How To Stay Motivated When You’re Feeling Lazy (Animated)

- [Mitch] Do you hate to wake up early? Or to go to the gym or to work hard in school or at your job? Do you often postpone the work that you know you should do?

Or maybe you just wish that somebody else would do it for you. If you answered yes to any of those questions then the world has probably told you that you are lazy or that you're a procrastinator who lacks motivation. At least, this is what I was personally told.

And for a long time I believed them. I bought into their BS and I labeled myself as that lazy procrastinator who would never achieve any great academic success, and I carried this mediocre mindset of getting mediocre grades and putting in mediocre effort all the way up until my college years. But one day I was presented with the opportunity to study abroad in Europe.

And this got me really excited, and nothing ever remotely related to school had ever got me excited. And I started to imagine myself laying on the beach in Italy or eating churros in Spain or going to a party in the Czech Republic. And after weeks of research I decided that I wanted to study abroad in Lisbon, Portugal because it had everything that I had wanted.

In my mind going to Lisbon was going to be the thing that would make all my academic struggles worthwhile. At that time it was the most important thing in my life. But when I was talking to one of my professors about the exchange program I learned a few interesting things.

I learned that Portugal was the number one most popular choice among all the students, so there was going to be some competition. And then I learned that my university chooses where all the students go based on how good their grades are. And at this time mine were okay at best.

And then I learned that only four students are selected to go to Portugal, which meant that if I wanted to go to Portugal my grades needed to be in the top 1% of my entire business program. So it was me, the lazy procrastinator, going against all the other kids who had dedicated their entire lives to school. That was my competition.

So the next day I started to study really, really hard, way more than I ever had in my entire life. I can still remember walking through the library and seeing the other kids from my class who I knew wanted to go to Portugal, and we would just make eye contact with each other and we would just have this intensity in our eyes because we both knew that we were competing for the same thing. So the stakes were really, really high.

As the semester went on my grades got higher and higher and my social life became more and more nonexistent. But one morning near the end of my semester my mom said something to me that was really interesting. She said, "I have never seen you work this hard in school.

"Maybe you aren't a procrastinator after all. " And this line really got me thinking because during that particular semester no teacher, no student or parent would say that I was lazy. In fact, they would say that I'm a really hard worker who really gets after it.

But in the previous semester, just five months ago, those same people would all say that I was a procrastinator and that I was lazy, so which is it? I can't be both, can I? The truth is, is that no human being is just one thing.

Nobody here is 100% lazy or 100% not lazy. I first really understood this idea back in the 10th grade where I would do anything to procrastinate doing my homework because I hated school. But I would put everything on hold in order to play a computer game called StarCraft II, which is actually a national sport in South Korea.

And I would spend hours just researching how to get better at StarCraft. I would practice my skills, practice different strategies, and at one point I actually beat one of the top 200 players in North America. I'm not saying this to brag.

I'm saying this to make a point that when it came to school I was really lazy but when it came to gaming I was the opposite. So the question, how do I stop being lazy isn't actually a great question to ask yourself. A much better question would be why am I feeling lazy?

And the reason why I was feeling lazy and why probably most of you are feeling lazy is because we were all doing the wrong thing. Maybe you're studying the wrong stuff or you're working at the wrong job. When you feel lazy you should pay attention and take notes because sometimes that is your intuition or your body or spirit or whatever you wanna call it saying to you, hey, you're doing the wrong thing.

Do something else. So when you're feeling lazy and you truly want to feel motivated again, you need to understand these two key things. The first one is to make sure you know the why behind what you are doing.

Because if you have this you will always be able to do those things that you don't really want to do, but they are stuff that you need to do. For me, it was being motivated to do well in school in order to go to Europe. And yes, I did actually end up going to Portugal.

So the lazy procrastinator won. So there's hope for all of us. And two, and this is the best option in my opinion, is to start doing something that you're actually passionate about, because life is short.

If you have not found the thing that you really love to do, then you need to start at the very least looking for it, otherwise, you will wake up at the age of 80 and think to yourself, man, I spent my whole life doing the wrong thing. And this image is really scary to me. But Mitch, how do I find something that I'm passionate about?

The number one best way to do this is to try new things. Unfortunately, despite what the movies tell you, your passion is not just gonna appear one day. It's not gonna come into your dream or just come into your life.

It's something that you will actually have to go and search for. And the best resource that I found to discover your passion is a website called Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community that can literally teach you any skill you want.

They have over 25,000 classes in design, business, technology. They can even teach you how to become a successful YouTuber or a successful animator or a writer or a photographer. And the first 500 people who sign up using my link in the description will gain access to all of this 100% free for the first two months, and the last time I talked about Skillshare I think like 500 people signed up in the first hour.

So, if you click it and it's still there, consider yourself very lucky. Let's make 2020 the year where we finally start doing the things that we love to do. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you soon.