There’s always a tug-of-war between discipline and motivation—and if you’ve spent any time chasing big goals, you’ve felt it. The article below, which my longtime friend and partner, Jim Watkins, shared with me, makes a strong case for motivation leading the way. I tend to see this tug-of-war a little differently. I believe that if you want to stay in the game long enough to win, you need both discipline and motivation working together.
Here’s what stood out to me in the article below:
–Learn to like the work, not just the outcome: This is where most people fall off. We love the result but resist the process. Flip that. Ask yourself: What would this look like if it were actually enjoyable? Then experiment until you find a version that clicks. I didn’t know I would love Commercial real estate. I needed a job. Now, I look back and learned to love it and being a commission-only broker.
–Motivation isn’t hype—it’s alignment: Forget the “rah rah” version of motivation. Real motivation is quieter. It’s the internal pull toward something you know matters. When your actions line up with your values and goals, showing up gets a lot easier. Set goals. Track them. Review them. Make them work for you. That is why I am such a believer in goals.
–Use momentum to stay on track: That intrinsic pull is powerful—but it’s not constant. When it fades, don’t stall out. Shift, adjust, and find a new angle that keeps you moving forward. Progress fuels motivation, not the other way around. Great habits, like a morning routine, can make your day.
–Discipline is still your safety net: Motivation gets you started, but discipline keeps you in the game when motivation dips. The days you don’t feel like it? That’s where discipline earns its keep. Build both, because relying on just one is a gamble.
I’m wired to get things done. I’ll use willpower, discipline, motivation—whatever it takes. The real edge comes from knowing when to lean on each.
The Fantastic Life Rule: #8
Use the 2% Rule
Progress doesn’t come from waiting for perfect motivation—it comes from finding small ways to make the work more enjoyable and staying consistent. When you build even a slight pull toward action, it compounds into real momentum.
The Power of “I Like,”or Why Do People Hate the Idea of Motivation?
Kate McKay
Feb 04, 2026
When it comes to reaching goals, sticking with habits, and generally being a high achiever, it’s commonly thought that willpower and discipline are the golden keys to success.
But according to recent research studies, the biggest determining factor in whether someone sticks with a pursuit is simply whether or not they enjoy it.
It hardly mattered whether participants thought an activity was important, knew it would garner significant benefits, and felt very committed to it; if they didn’t like doing the thing, they rarely stayed with it. Adherence to an activity hinged on intrinsic motivation — that the day-to-day effort felt satisfying in its own right. The people who were intrinsically motivated toward their pursuits not only were more likely to stick with them, they didn’t have to exercise willpower to do so.
Brett and I cheered these findings, because they provide scientific backing for a gospel we’ve preached for years: motivation trumps discipline. It joins similar evidence of the same truth, such as the fact that people who seem to exercise the most self-control — because they live such orderly, successful, and seemingly temptation-resistant lives — are actually exercising it the least, in part because they like to engage in the virtuous habits they practice. They’re not white-knuckling their adherence to disciplined behaviors; they do it naturally.
One would think that these findings would be cheered not just by us, but broadly. After all, isn’t it heartening that in some sense, fun beats willpower when it comes to getting where we want in life?
And yet, curiously, Brett and I have found that when we’ve talked about the fact that motivation is, if anything, underrated, people aren’t into it. The message doesn’t resonate. It isn’t popular. But, if we talk about how you need discipline, willpower — grit! — people love it. Banging on about discipline is the can’t-miss road to getting lots of likes and thumbs up.
I’ve spent a lot of time pondering this curious paradox, and trying to figure out what accounts for it. I think the phenomenon is multi-layered and runs surprisingly deep.
I’ll attempt to unpack each of the operative layers below.
Why Do People Hate the Idea of Motivation?
A Misunderstanding of the Relationship Between Effort, Value, and Enjoyment
Here is a truth about life: All valuable endeavors require effort.
People often ingest this truth, but then make some untenable leaps from it that go like this:
All worthwhile things require effort.
Effort is hard.
Hard things are not enjoyable.
Ergo, if something is enjoyable, it must not be valuable.
There are a couple of flaws in this thinking.
The first is the idea that effort is necessarily hard. It’s true that the human brain is lazy, and prefers doing less to doing more. But doing things doesn’t feel difficult when the effort put forth is matched by the rewards the activity produces. If effort is not accompanied by commensurate rewards, it feels hard; if it is, then it just feels like action, and action is enjoyable.
The second error is the idea that hard always equals unpleasant. Climbing a mountain is hard and can have moments that are indeed unpleasant, but can also be very enjoyable. Even when an activity’s moment-to-moment rewards are few, and it feels hard, people can still find the pursuit quite satisfying overall.
So while it’s true that all valuable things require effort, effort does not always feel hard, and even when it does, it isn’t necessarily unpleasant.
While there is a widespread belief that you’ll never accomplish anything worthwhile in life if you just do things you enjoy, this isn’t the case. You can do valuable things and like it.
A Misunderstanding of What It Takes for Other People to Do Effortful Things
Let’s say you have a friend who wakes up at five in the morning, and you would find it a struggle to do likewise. Let’s also say you accept the idea above that some effortful things can be pleasurable.
Nonetheless, you might still assume that your friend’s early-rising habit falls into the category of those efforts that are unpleasurable since that’s how you experience it. You will thus assume that your friend must use discipline to wake up early.
But it’s not only true that effortful things can be enjoyable, it’s also true that different people find different kinds of efforts more or less so.
So it can be the case that while you find waking up early unpleasant, someone else, because of their biology and disposition, actually likes it. They’re not necessarily more disciplined; they just have a different “taste” in effortful things.
My favorite data point on this idea comes from the researcher Daniel F. Chambliss, who conducted a study on the “nature of excellence” by examining what factors resulted in the stratification of competitive swimmers (I recommend listening to the AoM podcast episode Brett did with him). In examining why some swimmers became Olympians and others did not, Chambliss found that:
At the higher levels of competitive swimming, something like an inversion of attitude takes place. The very features of the sport which the “C” swimmer finds unpleasant, the top-level swimmer enjoys. What others see as boring—swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say—they find peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic. They enjoy hard practices, look forward to difficult competitions, try to set difficult goals. Coming into the 5:30 AM practices at Mission Viejo, many of the swimmers were lively, laughing, talking, enjoying themselves, perhaps appreciating the fact that most people would positively hate doing it. It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it.
When we see someone excelling at an effortful endeavor we would find difficult, we assume that they also find it difficult, and thus are utilizing discipline to do it. But discipline may not be what they are in fact operating from; they may have simply chosen an effortful activity for which they are personally particularly well suited — they intrinsically enjoy doing it.
Olympic athletes like their training.
World-class musicians like to practice.
Monks like living the ascetic life.
To paraphrase the writer David Epstein, what looks like grit, is often fit.
A Desire to Attribute Moral Value to Oneself
It’s not only that we tend to attribute the success of others to discipline; we’re also incentivized to attribute our own habits and achievements to this quality.
Studies have shown that people moralize effort. When two people are working on the same task, the person who is working harder is judged as having superior character and being worthier of higher pay and social approval, even when both people produce exactly the same results. The harder someone works, the better a person we assume them to be.
So when someone is examining how it is that they are able to do what they do, they’ve got a stake in attributing their success to discipline. Disciplined people are seen as superior. Disciplined people get the kudos. There’s not much status in saying, “I have these good habits because I enjoy them! I’ve accomplished my goals because I find them fun!” In fact, it could cause people to downgrade their perception of you.
A Resistance to Institutional Change
It’s not just individuals who are incentivized to affirm the idea that all worthwhile efforts must be driven by discipline — so are institutions.
Institutions, like schools and churches, are typically very invested in doing things in certain ways, which have often been formed over decades of time. These ways of doing things can sometimes feel tedious and difficult to participants, and if they complain or push back, the institutions will respond that that is how such things should feel — that all worthwhile endeavors take effort, and effortful things are hard and require discipline.
It’s of course true that some of the fruits of things like faith, learning, and service cannot be obtained without plodding through some unpleasant labors. But it’s also true that many institutional practices could be made more enjoyable than they are; it’s just that the institutions do not have the will to overcome inertia, disrupt the status quo, and implement changes that would make them so. By invoking the necessity of discipline, an institution places the blame for an individual’s lack of engagement on the individual himself; he is made to feel guilty that he is not more intrinsically motivated toward a task, while shutting down consideration of whether structural changes could significantly amplify that motivation.
An Investment in the Idea of Meritocracy
Discipline is a very democratic quality. We would like to believe that everyone has an equal capacity for ginning it up, and that by utilizing it, anyone can accomplish anything they put their mind to. We want to believe that anyone can, say, become a top-tier swimmer, if only they’ve got enough grit.
Desire, on the other hand, is less democratic. While it may sometimes be possible to change what we want to want, that which we find enjoyable or unpleasant is more baked in, inborn. It may not be possible to become someone who likes swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours if that proclivity is not already in you.
As a society, we are very invested in the idea of meritocracy, and the premise that motivation is the real driver of success threatens this sacred scaffolding. It means that your options for the paths you might successfully take in life are limited to those toward which you feel an intrinsic pull. We dislike all talk of limitations — even if the filter can ultimately be more liberating than confining.
A Fear of Cultural Collapse
At this point, you may be thinking, “Katie, I find your incisive arguments and elegant prose compelling (this is what you’re thinking, right?), but just like you said at the start, I’m not resonating with the celebration of motivation over discipline. There’s something, I don’t know . . . viscerally unsettling about it.”
Well, there’s a reason for that, dear reader, and it arises from the deepest layer at work of them all.
People, if not consciously, tend to think, or feel, something like this: “Well, it may work fine to encourage folks to do what they enjoy for the most part, especially in an age of peace and plenty. But, will people who have largely spent their lives doing what they enjoy have the capacity to handle the inevitable parts of life that aren’t pleasant and can’t be made so, like, say, taking care of one’s old and infirm parents? And what if widespread hardships come upon the world — will people who have spent their lives largely doing what they like have the discipline to be able to withstand such storms?”
We fear that if we don’t uphold discipline as the main operative principle for thriving in life, we will not develop citizens with the capacity to do the unpleasant things that keep ordinary society turning round and bolster our safety in the case of a great crisis.
This is a deeply-seated fear indeed, but is it legitimate?
Well, leaving aside the point that, despite the lip service we pay to it, most people aren’t currently using discipline in most of their pursuits anyway, it’s still not the case that encouraging people to do what they enjoy will lead to societal collapse.
That’s because effortful-but-enjoyable pursuits still produce grit and growth. Even when effortful endeavors are enjoyable, they still involve grappling with friction. Even when you feel like pushing through something, you still gain experience with pushing. Experience with hard-but-pleasant things grows your strength and capacity for dealing with hard-and-unpleasant things.
At the same time, no effortful pursuit, no matter how much you like it, is ever 100% enjoyable. There are always unpleasant portions and periods — moments when motivation is insufficient and genuine discipline must be summoned — and these of course build an individual’s resilience and ability to deal with challenges of the wholly disagreeable variety.
In fact, someone who sticks with an effortful-but-enjoyable pursuit — which still contains a small quotient of unpleasantness — for the long term, will actually develop more resilience than someone who pursues an endeavor with a higher quotient of unpleasantness, but quickly abandons it because they dislike it.
We don’t wear sackcloth and ashes every day to prepare ourselves to deal with the death of a loved one. We don’t regularly crawl under barbed wire and practice stabbing burlap bags with a bayonet to prepare for the possibility of getting called up to war. Sure, it’s wise to contemplate death, and keep ourselves functionally fit, but we trust that when and if those exigencies arise, we’ll step up and figure it out when the time comes.
So it is with being prepared for any future difficulties. We needn’t go through life in a perpetual state of deprivation, wearing hairshirts on the daily in order to be calloused enough to face potential adversity. As long as we stay sound of heart, cultivating a commitment to moral virtue, and keep in touch with the capacities for dealing with challenges, we’ll be able to confidently cross that bridge when we get there.
I Like
The ultimate word is I Like. It lies beneath philosophy, and is twined about the heart of life. When philosophy has maundered ponderously for a month, telling the individual what he must do, the individual says, in an instant, ‘I Like,’ and does something else.
—Jack London
I work out for 70 minutes 6X a week. I work 60 hours a week, including on weekends, holidays, and vacations. I hit my deadlines nearly 100% of the time. I’ve been happily married for 20 years. I go to church weekly and keep the faith.
From the outside, I imagine I might look like a very disciplined person. But that wouldn’t be an accurate assumption.
I do not experience exercise, work, marriage, or my religious life as hard, and 95% of the time, these endeavors do not require the utilization of willpower or self-control. Even on those rare times I don’t, say, feel like exercising, it’s not discipline that gets me into the gym; I go through with it because I ultimately want to work out a little more than I don’t.
I don’t perform and stick with the habits and practices in my life because I’m disciplined. I do them because I enjoy them. I like them — a lot!
In high school, I had a bumper sticker on my car, bearing a quote from Ben and Jerry, the ice cream makers: If it’s not fun, why do it? (My car was a Toyota MR2 — appropriate, because that’s about the most fun car you can drive.)
While I do not believe in strictly following that mantra — I think there are things you should do, even when they’re not fun — it has served as a general guiding life philosophy.
Over the years, I’ve observed that many people aren’t as into this philosophy, and above, I’ve endeavored to unpack why.
But regardless of whether they consciously embrace this philosophy or not, everyone is still living it out.
In roles and tasks that are policed by social shame or necessitated by a fundamental need, like paying the bills, people may stick with doing something they don’t like. (And when they do, they will typically be resentful, unhappy, and/or burnt out.)
But in situations where a pursuit may be freely chosen and freely given up, even people who are strongly committed to the idea of discipline will almost invariably abandon pursuits that they don’t intrinsically enjoy.
People who stick with effortful pursuits don’t do so — despite what outside observers and they themselves think — because they’re more disciplined; they largely do it because they like that pursuit.
The real question, then, is not whether you believe in the primacy of intrinsic motivation, but whether you are going to embrace its reality or resist it.
If you resist it, you will have a life filled with more half-finished pursuits, guilt, and frustration, and less fulfillment and success. You will be more apt to settle for suboptimal relationships and situations in the belief that anything worthwhile is supposed to be difficult.
If you embrace it, you will have a life that feels in sync and satisfying — that’s fruitful, joyful, and successful, without the need for self-flagellation.
This doesn’t have to be a choice between living a life of productive striving versus passive ease.
To achieve real happiness, true flourishing, pursuing effortful endeavors is required. But it’s possible to select endeavors that are both effortful and enjoyable.
In nearly every domain in life, there are multiple ways to skin a cat — multiple paths that will take you up the same mountain. Forms of exercise you actually enjoy. Ways of eating that are easy to stick with. A job you’re well suited for. Particular spiritual disciplines you find satisfying. A spouse with whom you royally click.
Living a life based on intrinsic motivation doesn’t mean not doing effortful things — it means leaning into effortful things that you like. Experiment with enough modalities, and everyone can find a way to get where they want to go — while enjoying it.
When people say motivation is fickle, it really just means they haven’t yet tried enough paths to have found the one where motivation could actually become the steadiest of fuels.
There are, of course, tasks and roles that are unavoidably difficult, and still abundantly valuable. But even here, it’s always possible to make them at least a little more engaging, satisfying, and intrinsically motivating by thinking creatively about how things could be better arranged, and asking this question: What would this look like if it was enjoyable?
While happiness gets a lot of attention, many people are, in fact, scared to be happy. They mistrust themselves. They worry that if they’re enjoying themselves, they’re getting away with something they shouldn’t. Finding themselves on a difficult path, people turn hardness into a virtue instead of grappling with the fact that their suffering isn’t necessary, and may not even be redeeming.
Hardness should never be fled from. But neither should it be automatically correlated with value. Hardness is not necessarily a sign you’re on the wrong path, but it’s also not necessarily a sign you’re on the right one. Harder does not always equal better.
Motivation, the power of an intrinsic pull, is an underrated force. You’ll go farther in life when you don’t have to forever flagellate yourself to keep pressing forward, and would actually find it harder to stop than to continue on. You will do more, reach higher, live more joyfully, and even best develop your character when you choose an effortful path you really, truly like.