it's Monday. i used to send a newsletter called Monday Morning Motivation, stronger than your morning coffee (cool slogan, right?) people loved it. it went out by email. email isn't dead. but there's a better home for it, and it's right here. where you can actually reply. so, this is a new category. MMM. every Monday. stories, no lectures. let's start with why it works. internal motivation is the best fuel there is. it's the one that keeps you going longest. and that's not just me saying it. here is some data ⬇️ - a 40-year meta-analysis (183 studies, 212,000+ people across school, work and sport) found that intrinsic motivation predicts performance, whether there's a reward on the table or not. - another one, on 223,000+ students, found that doing it for the reward or to avoid punishment had nothing to do with performance or persistence. doing it because it matters to you is what kept people going. so yes. the inside fuel wins. the problem? you have to find it first. and it dries up exactly when life gets hard. which is exactly when you need it most. cute, right? so you need doping. the good kind. the allowed kind. (fun fact: caffeine was on the banned list for athletes until 2004. so your morning coffee used to count as doping. this is stronger.) MMM is your weekly dose of motivation. i need it. you need it. we all need it. to keep going. because here's what i believe. the single most important factor in your success is doing it long enough. that's where i see people fail. execution. - not the lack of ideas. - not the lack of skills or knowledge. - it's the ability to do the thing (almost) every single day, no matter what. and that "almost" matters. a UCL study on habits found it took a median of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic, and missing a single day didn't break it. you're allowed a bad Tuesday. you're not allowed to quit on Wednesday. if you can keep going when: - you don't see any results yet - you don't feel like it today - it doesn't make sense yet - your mood is shit - your family is in distress - and so on, and so forth