Against Motivation

But this is the beauty of routine, the way it can carry you from one day to the next. You don’t even have to believe in yourself all the time if you can just believe in the process you have committed to. That steadiness of presence.

Routine is a form of self-hypnosis, a way to imagine ourselves as capable of whatever feat we are attempting. Every time we abide our routine we put a stone in the path to the place we are trying to reach.

But this is another thing I love about routine: you can take it with you wherever you go. Routine is a shelter. It gives us someplace to be, regardless of the moment we’re in. It gives us a place to metabolize experience.

Routine is a scrap of stability in an unstable world.

Motivation is the fun-but-flaky friend who overpromises and underdelivers. Motivation is unreliable, and it is not going to get most of us through a book or any other long-range project. Octavia Butler: “Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment.”