------- Digression alert! -------
I just can't go on without quoting William James (1891):
Quote:
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We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital principle within us protests against the ordeal. Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, "I must get up, this is ignominious," etc.; but still the warm couch feels too delicious, the cold outside too crueL and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of bursting the resistance and passing over into the decisive act. Now how do we ever get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery connected with the day's life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, "Hollo! I must lie here no longer"—an idea which at that lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects.
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------- / digression -------
Now back to business...
Quote:
Originally Posted by notz
... let's assume I know plenty and I know what I need to do. Further, let's say I have no denial about what I'm really up to. Where then, do I get motivation to "jump start" me, if you will?
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If we assume all of the above and you still find yourself waiting/wishing for motivation, then we have a paradox.
I've long suspected that quite a few paradoxes center on what we "need" to do. For openers, I submit that if we really needed to do it we'd already be doing it -- so there would appear to be something we need even
more than we need to do whatever it is that we're not doing. Resisting doing it would seem to be a way, possibly a maladaptive one, of addressing
that need. How's this for an example:
I need to shine my shoes but even more than that, I need to show you that you can't make me shine them.