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I know we’re all supposed to be 100% motivated, 100% of the time. We’re supposed to wake up, and check Instagram, and read a bunch of motivational ideas and then just spring out of bed, ready to rumble. But that’s not reality.
The reality is, sometimes we’re kind of a great big race of slobs. Sometimes we can put a human on the moon, sure, but other times we eat Oreos in bed and we call in sick to work, and we do anything we can to avoid facing the work and the shit that we don’t want to do.
You know what? I’m done beating myself up about that. I’m done setting myself the goal of working out at 6 AM every Monday morning, and then missing the goal most of the time, and then feeling like I’m a failure for the rest of the week.
I read this awesome piece yesterday, by a gun writer named Bianca Bass who I’ve somehow not discovered until now:
Some days you thrive, and others you merely survive. Some days you want to lean in, and others you want to just lie the fuck down. It’s impossible to be everything for everyone. But if you treat yourself with a little more acceptance and understanding, you’ll find you have so much more to give.
Wow. Fuck yes. Sometimes, you have to say that it’s okay to not be switched on. It’s okay not give 110% of yourself, and it’s okay to just not be up to doing something.
Why Doing Nothing Is Ok
It doesn’t make you a monster. It doesn’t make you a bad person, or a failure, or anything else. Holding yourself to a standard that you can’t bear to see fractured is a sure way to stumble, fall and stay down.
So here goes nothing.
I’m not the put together person that a lot of my readers think I am. I TRY. But I fail a lot of the time, and I’m okay with that.
I’ve eaten McDonald’s twice this week already. I’ve slept through my gym alarm 3 days in a row. I’ve been putting off answering emails since last Friday. I’m not arsed to post on Snapchat right now.
But wait. There’s more.
I still haven’t got around to buying the writing app I want to use for my book, so I’m putting it together in Evernote because I don’t want to go through the effort. I ~never make my bed in the morning, and I maintain my daily journal 3 of 7 days a week.
All of that makes me a pretty human kind of guy. It certainly shows that I’m a dude full of imperfections. And that’s totally fine by me. A lot of people are going to want me to be always on top of everything, all the time, and to those people, I say this — I don’t feel like it.
Life is messy. It’s always messy.
So embrace the mess and the chaos, learn to let it go, and remember — motivation might be the entrepreneur’s holy fucking grail, but you’re not a monster if you can’t find it all the time.
About The Author
[This post by Jon Westenberg first appeared on Medium and has been reproduced with permission.]
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