Exercising to be healthy doesn’t get me out of bed. Getting fit so I can catch a fit girlfriend does. Building friendships because of the warm fuzzies doesn’t do it for me either. But I absolutely hate depression spirals and anxiety, and that happens less when I get the right amount of quality time with close friends. All my good habits exist for selfish reasons.

I think this highlights the difference between motivation and discipline. Motivation is chasing goals when it’s convenient. Discipline is consistent effort because you want that goal more than you want the life you have now. My best discipline comes from selfish reasons – reasons that would be true no matter how I felt on a given day. It’s not convenient to go to the gym when it’s raining, but the weather doesn’t change how much I want a fit girlfriend. Does it really matter if my moral compass came from a cereal box? It still points North.

This also helps you reality-check how much you want things. Maybe you’ve chased buying a house or new car or promotion in the past. Other people were chasing it and you thought you should too. Or maybe other people actually told you what you should want, and you listened. The value of looking for selfish reasons is that it filters out everyone else’s opinion of what you should want.

Instead, look for selfish reasons to want those things. What benefit is there to you if you get them? How will your life change? How will you feel when you cross that finish line? Because if you really visualize that victory and feel nothing, that means it’s someone else’s goal, not yours. People have wasted their entire lives chasing what someone else told them was important. If working on your goal feels miserable and it never seems to move forward, there’s a good chance you don’t want it for yourself – you’re just trying to force yourself into a mold someone else gave you. If you don’t have your own reasons to do something then you will waste a lot of time dragging yourself somewhere you don’t want to go.

Selfish reasons can also be the removal of a negative in your life. Maybe seeing your body in the mirror upsets you. Maybe you want to get toxic people out of your life by finding a new job. Maybe stagnant people in your life drag you down, and you hate yourself for becoming like them. Research has shown that removing a negative improves quality of life more than adding a positive, so this is a great place to start.

All of us want to improve our lives. Most goals take time and consistent effort, and selfish reasons are the best thing you can depend on to stay the course. You are creating a better life for yourself. A happier you has a lot more to give the world, and you don’t need to feel guilty about making changes that will make you happy. Many people struggle to ask for their needs, and many people feel so trapped by the needs of others they forget to live their own lives. It doesn’t have to be like this.

If you never decide to do this for yourself, you will forever be living someone else’s life. Take a moment to figure out what you really want – no one else can do this for you.

Further Reading: If this post resonated with you then I highly recommend the book Am I there yet by Mari Andrew. It’s a book about becoming an adult, how to figure out who in the hell we are, separate what other people told us is important from what we actually believe is important, and it has lots of funny illustrations as Mari tells her story. Personally it gave me a lot of comfort to know I wasn’t the only one having all these problems, I hope it can help you too.