanted to get into a good college, and in college because I wanted to get a good job. It was straight forward and easy to have a well-defined why.

But as you grow older, and you lose all of the structure in your life that your parents and school provided, the importance of spending time developing your own why in everything that you do, grows.

When I graduated college, I knew I wanted to do something more than work a traditional 9-5, so I started trying new things and bouncing all over the place.

I thought about becoming a real estate investor, starting a bookkeeping company, and picking up an additional part time job.

But every time I started one of these ventures, it didn’t take long before I gave up, and I couldn’t figure out why I kept losing all motivation at the first sign of adversity.

After some deep reflection and reading several books on purpose, goals, and discipline, I discovered that in all of those things I never had a clear, or strong, why for doing them.

My why was weak and vain, it was almost purely to make more money because I thought that that would bring me some additional layer of comfort and happiness.

After I learned the importance of starting off by developing my why, I found that I had much more success, and motivation to push through adversity, because I truly believed in what I was doing, and I had a powerful reason for doing it.

Tips on finding your why

You will have a why for everything that you do, sometimes one why can cover multiple areas in your life.

The first thing you need to know is that the most powerful why’s come from outside of ourselves. We will work significantly harder when the motivating factor is someone else.

Think about someone you really care about. You will work much harder to ensure you don’t let them down, than you will work to make sure you don’t let yourself down.

You can still motivate yourself to move towards certain goals, but the problem is that it is a lot easier to tell yourself that its not worth it, or that you can try again later, or that you can’t do it, than telling someone who is depending on you.

The second thing you should keep in mind is that people will move away from pain twice as hard as they will move towards pleasure.

Think about this scenario. Say you can go on the vacation of a lifetime with your family, super luxurious, everything you’ve ever dreamed of, but its going to cost $20,000 and you have till the end of the month to come up with the money. That’s a big ask.

Now consider this, your mom or dad is sick and needs a life saving operation to be performed if they are going to make it. It’s going to cost $20,000, and you have till the end of the month to get the money.

You will do anything and everything it takes to get the money to save your parents, you will fight through any adversity, but odds are you wouldn’t do the same thing for that dream vacation.

 Whenever you take on anything that is new, anything that is big, anything that will require real perseverance to get through, you will need to determine your why from the outset. If you consider these two factors of making your why about someone else, and making it about avoiding pain, I can assure you that you will be much more motivated to attain your goal.

Go out, determine your why, work towards you goal, and make something better today. Good luck.