It means believing in your ability to perform a task and achieve goals. There are 3 ways to build self-efficacy:

• Ensure early success. When first starting out, choose activities you're certain you can do successfully.
• Watch others succeed in the activity you want to try.  This is particularly effective if the person you're observing is similar to you (friends, neighbors, co-workers).
• Find a supportive voice. Personal trainers and coaches are skilled in giving appropriate encouragement, as are good friends (usually).

A fundamentally independent thinker understands that nothing makes a person upset, angry, or depressed; rather, what a person thinks about the world determines how they feel. 

Procrastination gives you a break which is a good thing for your brain. 

If you become distracted, it can be your brain’s signals that you should have a break. However, if you procrastinate all the time and don’t accomplish your daily tasks, it means that you should change something.

A new place makes your brain work in a fresh way and you’ll achieve the necessary results faster.

Our brain can get used to a routine, even to places and you work on autopilot. Of course, you’ll accomplish your tasks but they will not be creative. 

The things that give us deep happiness are inherently things that take longer and have a big element of meaning in them.

And if the task you have to do doesn’t seem meaningful, try reframing your experience. You might not be able to change what you have to do but you can change how you see it.

When we feel connected to what we’re doing, when we make something our own, we’re much more motivated.

To turn some task you’re handed at the office into something you feel ownership of, make small tweaks that customize what you have to do, that allow you to do it your way.

So by breaking a larger project down into smaller to-dos, it will be easier for you to identify what step you should take next.

These smaller steps should be written down on a list. 

The main reasons why specific goals are so powerful:

• They force us to make a choice to pursue them and exclude anything that’s irrelevant. This increases our focus.
• They incite effort.
• They inspire us to be more persistent, as we have a clear idea of what success looks like.
• They immediately get our wheels turning on the strategies necessary to attain them.

The 3 elements required for intrinsic motivation:

• Autonomy: it's about choice - when you believe you have a choice, you're more motivated.
• Mastery: it's about wanting to get better at something that matters.
• Purpose: it comes from believing you're working on something that's bigger than yourself.

When we know that our work will make a difference to someone else, it makes us work harder. 

Try to reach out to the people who directly benefit from your work. This could boost your motivation to work hard.

We find motivation when something is meaningful. Meaning is much bigger than the enjoyment of a moment. It can include something we don't like. Soldiers risk being killed every day to serve their country. New parents handle poop daily for years.

Meaningful things give us purpose. This means doing something that serves a larger cause than yourself or, at least, making a contribution in your own world.

When a task you have to do doesn't seem meaningful, reframe your experience. You may not always be able to change what you have to do but you can change how you view it. When you look at it in light of how it helps others, you'll often find motivation.

You're not "filling out boring paperwork, you're helping people get the insurance that could save their life. You're not slaving over a hot stove, you're showing your family how much you love them.

Have you ever had a looming deadline on a big project only to spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning out your refrigerator or detailing your car?

If you struggle to get started on a project until it’s crunch time, you might have an unhealthy relationship with stress. Research shows that people can be just as addicted to stress as they are to likes on their social media posts.

You can accomplish quite a bit in just 15 minutes, and yet most of us fritter away that time on our phones in between meetings or during a commute. 

Commit to working on a put-off task for 15 minutes without interruption. Stop at 15 minutes. Don’t allow yourself to work any longer. Do this every day for a week and mark your progress.

"Mistakes, loss, and failure are all flashing lights clearly pointing the way to deeper understanding and creative solutions.” - Edward B. Burger

“...the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times ... The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile."

- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

If you lack the motivation to make an important change in your life, do something, anything really, even the smallest of actions, to get inspiration and motivation to do something else. 

You will think  “OK, I did that, I guess I can do more.” And slowly we could take it from there.