Become Blissfully Motivated by Reclaiming What Compulsory Schooling Stole from You

How to build a life on your terms

At what point did you notice the difficulty of staying motivated over the long term?

You might be familiar with this cycle: You identify something you want, and consistently work toward it for a few weeks or months. But gradually, your motivation wanes.

I’ve found that two central qualities determine whether our motivation stays robust enough to help us materialize what we want.

Ultimately, whether your goals become the raw material for your hero’s journey or burnt trash forgotten on the sands of time depends on simple factors within your control: the potency and longevity of your motivation.

The first ingredient is an unadulterated, pleasurable sense of alignment with the goal (potency). It’s also worth considering the durability of that motivation (longevity). How long can your nervous system sustain its connection with that firey, creative force?

Usually, when we meet our goals and enjoy the journey while doing it, we’re accessing a raw, juicy, and earth-moving form of desire. This self-led desire (we might also use Napoleon Hill’s phrase, the burning desire) nurtures feelings of gratification as we’re pursuing the goal, making it natural and fun to stay motivated.

But self-led desire has an estranged sister mainlined into the neck veins of our collective psychology. It’s called extrinsic motivation: Money, prestige, fame.

Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation: The Standoff that Haunts Every Would-Be Life Transformation

The problem with extrinsic motivation is that it reflects a hierarchical relationship. When you’re motivated by the need for security, approval, or other factors outside yourself, you can get caught in a child psychology vortex: you’re relating to your aspirations as if they were your Mommy or Daddy.

In the same way a child is emotionally dependent on their caregivers, extrinsic motivators can feel like they wield power over us. When you act as if the outer world holds the power and brashness to deny or bestow you with safety, love, and other deep needs, you become needy.

You prioritize whatever acrobatics will keep these sought-after states in steady supply. In short, you enter a survivalist mentality that keeps you apart from the most powerful force on the planet: the exuberance that comes with doing what you do because you want to, and because it simply feels good.

We forget that the people who reach the heights of success tend to do so because they stopped seeing whatever they were doing as work or as means to an end. Instead, their burning desire for a result became a form of gratification in itself.

You can regain touch with self-led motivation: it’s the adventure of your life.

As you do, you’ll find it natural and joyful to pursue and satisfy your goals. You’ll feel meaning and gratification in your journey as much as in your desired result. But to get to this place, you first should understand what strained your connection to your self-led desires in early life.

Attachment-Based Mind Control 101

“Do I live according to my deepest truths or to fulfill someone’s expectations? One cannot be autonomous as long as one is driven by relationship dynamics, by guilt or attachment needs, by hunger for success, by the fear of the boss or boredom. The reason is simple: autonomy is impossible as long as one is driven by anything.” Gabor Maté

Most people lose connection with their creative, life-rearranging force (self-led desire) because they go through decades of social programming. It’s called compulsory schooling. This corporate-funded system whets the average person’s palette for lifelong denial of their yearnings and urges in the service of external incentive structures.

The Underground History of American Education makes the case that a primary effect of traditional, Rockefeller-funded education is that it conditions people to externalize motivation.

They lose touch with their creativity and intellectual curiosity, relegating everything that doesn’t result in money or social approval to the background. This is a cornerstone of a system built to serve corporate America, not the individual.

“Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: The wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a system’s perspective […] Most of us tacitly allow every kind of psychic violence to be inflicted on [the student] to fulfill the prime directive of the system: putting children in their place.” John Taylor Gatto

Being subjects to a state-led curriculum at the age of five, being baptized in existential motifs in Russian literature, tent-making bats, and other programs we wouldn’t have chosen ourselves infused an emotional standard into our subconscious.

No matter your experience in school, the system imprinted your psyche with a nagging, pedantic “gotcha!” sense of pressure and force. From an early age, you had to “get with a program” outside yourself. It was one you didn’t choose, and that was, in many ways, of questionable relevance to your life.

Having a life directed by external commands meant to prop up a system (not empower the individual) was inherently disorienting. Because what a school does makes sense from a system’s perspective but disempowering from an individual perspective, most people lose touch with their inner source of authority.

“Do it this way!”

“Focus on this, not that,” the system screamed.

These injunctions likely manifest in your life now: They play out in dull, yet constant feelings of obligation. That sense of going through the motions, the “just-get-it-done” urge to rush through what feel like boulders in front of your leisurely hours.

You know you need to prove something but whatever you prove is never enough to silence the nagging voice in your head.

Or if it is, the feelings of ease don’t last long, and the next morning you’re still throwing back espresso, dark chocolate, and aspirin, and pretending you’re not bored.

The Birth of the Divided Will

“Give me a child at age seven, and I’ll show you who they become.” — Aristotle

School’s central message was the call to relegate our personal desires to the background, or at best, make them secondary to whatever offered economic or social approval.

As a result, we lost touch with the capacity to feel that spark of motivation and follow it without contraction, analysis, self-punishment, or fear of wasting time.

When you filter your desires through standards like “Is this practical?” or “How can this help me get ahead?” you learn to direct your life from a submissive and apathetic standpoint.

This is a motivation-straining, will-to-live warping cult of tedium. It’s the sense that every action you take carries an element of force.

School was the first vector to alienate you from an understanding of desire as a dynamic, creative resource you can use to direct your reality. But it’s just a single manifestation of a force that haunts every human life — self-betrayal.

Our estrangement from our self-led desires can be as simple as assuming what we truly want to do is best relegated to the status of a hobby or something we only focus on after completing the “real” work.

Usually, when people consider why they prioritize “practical” activities over others, they’ll make statements like: “I can’t just do what I want all the time. I need money. Before long, I’d feel the effects of following whatever I feel like in the form of starvation or other physical dangers.”

You might also say that humans enjoy working: it helps them emotionally regulate.

But it’s still worth considering the consequences of the school system’s fundamental injunctions. It encouraged our tacit agreement with the idea that it’s normal for our everyday life to feel vaguely unsatisfying: straining, tedious, or at the very least peripheral to our real concerns and motivations.

We gave up on the prospect of feeling on fire with our daily lives before we even knew we had the choice.

This is the birth of the divided will. It causes us to fight and discipline ourselves in the service of goals. We often see our desires as obstacles to silence or overcome rather than the very channels we can pursue to get what we want.

But there’s a way out. If you decide to embrace the obligations (and the desires) currently in front of you, they become the fodder for your momentum, putting you into a more fulfilled place that causes the world to open its doors to you.

The Flow State: A Magic Carpet Ride Back into Real Desire

I’ve argued that the school system warps our relationship with desire, causing us to normalize a force-based relationship to our goals and daily life pursuits. This inner disorientation is at the heart of the struggle to be consistently and potently motivated.

When a person grows up with directives for how to structure their time and direct their focus, they forget the power embedded in completely aligning with the right process, putting all the force of their desire behind it.

If going through the motions, and doing things just to “get them done,” is a residual effect of the heavy hand of compulsory schooling, flow states are portals back into a self-led life.

The flow state is the zone where challenge meets skill, where time falls away and we become purely immersed in the task at hand. We’re no longer checking our watch, yawning, and thinking about dinner. Instead, we’re effortlessly enthusiastic to the extent that we lose sight of the end goal, and the process becomes our source of gratification. It’s also a reliable way to introduce potency and longevity back into our motivation.

Research into the psychology of flow suggests that people with “autotelic personalities” are those who most readily experience flow states. Autotelic means “having a purpose in and not apart from itself.” People familiar with the magic of flow are skilled in the art of doing what they do for its own sake rather than focusing on the result.

Granted, if you dislike the job, relationship, or whatever else currently stands in front of you, this can, at first, seem difficult.

One of the most prevalent ways compulsory schooling scars adults is by leading them to pursue career trajectories based primarily on extrinsic reward: They become irritable doctors, lawyers, or corporate employees who spend their mornings wishing they could go back to bed, and their afternoons wondering when they can have their first drink.

This loop of disliking your circumstances but lacking the presence to change them can last 40 years if not broken. But aiming to become autotelic can serve as the foundation and a source of momentum you can use to make the shift into a more aligned, self-led life.

Even if you don’t currently like your work or daily lifestyle, you can still tap into flow, and you’ll operate from a more powerful, present-focused perspective that will give you the persistence and drive that become platforms for change in your circumstances.

Absorption: Unlocking the Doorway into Flow

Easy access to flow begins with the realization that light-hearted enjoyment is innate to consciousness; it’s always available, just beneath the threshold of our psyches if we’re attentive. I often return to a concept I saw in Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life:

“Fun isn’t so much a feeling as an exhaust produced when an operator can treat something with dignity.” Ian Bogost

Enjoyment becomes accessible when we stop looking for conditions that allow us to like what we’re doing. Instead, we merge with the task by giving it our complete, unadulterated attention.

This is a way of honoring yourself and your task, recognizing that the unique insights held within it are only possible to find when you commit to giving it your undivided presence.

One access point for this level of presence I learned from holistic practitioner and doctor of the soul Kelly Brogan, MD. She suggested looking at yourself — and in this case, your task — as if you were a lover gazing on the beloved. From this vantage point, you effortlessly connect with the largess and the majesty of the object of your gaze.

You find it natural to perceive the gift within your activities because you see beyond their concrete details.

You gain insights into the subtle ways that simply taking your time and paying attention can transform your life, bringing answers to your current predicament — if only you maintain the curiosity to see how.

While this can sound like cognitive dissonance, or at worst, a form of Stockholm syndrome (“Just pretend you like your work until you do!), absorption is a lever you can pull, and it’s the central doorway into an immersive life.

Think about the concept introduced by writer Neville Goddard: don’t think about what you want, think from the perspective of already having it. Said differently, to materialize a circumstance, you must operate as if it were already yours by stepping into the feeling of the wish fulfilled.

When you find entry points for absorption into a task, you access your inner enthusiast. It’s only from this vantage point that opportunities for enjoyment and meaningful immersion multiply. If this sounds overly optimistic or pollyannaish, tell your inner dictator to sit down and consider this.

Recognizing the resources already present within the recesses of our psyche — or even in the seemingly mundane tasks that populate our to-do lists — can transform the way we perceive our reality, making it easier to generate and feel moved by raw and powerful channels for self-led desire.

If you take your time you will come into contact with parts of yourself that have been shut away. You will need the abilities and energies of these shut-away parts to confront the challenges of the present and future. — Jordan Peterson

In many ways, the intuition that compulsory schooling stole from you is this: you already have everything you need to build the life you want.

Transformation is a product of slight turns of your perceptual nobs or a method of re-sequencing pieces you already have. It’s not the result of manipulating external coordinates — fame, money, approval — so they give you what you think you lack.

Instead of disowning the parts of your experiences that feel grueling or otherwise uncompelling, you recognize that embracing, rather than denying, those tasks and qualities, is what gives you the presence to be the skillful wielder of the experience-transforming desire.

You practice the art of uniting with your experience, instead of trying to judge or reshape it from the sidelines. When you do this, you’re free.

Thank you for reading! For more on flow-based living, read more here: