We live in a world where we’re given a thousand different choices, all designed to make us as happy, contented and comfortable as possible. For many people, comfort can become a Dominant Value. Everything from ready meals, to escalators, to one-click shopping is designed to make our life easier. But at the same time we are living in a world that is rapidly cognitively stratifying. As manufacturing is taken up by developing countries, in the first world we expect that everybody should be capable of, and interested in doing, ‘value-added’ cognitive work instead.

The importance of motivation

While on paper this sounds good — working with our heads sounds easier than working with our hands — we are finding we are having to work harder and harder, and study longer and longer even for the simplest job. Electric lighting and caffeine have extended the hours during which we are supposed to perform at our peak. There is simply more competition and more demand for us all to perform at our cognitive potential for more of the time. And unlike with physical jobs, we are finding that we can’t just shut off from cognitive work either.

Automation is now coming for professional jobs too: if you think you can go to university and get a good white-collar job and be safe from automation, think again. Repetitive mental tasks are easier to automate than labour is. There’s a reason why we have accounting and legal software but no robot butlers yet. As all the ‘easy’ repetitive mental tasks get automated, what’s left are the hard mental parts of white-collar work.

… it’s more important than ever to be able to motivate ourselves.

In light of all this, it’s obvious that it’s more important than ever to be able to motivate ourselves. To wring the best performance we can out of our grey matter. Yet in a lot of ways we’re finding it harder and harder to do that. Managers and business owners, in particular, struggle with this problem: how do we increase employees’ motivation when so much emphasis is put on comfort and ease in our culture? Doing anything other than the bare minimum can feel like a hardship.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a particularly motivated person; in fact, I can be quite lazy. I almost called this book The Lazy Way to Wealth, but I didn’t get around to it …

Despite this, it didn’t require tremendous motivation for me to do some things that many people might wish they were motivated enough to do — like walk away from my job, with its guaranteed career path, to do something different. In fact, I found it easy. The idea of doing the same thing, working for someone else for the rest of my life, was repellent.

The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.

John Pierpont Morgan

And that’s because there is a difference between feeling motivated, and being motivated to take the right action. The good news is that you don’t need to feel motivated to be motivated.

What’s important is getting the right motivation that actually motivates you to make the necessary changes that reality demands.

People say real change requires hard work, but it’s only hard work by the standards of an incorrectly motivated person: hard work if you are fighting against your values.

We make the mistake of assuming everybody is the same. But they’re not. People value different things: they have different time preferences, different levels of conscientiousness, and some people are more ‘state oriented’ and place more value on needing to ‘feel motivated’ than others.

Yet we just assume that if someone can’t start saving early for retirement then they just aren’t as motivated as someone who can, and we need to ‘motivate’ them more. But this ignores the reality that everybody tends to do what is easy for them based on what they value.

When we see that a lot of people aren’t motivated enough by security to start saving for a retirement that is many years away, we decide to remedy their lack of motivation in several ways. Firstly we take a goal focus.

The polarity of short-term goals

Not every value is equally effective at motivating us to take action. We’ve seen that if comfort is your Dominant Value, you could choose a big goal that seems to align with your value (you could set a goal to be rich, reasoning that being rich would make you more comfortable), but no matter how much you break down the steps, for someone who values comfort, any change is going to be uncomfortable. So valuing comfort won’t help you to get rich, because it won’t help you to take the first steps.

… those first steps, those intermediate goals, need to be motivating by themselves.

What most people don’t realise is that those first steps, those intermediate goals, need to be motivating by themselves, and represent the same things you value if you want to give yourself the best chance at success.

This radically changes how we think about motivation.

What is your ultimate definition of financial freedom? Picture that. Now, what is an intermediate definition of financial freedom, that, when you achieve it, will make you a little bit freer right now?

This is the step that most people miss, because they don’t really value freedom. You may have defined freedom as having $1 million in the bank, but if you set that as your big goal and focus on that number, you could end up slaving away every year, tying yourself to a job you hate, taking on massive debt, trying to make/save that much money and end up less free along the way, and perhaps never arrive at your goal because your intermediate steps don’t match what you value at all. You got stuck focusing on the number, when that number is just your best guess, from where you are now, of what financial freedom might look like, in the future.

Instead, if you think more about what freedom can mean to you now and start to really value it, you could start achieving the thing you want — freedom — sooner, with intermediate steps and shorter term goals, that align with what you value.

You can’t know what the top of the mountain will look like until you get there.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a big goal; you often need the big goal first, but really, the big goal is not at all important in the beginning stages. You may have a goal to climb a mountain, but you can’t focus on the summit at all in the beginning. You can’t know what the top of the mountain will look like until you get there.

You have to have a smaller goal to successfully navigate the foothills as well, and your attention has to be on that, not on the big goal.

In fact, your ideas about where you want to end up may even change as you progress. You may find, as we saw in the section on the path of security in chapter 4, that you don’t need as much money as you think to be financially free, if you learn some skills; or you may reach $1 million and realise that there are levels of freedom beyond that, that you want to achieve, so it’s important to pick a first step that is aligned with your big goal, but is sufficiently self-contained.

If you can see that you can actually get freer right now, and that achieving that freedom puts you in a better place financially, then you can develop the confidence to continue on the path knowing that you’re becoming financially free, without knowing 100 per cent what your final destination will be, and without being able to see all the steps at once.

For example, you may see how you can save some of your income, so you’re not so trapped where you are. Once you’re not as dependent on your current job, you might see how you could find a better job. Once you do that, you may learn some new skills. Once you have those skills, you may see how you can start a small business … and so on. Each step you take that makes you freer helps you to build the skills you will need for the next step, giving you more choices and more time to capitalise on those choices. By aiming to be freer first, you set a goal you can achieve. This way, you don’t give up in the face of a big goal that you couldn’t achieve without growing yourself first, and becoming more skilled along the way.

Put your pain behind you

Nobody wants to make pain their primary motivator, but pain can be useful as something to put behind you. Pain has a purpose. As a former physiotherapist, I know that pain is only really a problem when it becomes chronic: when it invades our present with no hope of letting up.

With freedom as a motivator, not only will your first steps be more pleasurable to you, as they help you to move forward, but if you have something painful behind you that you’ve broken free from — whether that’s debt or even being stuck in a job — you’ve now got a reason not to slip back. And who doesn’t want to put their pain behind them?

Freedom, the perfect motivator

Freedom is unique among all the values we can hold that move us towards financial freedom. It is a ‘homuncular’ motivating force for creating wealth: the smallest part fully represents the whole. Freedom First means you get freer now, and continue to get freer. What you are motivated to become is the same thing that is motivating you each step of the way. It’s self re-enforcing. The more freedom you gain, the easier it is to stay free, and to get freer.

Visualising freedom as a motivating value

The pain you leave behind acts as a backstop, while the small pleasurable first steps or goals in front of you draw you forward because they align with what you value, all leading you towards higher and higher levels of financial freedom.