Your Problem Isn't Actually Motivation
Near the very top of my short list of books that every musician should read is James Clear’s Atomic Habits. I have read it multiple times and each time through it makes me a better performer, teacher, and entrepreneur.
He makes so many great points in that book that I find it hard not to highlight entire pages at a time. But one point in particular has stood out to me each time I’ve read the book.
In the chapter “The Best Way to Start a New Habit”, Clear writes the following about motivation:
“Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.”
This applies to the practice room as well as to developing the skills needed to further a portfolio career.
If, for example, you have been telling yourself for months that you are going to build a website and haven’t done so yet, you don’t lack motivation. There is a good chance you are quite motivated to have a website. That’s why you wanted one in the first place.
What you lack is the clarity that comes from having a specific plan that includes a clear next step.
For a long time the website for The Entrepreneurial Musician was just a part of my personal site, andrewhitz.com. There are some benefits to setting it up that way, but eventually I came to the conclusion that it would be best to spin it off as its own website. That was when I decided to build tem.fm.
But in spite of being motivated to make it happen and a decision having been made, it took almost two full years until there was actually a website! So where was the lack of clarity?
I decided I wanted to build this website on a platform that was new to me, Wordpress. There were specific advantages to using Wordpress and having familiarity with that platform was a skill that would serve me well moving forward. I was all in.
Then came all the decisions I had to make. Where would I have my site hosted? Which plan would I sign up for? Should I go for a paid Wordpress theme or a free one? Should I survey fellow musicians to find a theme or would it be best to go with a popular one?
The number of decisions I had to make on this very powerful and new to me platform was many times over more than the websites I had built in the past using Squarespace. In fact, there were so many decisions to be made that I never quite figured out which one should be made first so I barely made any of them.
All of this was complicated by the fact that I am fully capable of learning everything there is to learn about the Wordpress platform. With a lot of work, all of it would be well within my technical abilities.
When I combine the belief that I could learn Wordpress with the feeling that I should learn it and with a lack of clarity about what my next move should be I predictably kept myself busy with other things. For like 22 months!
In retrospect, if I had sought a resource that led me through the entire process from the very beginning I would have checked off each box one by one and made it happen. I’m sure there are countless online courses and YouTube channels dedicated to this very thing. That’s where I easily could have gotten clarity about the entire process.
The main takeaway for me is that when trying to learn about myself and why that process was such a failure for so long it would be a mistake to conclude that I only lacked motivation when in fact it was a total lack of clarity that led to my inaction.
So there is a very good chance that your problem is not motivation, but clarity.