Doing It For Me

One of the great struggles I have always had in my life is simply being consistent with anything, continuing to follow it, staying with it.  I have picked up half a hundred ideas or things to do in my time; most of them fall by the wayside of life as I move on.

Why is this?  It's not as if these things were harmful  and needed to be dropped, nor that didn't want to persevere in them.  It's just that, well, the motivation seemed to go away.

An example:  I have always struggled with exercise in my life.  At best I was semi-physically motivated as a child and no team sport player.  This has dogged me in my later years, especially when physical activity is almost a necessity for health.  I have spurts: I go for a while, seem to reach a point where I feel I've accomplished something, then suddenly stop.  Every time I try to pick it back up it seems to be more difficult to do so.

Why is this?  It's not as if I don't know the benefits of exercise.  It's not as if I don't feel better after I do it.  But for some reason, all of these points fail to motivate me on.

Then it occurred to me yesterday:  who am I doing this for?

The reality came that more often than not, I do these things not for myself, but for the notice they get me.

I've written before how motivated I am by the approval of others.  I found a new layer of it yesterday as I considered the reasons I chose to do so many things:  it was not just because they were interesting (they were) or I liked to do them (I did), it was also because it was a topic of novelty and discussion among others, an attention-getter for me.  The problem, of course, is that when the attention goes away, so does the reason for doing them.

We cannot ever really succeed or make good in anything that we do not do for ourselves.  That's a bold statement I know, and might be construed as selfishness by some.  But the reality is that unless we have a personal interest and stake in anything - not based on outside circumstances or outside people - we will eventually stop doing those things because the reward is not what we need to keep us going when the going gets difficult - and at some point, it will.

I confess that this is a difficult thing for me - the idea of self-committing to a goal and seeking the reward when measured against myself rather than any outside influence.  It's not something I think I have done before, at least not regularly:  so many other activities of my life seemed to be done to please or get the attention of someone else.

But difficult or not, it is time to change.  I cannot continue to dip my toes in the water of life and pull them away when others leave the pool, looking for where they will go next so I can dip my toes in too.  It's time to decide what rivers to go in myself and take the plunge.  If others come too, great:  we'll float together.  But if they don't, that still cannot influence my thought to stay in the river and ride it once I'm in.

To do the first is to simply become a copy of what's desirable and popular.  To do the second is to become the individual one was meant to become.