Tactical Motivation: How To Get Out Of A Rut And Take Your Studies To The Next Level

Welcome to the GMAT Strategy Podcast. You're here because you believe there's a better way to study for the GMAT, and so do I.

I created the GMAT Strategy to maximize your results and minimize your efforts so you can get to the fun parts about business school and life as quickly as possible.

My name is Isaac Puglia, and I've been teaching GMAT classes and tutoring privately for the GMAT for over six years, and I personally have achieved a 99th percentile score on an official GMAT exam and helped hundreds of students get into the business schools of their choice.

I'm excited to be a part of your MBA journey, since I think the world can benefit from the best possible business leaders that we can find. And if this show is bringing you value, please share it with your friends and family who are studying for the GMAT so that together we can make this process as easy and painless for as many people as we possibly can.

Let's go.

Today I want to talk about motivation, and specifically how you can get out of a rut if you've stopped studying or you feel like you're losing momentum in your studies.

This is something I get asked about a lot. I got a really interesting version of this question recently, and I made a post about it on my Instagram page if you want to see this written out in more bullet-point form. But I'm going to go into quite a bit more depth here today and talk about some tactics you can use to get yourself back in gear, if that's what you want.

Like many of my methods, this may not be for everyone. Some of these may work for you and others may not, but this is a collection of the things that I have seen work best for my students over the years.

First thing I want to say is it's totally okay to struggle. I think that when you're struggling, it's just a symptom of the effort that you're investing, and that you're trying to push your boundaries. And if pushing your boundaries were easy, everybody would do it, and everyone would be growing at an insane rate, and everyone would be going to Harvard Business School and making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. But it's not necessarily easy. But it's not always a complicated process, and it isn't necessarily easy either. And if you want something bigger for your life, there's usually a price to pay. But in my opinion, it is 1,000% worth it. So here we go.

The first helpful thing that you can do if you're in a rut, or you want to take your motivation to the next level, is write down your vision. Why are you doing this? There are probably some very compelling reasons that you're studying for the GMAT.

And what I tell people most often is: write down what you want. What do you want out of life? What do you want for your body? What do you want for your home? What do you want for your career? What do you want for your family or your relationships? What do you want?

Now let's get into this. I think it's best to be as specific as possible, but you don't have to be hyper-specific if that decreases your excitement. And I think excitement is really what we're going for here when we're writing down our vision. We're going for excitement and we're going for clarity. And we're basically taking this vision out of our mind and we're externalizing it. We're making it concrete by writing it down. So you can have a note on your phone, I'll give you some other tactics, you can write it pen and paper if that's more powerful for you. And you can either put it in a public place where you see it all the time, or you can file it away so that it's very private but you know that it's concretized somewhere.

So when we're talking about specificity, I think the best thing you can do is not just write "oh, I want a big house." Well, how big? How big do you want it? You want 30,000 square feet? You want 12,000 square feet? You want five bedrooms? You want 50 bedrooms? Do you want a smaller house? Do you want a more modest house? What's exciting to you? That's what we're going for here, is excitement. And I encourage you to be even more specific. What type of neighborhood do you want to live in? Or do you want 10 houses in 10 different countries? Or do you want 10 houses because you want to own the entire block that you live on? I mean, there's no limit to this. And we're not necessarily writing it down because that's what you're going to do. We're writing it down because a certain part of you just wants that, and it might not be the most rational part of you, and that's okay. You really want to let yourself go with this.

I'll be honest with you, I've gotten down to the level of: I know what my address is going to be in five years. Now, that's just me. You don't need that. You don't need to know exactly what your address is going to be. You don't need to be able to see your future home on Google Maps like I can. But I want you to know that that level of specificity is exciting to me. And so if you want to go there, that's an option. Or if you want to keep it more vague, you can say something as simple as: I want people, when they come over to my house, to feel the most comfortable they've ever felt in anybody's house. That's a really cool vision. If that's exciting to you, write that down. Or maybe you want people to come over and feel really jealous. I mean, there's no judgment here, okay? That's the point of this, is to remove the self-judgment and just get to the pure, raw excitement of what turns you on emotionally with your vision for what you want.

Now, here's a quick tactic. You definitely don't have to do this, but I have an album on my phone where I have images, photographs, of all the things that I can theoretically photograph, or things that remind me of the types of experiences that I want to have. So not all your goals need to be material. I think it's good to have an experience category of goals that you write down, or maybe create a vision board. This is sort of like a digital vision board, if you've heard of that. If you don't know what a vision board is, a quick web search will get you some instruction on that.

But you might want to set some experience goals. How do you want to feel when you wake up in the morning? Or how do you want to feel when you leave work at the end of the day? Or how do you want to feel when you take a lunch break? Or are you excited by never taking lunch breaks? Or how are you going to feel when you go on vacation? Things like that can be really, really great and very exciting and motivating, but people don't always talk about that. I think a lot of times the emphasis is put on material goals, and that's fine. That's totally fine. But I think you should also think about: how do you want to feel when you get in your car to drive to work in the morning, if you want to drive to work in the morning?

So with the photo album thing, I have a little time that I set aside pretty much every day, maybe like three to five days a week these days, where I go online and I just think about what I want, and I do image searches, and I find the versions of those things that I want. So I can tell you what color my cars are going to be in eight years from now. I can tell you what model year and what make they're going to be. Now again, you don't have to go to that level of specificity, but I personally think it's helpful and it's fun. I think it's fun. So I just make sure I look at that photo album probably about three to five times a week, just to make sure I stay connected to where I'm headed. What's my north star? Where do I want to go? What's all this stuff I'm doing every day adding up to? I think that's valuable, to have that type of clarity.

So, what a lot of people recommend, and I think is good advice, is breaking it into four categories. I mentioned them earlier. I think first is your body, your physical health, your physical appearance. Like, do you want to be slim? Do you want to be really big? Do you not care? Is your goal with your body just to not care what other people think about it, or how you think about it? Anything goes here, okay? Just: what do you want? What kind of clothes do you like to wear? What's your style like at work? What's your style like when you're not at work?

What's your house like? We talked about that already. What are your relationships like? How does it feel when you talk to your spouse? How do you make them feel? How do they make you feel? Do you want someone who talks to you a lot, or do you want someone who's a great listener, or do you want both? What kind of qualities do they have? What kind of personality do they have? How do they treat your family? Things like that can be really, really valuable.

This is a little embarrassing, but I'll admit to you: I have 65 different qualities of what I'm looking for in romantic partners. And some of you might think that's a little much, but I like that level of specificity, and I know whether someone's a hundred percent match for me, or whether they're a 90 percent match, or a 70 percent match. And I know how I'm going to deal with that situation according to how much they align with what I'm looking for. And that changes. This is all flexible. Sometimes on a daily basis I'm rewriting those qualities. Sometimes I'm deleting some. Sometimes I'm adding some, according to my experience and what I learn.

Same thing for work. I think you want to get a pretty clear vision of what you want for your work or your career. Do you want to be retired in five years? Do you want to be retired for three years and then come back to work and be an investor? Do you want to work at an office, or do you want to work from home? What does your home office look like? Or do you just work from your bed and your pajamas for two hours a day? This is really time to just let your imagination run wild.

Again, the key here is you're looking for excitement. You want to get excited when you think about this stuff. And I think an important point to make is it's totally okay if, after you experience that initial excitement, you have a little voice in your head or a feeling in your gut that says something like "that's not possible" or "that's not realistic" or "that's stupid," whatever that self-judgment is. That's fine if that creeps in. You don't need to avoid that. You don't need to minimize that. You don't need to stop that from happening. You just want that initial feeling of excitement. You want it to be at least written down in word form, and maybe at best you have a pretty clear vision. You can show yourself some images, or whatever appeals to you in that respect. You can make a video if you want. It's up to you.

After you've written down your vision, I think the next best thing you can do is follow motivational social media accounts. Whatever your preferred platform is, whatever you engage with the most, just type "motivation" into the search bar, or "inspiration" into the search bar, and follow as many people as possible who you resonate with. Don't follow accounts where you're like, "okay, this is dumb, but as I said it was a good idea, so I'm just going to do it." I mean, you can maybe do one or two like that, but ideally you find someone, or some type of content, that you actually like, that resonates with you, that you feel is harmonizing with your personality.

The information we feed our mind is very similar to the food we eat. It has a residual impact, and it tends to compound over time. So if you're eating really bad stuff for a day, it's not going to affect you as much as if you're eating really bad food for 10 years. Same thing with the information that you bring in on a day-to-day basis. Week in, week out, if you're constantly having a little bit of positivity, a little bit of motivation and inspiration hitting you and your socials on a day-in, day-out basis, or maybe a few times a week, versus none of that, I think it compounds both ways. And so you'll get more and more inspired and more and more motivated over time as you engage with people and communities and accounts that you feel resonate with you and are positive. If you're motivated by negativity, that's fine too. Again, no judgment. You just want to do what works for you. That's really the key with this stuff.

The third tactic, this one can be difficult but it's also one of the most impactful: I would recommend either cutting out one person in your life who you feel is encouraging you to stay unmotivated, or who's hampering your studies, and start spending more time with someone around you who's taking action towards what they want.

Now, that's extreme. You don't necessarily need to cut people out of your life, and I go back and forth on whether that's even a good idea. But that's not really what this is about. This is just about lessening the time that you spend with people who might be bringing you in a direction you don't want to go, even subconsciously, and increasing the time you spend with people who make you feel excited for what you're doing and inspire you to do more of it, if that's the direction you need to go.

So the reality here is that the people we spend time with just have an unbelievable influence on us. They influence the books we read, the thought patterns we have, even our biorhythms and our brain waves, believe it or not. You can look up research-backed studies that show that your romantic partner is going to have an effect on your blood pressure, things like that. They'll have an effect on your heart rate when you're sleeping. I mean, it's some deep stuff when you really get into it. So it's not something to become super neurotic about and make into a huge stressor. This is just something that you want to start to generate some awareness of, and start to head in the right direction. And I'm aware that this can be one of the toughest things. This is very similar to diet, which we talked about in last week's episode, and it's just an area that a lot of people struggle with, and that's okay.

So I think it's okay to take baby steps. You can just take small steps. You can start with just a tiny bit less time, like one minute less a day, with someone who you feel is bringing you in the wrong direction, and maybe 30 seconds more a day, or even just a text to somebody who you feel like you admire the way they chase after their dreams. And you just send them a message and just say, "hey, you really inspired me today when you did X, Y, or Z," something like that, if that's appropriate, obviously.

So with friends, this can be one of the most difficult things, but it's good to audit your social group quickly. Again, it's not something to be neurotic about or obsessive about. I think that can hurt you, actually. But I think you do want to spend a little bit of time just thinking about the people you've spent a lot of time with in the past, or the people you're going to be spending a lot of time with in the near future during your GMAT studies, and just start to think: is there anyone who's a big positive? Is there anyone who's a big negative? Is there anyone who's a small positive? Is there anyone who's a small negative? And can I optimize that? Can I spend a little bit less time talking to the people who are bringing me down, and a little more time talking to the people who are bringing me up?

For example, maybe you still socialize with exactly the same group, but instead of engaging a person in conversation who you think doesn't have the type of momentum that I'm looking for in my own studies, maybe you just choose to spend a little bit more time in conversation with the folks around you who are going in that direction. Something like that. And it's definitely not something you want to be mean or rude about. That probably goes without saying. But it's something that you want to internally just start to shift a little bit.

Now, I'm not going to go deep on this, but you know, you could invite these people out for coffee. It could be a drink. It could be people you're not even friends with, or just people you work with, people who you feel are inspiring in the organization you're in. You can cold email people. You can drop in on them and just say, "hey, I've got some questions about what you're up to. I'm thinking about getting my MBA, you have yours. Do you think that was a good decision, in retrospect? Would you do it again if you were going to do it again today?" Even just a little informational interview, once, doesn't have to be a regular thing, can take you far in the long run.

Now, a quick note here: if this is not possible for you for any reason, if you are very socially isolated, or you just have to spend time around certain people and that's an inescapable reality of your life right now, then a good way to get some of this effect of spending time around people who can have a positive influence on you is reading books, listening to podcasts, and interacting on social media, which is part of the reason I brought up the social media thing. But you can feel free to go a little further with that. You can direct message people. You can ask them for advice. You're probably not going to get a response a lot of the time, especially if you're DMing people with millions of followers, but you'd be surprised: a lot of these folks are very engaged with their communities. They reply to comments and they can answer questions and give you feedback that might make the big difference that you need to have made right now.

I think athletes are great. Business people are great. Celebrities. Basically, the idea here is spend as much time as you can surrounding yourself with people who are living on the level that you want to live on. So if you want to be worth a net worth of $150 million in five years, start spending as much time as you can around people who have a net worth of $150 million. What are their habits like? When did they go to bed? When did they get up? What kind of relationships do they have? What are they doing in their professional lives? What are they doing in their personal lives? Just find out as much as you can about these folks, and start to copy a little bit. Start to integrate the things that you feel like are authentic for you and your personality and how you want to live your life.

The fourth tactic is something called the Pomodoro technique. It's spelled P-O-M-O-D-O-R-O, and it's probably worth a web search to get some specifics on this. I'll give you the lowdown though. Essentially what you're going to do is set a 20-minute timer for whatever you feel like is the highest priority in your GMAT studies right now. You're going to set a 20-minute timer where you block off all distractions. You're going to put your phone in airplane mode. You're going to shut yourself in a room, or in the most non-distracted place you can get. Just minimize the distractions. You might not be able to eliminate them, but minimize them.

And then after that 20-minute timer goes off, you're going to take a short break and give yourself a little reward, either 5 or 10 minutes. You give yourself a little reward: you go on social media, you talk to someone you like, you just do something pleasurable, so that you start to reinforce this idea that sitting and working on something that's important to you, even if it's painful in the moment, takes you where you want to go.

Now, those are the top four least polarizing tips that I can give. And I'm going to get into some stuff right now that's going to be probably a lot more polarizing. So I just want you to know that this stuff, again, it might not resonate with you. It might turn you off. You might hate this. You don't have to do any of this. I'm not recommending you do all of it. I'm just presenting you with some options in case you're in a situation where you feel like this stuff could help, and you can try it out or not try it out. It's up to you.

So, this one's definitely going to be controversial, but one thing that I have had some success with is a reward when you do things the right way, and a little bit of punishment when you do things the wrong way. Now, don't get too intense with this. This is my advice. If you set a goal for your studies, like let's say you're going to study for an hour, then you want to plan a little reward for yourself if you do that right. Just something nice. Doesn't have to be big. In fact, I'd recommend you not make it big. Make it small, like a nice beer or a nice wine. You know, do you break out the fancy wine when you hit your study goal? Versus when you don't hit your study goal, you drink the wine you like less. It's just a small-grade, very low-key reward. Reward yourself when you hit your study goal for the day, or the week, or the month, and then just don't reward yourself when you don't do it, okay?

So I don't actually recommend punishing yourself. I don't think that's the best idea for a lot of people. I trust your judgment, of course. This is your life. But I think it's more about the reward and then not-reward, and that's usually enough to remind you: right, this is really, really important to me. Basically, something pleasurable when you hit your goal, and then you're not allowed to do that pleasurable thing if you don't hit your goal.

Next tip is exercise. I talked a lot about exercise in last week's podcast, so I'm not going to go super deep on this. But if you don't have an exercise routine and you have a very sedentary lifestyle right now, then just go for three minutes per day, every single day. And here's the thing: three minutes of exercise might not radically alter your physiology. You might not radically alter your brain chemistry. But just beginning the habit of doing it, even a little bit, is going to encourage you to magnify that habit over time.

So for example, I had a fitness coach back in the day, and sometimes he would give people who are really struggling with motivation an interesting assignment. He would just say, "just do one push-up a day. One push-up. That's it. Even just a half push-up, even if you can't do a full push-up, just do one." And almost inevitably, most days people would end up doing three or five, and they'd think, "okay, I got a few more in me," something like that. And on the days where they were really not feeling it, and it was awful and it was painful, they just did one. And then they got to reward themselves for that.

Rick Rubin, if you know who Rick Rubin is, he's a big-time music producer. He's produced records for Jay-Z, obviously Rage Against the Machine, I mean just countless giant artists. And when he's working with struggling songwriters, people who have writer's block, he says, "just bring me one word tomorrow. Just bring me one word, one word you like, or one line. You don't have to bring me a song. You don't have to bring me a verse. You don't have to bring me a chorus and an intro. You don't have to bring any of that stuff. Just bring me one word. Just get some momentum in the right direction."

With your physical exercise, now, a quick tip here: if you're super into fitness, you might have to back off your goals, and that might really hurt. Don't use staying in shape as an excuse to not study for the GMAT when you know you should be studying. Now, there's balance there. There's obviously a balance there, and I trust your judgment to make the right call for yourself.

Next tip, definitely controversial but potent: don't let yourself go to bed unless you've studied for at least 10 minutes in the day. This is if you're really, really struggling with motivation, you're in a huge rut, you're not studying at all any day. And you can scale this up if you want, but I think 10 minutes is a good number. And here's why: 10 minutes less of sleep is extremely unlikely to affect you the next day, and over the long run. But you would be very surprised how much you can learn that you didn't know previously in just 10 minutes.

I'm always shocked at how negatively I think when I think I only have 10 minutes to work on this thing because my day's going sideways. I'm always shocked at how negatively I think about that, yet how much I get done in just 10 minutes. It's usually not, you know, studying 10 minutes a day may not be enough for you to go from a 500 to a 700 in a few weeks. That's extremely, extremely unlikely. But 10 minutes is way better than zero. It's way better than zero. And it's probably more than twice as good as five. So just get a little bit of momentum in the right direction.

Okay. I've saved the most extreme tips here for last. So if you're feeling a little bit bad about what I was just talking about, then you might want to just flip this off and come back later. Only if you absolutely need to. But here are two tips that you can use that definitely can work in certain situations.

So, the first comes from a weightlifting coach I had back in the day. He would reach plateaus because he was a really hard worker and he had a big social media following. I don't even know if he's still doing that, but he was pretty big-time in the fitness industry for a while. And he would reach plateaus pretty quickly because he trained so much. And his strategy for himself was always to do what he called "becoming weak." So he would train at these different gyms, and he would basically just be way more knowledgeable and way stronger and in much better shape than the people around him, because he was basically doing it full time. And so what he had to do is he had to start going to other gyms and just working out around people who were way, way stronger than he was, so he then became the weak person in the gym.

So I already talked about spending time with people who make you feel motivated, but this is like a little bit more extreme version of that. Which is, I recommend either following people on social media, or if you can hang out with them in real life, that's maybe even better, but obviously there can be limits to that. But you want to start spending time around people who are absolutely kicking butt at what you want to be doing, and who are so much better at what you want to be doing that it's like maybe even a little painful for you to watch how much you suck compared to them.

Now, it's not an excuse to say that you suck in general, because there's probably always going to be someone better than you, and there's probably always going to be someone worse than you. I'm just saying, if you're really struggling, seek out situations where you lose, and you lose maybe on a regular basis. Now, this is not going to work for everybody, but it can be very, very effective for some personality types. Go out and realize that someone else is way better at the things that you want to be great at, and is getting the results that you want to be getting in five years, they're getting those results today. And just let that pain sink in a little bit, and realize that unless you take action, you're probably not going to be there in five years. Now again, that's extreme. You don't have to go to those lengths. But it definitely can be effective in certain situations. So think about how you might be able to make that work for you. And if it's not a fit for you, don't do it.

Now, last, and probably most intense: spend a little bit of time meditating on death. Now, you definitely don't want to go extreme with this, okay? I think it can be very detrimental. And as I have recommended in the past, and I'll recommend again, I think spending at least 80% of your time thinking about what's awesome about your life, and being grateful, and being excited for what you're creating, and being interested in what you're going to be doing in the future, is definitely the way to go, if you want what most of us want in life, which is we want to feel good.

But there is a time and a place, if you need something a little more extreme. You can do a couple things. First is you can get something called a totem, which is just a little physical item, usually, that reminds you of your own mortality. Now, plenty of people out there are trying to solve the death problem, and maybe we're all going to live forever. Maybe we're going to upload ourselves to the cloud. Maybe we're going to get a new body in a few years when this one wears out. I mean, no one really knows exactly what's going to happen, I don't think, at least I don't. And maybe we're all going to live to 120, and then we're going to be over it, and we're like, okay, we're good. But as of today's technology and its availability to the masses, pretty much at this point, if something really, really drastic happens, then our life will probably end at some point.

And again, I don't think this is something you should meditate on all day, every day. But if you need to take it to extreme lengths, and this is motivating for you, then it can work in the short run. Now, Steve Jobs used to do this a lot. So if you do a web search for "Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech," I think it's from 2006, he has a pretty good segment on how he used the idea of his own mortality to motivate him and to help him make good decisions. So that's an example of someone very, very materially successful who has made use of this.

The totem thing is interesting. You can get a black ring, a black watch, black socks. I don't know, something that just reminds you: okay, my time here is limited. My time is limited. Am I doing what I really want to be doing right now? Am I prioritizing the right way? Am I likely to, if and when I do go, look back on this period of my life and feel good about what I was doing? Or am I way off course? Am I way off course, or am I a little off course? How can I get closer to being on course for what I want?

Now, if you don't want to go that extreme, that's completely fine. A piece of advice I often give to people is just, each day, set a 10-second timer and just think about how you might die at some point. Maybe not. Maybe you're not going to die. Maybe you're going to live forever. But maybe you will. Are you happy with the way things are going right now? And that little 10 seconds, you might be surprised, can really give you a big emotional lift.

Now, if that's bringing you down, just stop, okay? Again, what we're going for here is the emotion of motivation, the energy of motivation, and if absolutely necessary, just raw discipline and grit, and moving beyond motivation. Because ideally, in a perfect world, your level of motivation does not affect how effective your studies are and how regular your studies are. And I think a lot of people these days talk about discipline being more important than motivation, and honestly, I agree. I agree. Being motivated is actually not essential for your progress. It certainly helps, but the only thing that's essential is that you sit down and you get to work. That's what's going to make the difference.

So I really, really hope this stuff helps you out. Definitely give me feedback if you liked this episode, if you thought it was garbage, if you have techniques of your own that I can incorporate into a future episode, where maybe we can pull some really valuable stuff for the community that's worked for all of you. I would love that.

In the meantime, my greatest hope, as always, is that this content will make your studies as easy and as painless as they can possibly be. If you would like more tips and strategies for optimizing your performance on the GMAT, just head to my website, thegmatstrategy.com, and check out my free video presentation on how to achieve your dream GMAT score in half the normal time and with half the normal effort.

In the meantime, this is a weekly show, so please subscribe, and stay positive and stay consistent with your studies. I'll talk to you soon.