Motivation versus Discpline

     This week on Facebook alongside the usual ebb and flow of artwork, status updates and clickbait there's been a particularly interesting article making the usual rounds. The article itself is centred around the argument of motivation versus discipline when working or pretty much doing anything such as the washing up or hoovering. It's fair to say on the course that the predominate drive for people is motivation both on briefs set by the course team and in their personal work and other course I won't claim I'm any different but recently the idea of switching from fuelling myself with motivation to develop a more disciplined approach to my work has been growing. While I think I can put down the inception of this to Mitch last year through listening to various professionals in industry and being in a work environment it has become clearer as to how important this is in trying to handle myself as professionally a possible. As Mitch put it we need to become art machines.

 

 

     But just what was the article covering? You can read the full thing here however I felt I'd other a quick synopsis before diving any further into this post. First lets define what we mean by motivation and discipline here, simply it is a desired mental attitude require for completing a task such as painting or modelling whereas discipline is simply following through with a task regardless of your emotional state. Already I can see a benefit here. As the article explains in more depth the traditional motivational route is infact a pretty backwards way of operating requiring the mood to do the job that would be gained by doing the job anyway. In simpler terms you don't wait till you're a professional before you start training just as you shouldn't wait for the right mood to complete the task at hand. To summarise the article concludes that "motivation is trying to feel like doing stuff. Discipline is doing it even if you don't feel like it."

 

     Having read the article through a couple times now it feels like confirmation of my changing attitude. While reading the passage I felt it really highlighted this way of thinking about motivational as a short term fix which requires a long term solution in the shape of more discipline which I hadn't ever thought of on such a way and in my mind really gets down to the problem. It's clear I need to get off the drug of motivation and drag myself away from the edge of the pit of procrastination by simply nailing down a far more disciplined approach.

 

     While this may be simple in concept it's going to be a challenge to actually implement in a day-to-day routine. This process will take time and more likely than not it'll be a long while before I nail any of this down but in my mind alongside most of what I'm learning and discovering right now I want to get these in place for the FMP next year. In my eyes I really want the project to reflect the culmination of everything I'm exploring over the past two years but I'm beginning to go off on a tangent. Back to the point and to aid me shifting gear into a more discipline driven approach to work I was recommended a book, The Power of Habit, which I received over Christmas. The book covers human habits on an individual level as well as in organizations and companies, how they work, how to purge bad ones and create new ones. Hopefully the lessons I can pick up in there can be applied and practiced on my current projects leading up to returning to Leicester.