I've once again thought myself into the corner of trying to understand motivation, trying to distinguish what causes me to take action, specifically habitual action, versus aspiration which just makes me wish I were taking certain actions.

What is the motivation that works when I successfully diet versus when I'm trying but failing?

What drives me to the gym for an hour or so four days a week but can't be marshaled to have me sit at a keyboard or with a guitar for just five minutes once a week?

Some of this will have to do with appetite, subconscious wants closely coupled to biological needs, some will be tied to mental states like anxiety and depression and arousal, and I think some will be associated with identity and drives regarding how we need to be seen by ourselves and the world.

I am interested in the negative motivations, particularly the role they play in my relationship with food and my behaviors toward and around other people, but what I'm really looking to harness right now are the positive ones, like the ones keeping me going to the gym or driving me to show up at the clinic early every weekday morning even though I'm completely free to work from home.

I feel confident all motivation is going to be driven by a sense of reward, but I believe obvious reward is only going to be the foundation of habitual action.

Maybe the reward has to also be fully believed to be achievable. With working out, I started confident the initial changes I was hoping to achieve were attainable, and as I collected the rewards of my work in terms of improved health, I was further motivated to continue.

In opposition is my experience with writing. I have had periods where I took it more seriously and brought more energy and discipline to the activity, but I've seldom had a strong sense that what I was trying to do, writing a story or poem or novel, was achievable. Rather, more often than not my efforts to sit down and write have failed to one degree or another.

Almost all of the exceptions in this realm are straight out of Dead Poets Society: when my goal was not to write but to woo, and writing was just a means to that end, I could bring all kinds of focus and discipline to the effort, which circles right back around to the point that while I have aspired to write since I was very young, actually being motivated to write requires a secondary set of conditions.

Knowing I need that secondary push to change aspiration into action, I can take a more considered look at my life and see if there's a way to repurpose an old motivation or create a new one which will be both consistent and additive enough to make me sit down regularly at this keyboard.