Read this if you’ve tried to use negativity—hate for your career, envy of others, or disgust with yourself—to drive motivation, only to discover it backfires.
The way you've been approaching self-improvement makes perfect sense.
You don’t like your current life. You don't like the way things are going—from your day-to-day behaviors and habits, to your vision of what your life will look like a month, a year, or five years from today.
So, you want to use that dislike; to leverage it and get it to induce self-discipline and propel you towards a better life.
I hear you. I’ve been there.
Perhaps you’re on a career path that doesn’t interest you. At times you friggin' hate it. → So, you want to use that hate to push you into working on something you’re actually passionate about.
Maybe your self-image is at an all-time low. → So, you want to use that disgust and discontent to drive yourself toward better habits.
And, of course, you compare yourself to others—we’re human, and that’s just what we do. → So you want to use the envy and resentment to fuel your actions and get a slice of their happy pie.
Like I said, your logic makes sense:
I don’t like the way things are going today... therefore I will change using that dislike as fuel. I will use the pressure of resentment, pain and yearning to climb out of my eternal rut.
The thing is—and I learned this the hard way—this doesn’t work. You’ve probably tried it, too, haven’t you?
But it doesn’t work, because motivation isn’t fueled by negativity.
Negativity does only one thing: it drives you to vices.
The power of Acceptance
But wait.
Unsatisfied people do make changes, right?
The obese guy loses 150 lbs. The alcoholic cleans up and now spends her time sponsoring others. The delinquent teen changes course and becomes a successful entrepreneur.
But how?
Here’s the thing. Here’s what took me years and immeasurable struggles, pain, and denial to realize and fully accept: Positive changes in behavior, leading to tangible life improvements, only happen if you are perfectly content with the way things are.
Let me say it again.
Positive changes can only happen once you’ve accepted the way things are.
“Huh? That makes zero sense. I mean, why would anybody make changes if they were content with the way things are?”
You can see it as another one of life’s cruel paradoxes—one that makes perfect sense once you experience it.
Motivation only works forward. It won’t show up if you’re obsessed with wanting to move away from a life or career path you hate and resent.
It’s a cat. It won’t come if you chase it—if it senses your desperation and neediness.
No, you have just to let it be. First, you have to figure out how to be at peace with the present moment and accept the way things are.
Only then will the motivation and positive energy present themselves.
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While this perplexing (and frankly, inconvenient) truth takes root in your mind, I'd like to share another bit of my story that exemplifies this paradox in action.
October 2007. I was in grad school studying engineering. I was on a career path that I was indifferent to at best and downright hated at worst. And it was usually the latter.
At the same time, I was painfully aware of the many privileges I was born into. I tried to be grateful. I tried to count my blessings. I tried to just be happy. Yet I was constantly miserable and longed for a way out.
And then it came.
There it was, on display at the campus bookstore: The Four-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss, a book promising a way out of the conventional career rat race and onto the thrill-ride of being my own boss while traveling the world.
I remember that day vividly: sitting on the campus lawn under a warm sun, cracking open that book for the first time, my mind bursting with ideas.
Potential. So much damn potential, it was unreal.
Soon after, my life became split in two. There was reality: school and my conventional career path, along with the obligations that I hated, but that I just had to do (and boy did I procrastinate on that stuff).¹
And then there were the fantasies: the entrepreneurial dream, the "side projects", my ticket to freedom. I just needed to ride the train of focus and hard work for a while, and I would reach the promised land of an exhilarating and fulfilling four-hour workweek.
But I kept falling off the damn train.
So it went. Idea after idea. Failure after failure. One step forward, eight steps back.
As the years went on, my existence became a blur of frustration, desperation, envy, and longing. Each time I attempted to start a new project, I willed the pressure of these negative emotions to motivate me—to propel me to work, to get me to get my life together, to stop procrastinating and get my stuff done once and for all.
But, it never worked.
The more I tried to harness that negativity, the more I tried to force myself out of my rut using a fierce resentment of my life and career, the harder I crashed when my willpower gave out.
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Fast forward to October 2015.
I had just come back from a stint in Vancouver. Six months previously, I had quit my day job to pursue a business idea out there. I came back home to Montreal because, well, things never took off, not even close. I also ran out of money.
My idea didn’t fail because the market didn’t want my product; it never even got to that. For much of my time away, motivation evaded me, and my bad habits took over. Resistance, self-doubt, and imposter syndrome² sidelined me. I never stood a chance.
So, after the usual sad fanfare, I gave up and went back to my old day job.
But this time was going to be different. I committed to challenging my long-standing assumptions and beliefs about my career as a civil engineer. I spoke to people—first some friends, and eventually, a mental health professional. I discussed these beliefs, plucking them from where they had festered for decades, exposing them to the light of scrutiny and reasoning.
Here’s a fun little exercise: Take a belief that 17-year-old-you came up with, then attempt to explain and justify it to someone new (like a therapist). You’re going to have a hard time.
So, yeah. I began to realize that the truth I clung to was layered with the stories I told myself. Years of insisting I hated my career. Years of seeking and grasping at scraps of evidence that engineering was boring, hard, or unfulfilling—that I detested every aspect of it and there was nothing redeeming about it.
With help, I took a hammer and chisel to all those layers, and I discovered the underlying truth: There was nothing inherently wrong with my career. My job was always just ‘insert this number into that Excel box.’ Then ‘write this word, then that word.’
It wasn’t this abhorrent monster that my immature mind conjured up years ago as a juvenile response to the realities of being an adult.
Yes, it wasn’t my passion. Yes, it was often boring AF. Yes, it didn’t allow for me to ride a motorcycle across Argentina like Timothy Effing Ferris. But it wasn’t that bad.
Even when it did “suck,” even when it got objectively tedious, stressful, or frustrating, I always had a choice.
The Buddha says pain is inevitable. Suffering is not. Suffering is how you choose to respond to pain, and my default for over a decade was to wallow in the pain mindlessly. To ruminate and tell myself I hated "the source" of the pain (my career choice), and that this would be my future forever and ever.
My job didn’t lead to my suffering, my beliefs about my job did. Simple as that.
The truth was, my career wasn’t that bad. Come to think of it, it was fine. The people at the office were fun and caring. The job was stable. It paid the bills and allowed me to live comfortably during the evenings and weekends. Much of the stress could be reduced with simple time management techniques and occasional conversations with my manager.
So, when I returned to the job, I decided to just let it be. To come in without any prejudice. To rediscover, moment by moment, whether I really did “hate” my career.
Turns out I didn’t.
Then… when I least expected it, guess who came sauntering into my life all casual, like no big deal.
That little fucker of a cat. Motivation.
From there, I found a natural rhythm with my focus and productivity. I stopped procrastinating because I stopped having a reason to procrastinate; a reason to seek an escape through my vices. And I was able to slip into consistent lifestyle habits; getting into great physical shape.
I was, against all odds, quite happy with my life.
Finding acceptance during the early phases
As wait for your motivation levels to replenish after reducing your vices, I invite you to experience what it’s like to let go and “just be.”
I invite you to observe things as they are, now, today, live.
I invite you to scrutinize and challenge all of your long-held beliefs about who you are and the predicament you are in.
If you manage to do this, if you find a way to just be in the present moment, I can almost promise you’ll find yourself having an unexpected thought, like:
Huh. You know, this isn’t so bad.
If I focus on this thin little slice of the present moment, I can see that I’m not actually lacking anything. I can accept this reality as it is right now.
Sure, your outside stresses, obligations, and worries will still be there. Sure, the wounds of your past failures and traumas will not have fully healed. But if you’re anything like me, it’s our ruminations and self-imposed pressures to fix this and improve that, that cause most of the yearning, pain, anguish, and anxiety.
We’ve convinced ourselves that the only way to relieve that pain and anxiety is to take MASSIVE action. So we sit down to work, but then we get pummeled by resistance due to the VIDs, plus the regret of having procrastinated, plus the overwhelming feeling of how much there is to do. We hit this enormous brick wall, where we feel utterly deflated and demotivated to fix things, despite an urgent desire to do so.
This leads to a massive Expectation Gap, leaving us confused, frustrated, and crushed. This leads to vices.
No more of that.
Seriously. I urge you to take a different approach this time around. I urge you to let go of all the pressure and expectations you put on yourself. I urge you to just be. All that negativity hasn't been working. It won't work this time. It won't ever work.
Let it go.
In the video course, I go quite deep on the concept of mindfulness. When combined with maxed-out patience and self-compassion, mindfulness will help you reach that state of calm acceptance. It will teach you to see that right now, in this present moment, things are okay. They're always okay. You can breathe. You can be.
Acceptance isn't a delusion, by the way. It's not about lying and gaslighting yourself into believing everything is great and exactly how you’d wish it to be. It's just about seeing reality exactly as it is right now—and unless your house is on fire, right now isn't actually house-on-fire-awful. You can accept it.
Image based on KC Green's web comic strip, "On Fire”
And acceptance, paradoxically, leads to the motivation to make things a little better. Motivation—pure, unforced, naturally cultivated simply by avoiding vices and waiting—is the fuel you need to get moving towards a better life.
1 - Writing this has me recall what Stephen Pressfield describes as the "shadow life" in his book The War of Art. Pressfield argues that we often live a life that is a shadow of our true potential due to "resistance." This resistance keeps us from pursuing our true calling, leading us to live a life that is safe and conventional rather than fulfilling our artistic or entrepreneurial endeavors.
2 - Impostor syndrome is that nagging, persistent feeling that you’re not as competent or talented as others perceive you to be. It’s the voice in your head telling you that your achievements are just luck, and soon enough, everyone will see you for the fraud you believe you are. This self-doubt can paralyze you, making it difficult to take risks or pursue new opportunities, as you constantly fear being exposed as an impostor.