Money Motivation: How to Stay Motivated About Money
By: Mathieu Gouraud
Tags: Personal Finance, Money Mindset, Motivation, Wealth, Personal Development

I can’t tell you the number of times I have made a google search looking up easy ways to make and save more money.

Every time I made a search, I would hope that there would be something I had missed that did not require much work.

The reality is that there is probably just passive investing (my investment strategy) that does not require much input to earn money.

It seems like everything else needs a substantial amount of work, and by default a whole lot of motivation.

Motivation seems to be this mysterious force that comes and goes without any apparent rules nor patterns.

Most of us usually wait for it to come to us to take action. Life is short however and we don’t have the luxury of time, especially when it comes to our finances.

So today, I want to show you how you can make it easier to summon motivation to create a better financial future for yourself.

What is Motivation?

The definition of motivation from the Oxford dictionary is “the general desire or willingness of someone to do something”.

From a scientific standpoint, motivation is the result of a mix of social, emotional, and biological forces that come together in a complex way.

The concept is simple to understand yet it is something that we all struggle with; mostly because it is a finite resource.

The question is, how can we use that resource in the most optimal way when it comes to our finances?

How Can You Stay Motivated About Money

When it comes to motivation, I think that there are two ways that we can manage this resource intelligently.

The first one is increasing your motivation. The second one is managing your motivation levels, so you never run out of it.

3 Ways to Increase Your Motivation

Why do You Want More Money?

One of the best tricks to get more motivation is asking yourself why do you want more money?

I don’t believe that most of us are intrinsically motivated by money itself. We are motivated by the things that money can bring.

Yet, a lot of us write down goals like “have a 100k net worth by the time I am 30”.

There is nothing wrong with writing this, but I think you need to go a little deeper and ask yourself why? Why would you like to have 100k to your name by the time you are 30?

Maybe this number is tied to the idea that you would feel secure about providing for your family. It could also mean that you would feel more flexible about quitting your job and travelling the world for a couple months.

Whatever your reasons may be, they need to be deeper and more meaningful than a number to your name. These underlying reasons will provide you with more motivation to achieve your goals.

Make Your Why Emotional

This leads to the second point. Make your reasons emotional.

The truth is we take actions in order to attain rewards that make us feel good. The better we anticipate the feeling to be, the more likely we will be motivated to take action.

This is called a craving and is part of the habit formation process.

Have you ever taken a second and thought about how it would feel like to be rich?

You might have pictured yourself in a luxury car or sipping on a Mai Tai on an island paradise.

The truth is you were not actually craving the car or the Mai Tai itself. You were craving the feelings and emotions associated with it.

You were lusting for the ego boost of driving in front of a crowd of people all looking at you in awe. You wanted the relaxation and stress-free moment of sipping on your Mai Tai on an island paradise.

Being aware of those emotions and remembering the feeling associated with them is much more of a motivation booster than simply picturing yourself with material things.

Visualize

Visualization is a technique used by some of the most successful people in the world.

In essence, it boils down to your mind “seeing” your goals accomplished.

This trick goes hand in hand with the previous two tricks I’ve mentioned. Visualizing your why in a clear way will amplify the effect of your why and your emotions, which in turn will increase your motivation.

This is also a powerful way of summoning motivation because your mind realizes that there is a gap between your current state of being and your desired state.

Your mind will therefore imagine creative solutions and gather necessary resources to solve this conflict.

2 Ways to Manage Your Motivation

Set Goals that are Challenging yet Attainable.

Setting the right kind of goals is crucial to motivation.

you need to find the perfect sweet spot between a goal that is attainable yet challenging enough.

If the goal is not challenging enough, then you will not have used your motivation resources effectively.

If the goal is too challenging, your motivation levels will quickly fade, and you will need even more motivation to get started again on something else.

Sadly, I don’t think there are any fast tricks to figuring your sweet spot other than trial and error.

As you take on more and more challenges, you will become more aware of your own capabilities. This will allow you over time to set the exact level of the challenges you decide to undertake.

To give you an example, I got a bit ahead of myself this year.

I wanted to launch a startup with my roommate on how psychology and data algorithms can help individuals better manage their finances.

We worked on it for several months, sometimes late into the night before deciding that it was too hard at the moment.

We realized we did not yet have the capabilities to launch such a massive project.

So, I took a backstep and started learning more about personal finance and psychology… Which lead me to start this blog.

It is still challenging but something that I feel I am much more up to the task for.

Trial and error my friends, trial and error.

Schedule, Schedule, Schedule…

Scheduling your money-earning activities will make it much easier to stay motivated.

If you already commit yourself to working at a specific time for a specific amount of time it will take a lot less motivation to get yourself to work.

This trick works for anything, really.

For my part, during the work week I go to the gym religiously at 12 PM every day.

I have done this enough time that it has become a habit and I don’t need nearly as much motivation as I did when I first started.

Same thing with meditation. I used to do it only when I “felt” it. Then after reading more about habits and scheduling them I found it absurd that I would follow this advice for going to the gym and not for meditating.

I’ve since included it in my daily routine and meditate for 10 minutes as soon I wake up.

Same thing for blogging and writing articles… I might require more motivation on some articles that I write but the more I write, the easier it becomes.

Even when motivation is hard to come by I stick with with it because I’ve sold myself on the power of scheduling and habits.

Other Tricks I use to Stay Motivated About Money:

Money is About Life Setup

For me, money is about life set up. I’ve got this image in my mind of what I would like my set up to look like in the long term. (back to visualization technique)

It looks a bit like this:

Having some home bases where my friends and family are while having the flexibility to travel where I want and when I want.

Most of my friends live in Montreal, Canada. My family lives in the southwest of France, on the border of Spain and the ocean.

The feelings and freedom that I associate with this lifestyle vision is one of the driving forces behind my motivation.

I’ve realized that if I want to have a chance at living this lifestyle, I have to find a way to make a living that does not keep me geographically stuck in one place.

Making a living online is probably the number one way to do this.

How You Earn Money is Crucial to Staying Motivated

I’ve talked about the importance of how you derive money in my post about happiness.

I think this is also a crucial component of staying motivated. Whichever way you earn money, in most cases you need to spend a huge amount of time on the activity that earns you money.

If you don’t enjoy the way you earn your money, your motivation levels will quickly drop. You might earn more doing things you don’t enjoy, but in the long run, this is not a sustainable strategy and you will burn yourself out.

I know this because I used to be in that situation.

I used to work as a salesperson selling investment strategies to Financial advisors. The thing is, I was not passionate about the products that I was selling. Even though I was making good money, it would be a battle every morning to find the motivation to make my sales calls.

What kept me going was that I knew this would be temporary. I just needed a bit of experience before plunging into what I knew was my true calling: Personal Finance.

I think it’s important to note that most of us won’t find their true calling right away. What matters is that we keep searching for it, whether it’s through reflection or trial and error, and that we don’t settle for anything else than something we enjoy.

Money is About Relationships

Money has this magical thing about it where it can help you towards so many purposes.

For me, this includes fostering better relationships.

Friendships are formed as a result of experiences experienced together. Alot of them don’t require any money, but the ones that stand out, at least for me, happened because we had money.

Some of the best experiences that I have had with friends were being able to go on vacation together somewhere and trying out activities that we had never done before. This would have been impossible had we not had the money.

Money can enrich your relationships. Imagine having the freedom to try out new experiences unconstrained by cost, like discovering new parts of the world with your loved ones or discovering new tastes together at world class restaurants.

Shared experiences bring us closer together, and money has a major role in extending the set and intensity of experiences, and relationships, that we can be exposed to.

Conclusion

If you want to know something ironic this post required a lot of motivation from my part.

The inspiration was hard to find at times, but I’ve stuck with it by using some of the techniques that I’ve written about. Talk about a fitting subject to write about….

I hope this post motivated you to stay motivated about your own money!

I’d love to hear some of the things that motivate you and what kind of strategies you use to stay motivated.