The morning after Johnny Kelley won the 1935 Boston Marathon, he went to work, showing up at 7:30 a.m. at a greenhouse in Arlington, Massachusetts. After winning one of the most grueling footraces in the country, he had every reason in the world to sleep in. And yet.
I've spent a good chunk of the last few years writing about doing hard things, about embracing the suck, and the power of the grind. And on a surprising number of mornings, I've woken up incapable of any of it, flattened by a spectacular case of the blahs that made even the simplest task feel like summit preparation for Everest. The irony, as they say, is not subtle.
Most advice about productivity rests on an assumption that you'll show up at the starting line feeling ready. Not necessarily thrilled, but operational and at minimum, upright.
We've all been conditioned to think motivation is the fuel, that you have to feel it before you can do it. It makes intuitive sense. But the brain doesn't work on a feelings-first basis, at least not in the way we assume. It works more like a reluctant car engine. It needs a push. Once it's rolling, the rest kicks in.
In the early 1970s, psychologist Peter Lewinsohn was working with patients struggling with depression and noticed an uncomfortable loop. They were inactive because they felt low. They felt low because they were inactive. His solution, what later became known as behavioral activation, was almost insultingly simple: get moving first. The feeling follows the action. Not the other way around.
It isn't just a clinical observation. Neuroscience backs it up: dopamine, the brain's reward chemical, doesn't fire only when we succeed. It fires in anticipation of reward. Which means that starting a task, even reluctantly, already begins the neurochemical sequence that keeps us going.
Then there's the Zeigarnik Effect, first documented by psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik in 1927 after she noticed that waiters could recall unpaid tabs with uncanny accuracy but forgot completed orders almost immediately. An unfinished task hums in the background of the brain, creating a low-level pull toward resolution. Starting generates momentum we didn't have before we started. Which is both useful and slightly inconvenient to admit.
Motivation isn't a prerequisite. It's a byproduct. I can confirm this from personal experience and several reluctant training runs.
The mornings I least want to lace up my shoes are often the ones I’m most glad I did. The essay that sat inert on my screen for three days usually starts writing itself five minutes after I open it. The task I'd been postponing, convinced I needed a completely different mental state to tackle it, almost always takes forty minutes once I just start.
Running 26 marathons has taught me this, if nothing else: the formula for getting to the finish line is less about willpower than most people assume, and more about the decision to take the first step even when the rest of the steps seem very far away and the sun is not yet up and the alarm goes off at 3:45 and I wonder seriously if I’m making questionable life decisions.
The blahs are real, the grind is unglamorous, and hard things are genuinely hard. None of that is in dispute.
But the feeling of "I'm not ready" is not a signal to wait. It's just a feeling that passes, surprisingly reliably, once you've begun. When everything feels flat and pointless and nothing like the productive day you had in mind, that's not the time to hold off. That's exactly the suck to embrace. It doesn't politely reschedule for when you're in a better mood.
Johnny Kelley went on to run 61 Boston Marathons. His last, in 1992, took him 5 hours and 57 minutes. He was 84 years old. In the decades between that first win and his final finish line, he buried a first wife who died of cancer and said running helped him get through it. He ran three Olympics, won two Bostons, and accumulated a modest museum's worth of diamond rings, watches, and one refrigerator. No money, though.
I'm not the first to observe that action precedes motivation, or that starting is harder than continuing.
But I think it's worth saying plainly, because the alternative—waiting until we feel sufficiently inspired, energized, or whatever state we've decided is the prerequisite for starting—is a strategy that, in my extensive experience, primarily produces very comfortable waiting.
Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. Chuck Close