People say that optimism is telling yourself and managing to convince yourself that you can watch a full 20-minute episode of OTT in less than five minutes. If that's true that I'm quite an optimist but in all seriousness I think this is a classic example of the trade-off between motivation and procrastination and it goes a little bit like this: you keep on procrastinating until one day you suddenly realize that you just can't afford to keep putting your work off to the last minute whatever it is.

At times your intent and your actions don't meet so you make the resolution to commit to something new and it might work for a few days/weeks/month. However, it’s quite certain that you'll end up relapsing and then the all-too-familiar feelings of guilt, anxiety, self-loathing will set in and you go back to your resolution and so the process goes on a loop.

I try to be resolute by limiting my motivation to a finite sense. So when you're set your goals way too high, often times you run out of motivation too quickly. Some professors from the University of Chicago conducted a study that was quite interesting. It looked at the effects of extrinsic rewards on individual performance. what they found was that people completed tasks the best when they did them for their own sake, when they did them because they enjoyed them not because they wanted an extrinsic reward. This study tells us is that the most important thing to maintaining a habit is getting buy-in from yourself.

Work so hard that you don't even notice the time going by. That is what motivation is when you're so emotionally invested in the process that the outcome ceases to become important. What's the message here is that self-motivation when done right can be transformative because it enables us to find that inner spark so that we enjoy every little thing we do in our lives.