The "Do Something" Principle Will Change Your Life

It's no secret that on a day-to-day basis, most people claim to lack the motivation necessary to make any significant positive changes in their lives. It's almost a meme in today's culture that people are just generally lazy and unmotivated, helpless against their own primal desires to veg out and scroll Instagram, cringing at the very thought of dropping the phone and cleaning their entire kitchen.

Every once in a while, though, something triggers us. Maybe it's a deadline, a post we saw on Instagram, or a Tony Robbins video we just happened to stumble across on YouTube, and it gives us the adequate inspiration needed to perform the actions necessary for improving our situation. But here's something that almost nobody knows: action is not just the effect of motivation but also the cause of it.

Most people only commit to action when they feel motivated to do so, and they only feel motivated when they feel a certain amount of emotional inspiration. Emotional inspiration gives us the adequate motivation to perform a constructive action, but there's a huge problem with the system. Aside from the issue that inspiration seems to strike us randomly and unpredictably, there's an even bigger problem.

Often, our negative attitudes towards our bad situations hinder us from experiencing any sort of emotional inspiration towards changing the situation in the first place. If you have an attitude of massive guilt, shame, resentment, or fear towards your current situation, then the very thought of confronting this monster is likely to inspire the very emotions that put you in that situation to begin with. It's a catch-22.

So how do you fix this? Well, by realizing that emotional inspiration, adequate motivation to constructive action, is not a linear sequence; it's an endless loop, and you can start wherever you want to start. Inspiration leads to motivation, which leads to action, which leads to inspiration, which leads to motivation, etc. If you lack the inspiration or motivation to take constructive action, then do something—anything, really—that harnesses the reaction from that action to give you the adequate inspiration and motivation to take further action.

And you might be thinking, “Well, how am I supposed to do something without any inspiration?” Whether you realize it or not, you do this all the time. Ever notice you're much more productive after taking a shower and getting dressed? Did you have to have some sort of big inspirational epiphany in order to take a shower? No, it's just something you do. Some actions require little to no inspiration whatsoever, and those are the very actions whose reactions you should harness into taking further action.

So next time you're avoiding some huge thing you got to do, don't just sit there and wait for inspiration to hit—just go and do something. Then harness the reaction from that action to give you the adequate inspiration and motivation to take further action. This is the dosomething principle.

Hello! If you like this video, then you will love Mark Manson's article called the dosomething principle. This entire video was based off of that article; these were not my own original thoughts. Those are Mark Manson's thoughts. I'll put a link in the description for that article down below.

If you guys don't already know, Mark Manson's also the author of the article. He is an author! Mark Manson's also the author of "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck," which is an awesome book. I highly recommend it. The link in the description is there for you to click on. It's also an Amazon affiliate link, so if you want to help out the channel by purchasing that book or anything else through that link, you also give me a small reward—that's like probably $2.00 or something—but it does help.

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Also, this was a bit of a different style of video, so if you dig it, let me know in the comments section. Was it a good change or not? Was it not very good? That's all for today. Thank you for watching, and we'll catch you in the next video!