In order to gain power over your own motivation, you need a rational morality — a self-consistent morality — that guides all of your choices and actions in a way that enables you to live, productively and happily, in long-term loving relationships over the course of your life. In other words, it is a morality of principles, not of concrete rules.

If you think this is impossible, that no such moral code exists, then you haven’t been exposed to Ayn Rand’s discoveries in ethics. I will say more about this at the end.

But even if you are sold on the idea of a rational morality, you may not understand how a rational morality enables you to manage motivation. There is such a broad cultural acceptance of the reason-emotion dichotomy that you may not realize that these two aspects of one’s mind are fully integratable. How? By monitoring whether your motivation matches your intention and doing the reasoning work — including the introspective work — to identify the source of every conflict and resolve it. Inner conflict can be resolved in time to act, but only with the guidance of a rational moral code. A moral code is relevant in all three phases of managing motivation: motivating action to begin with, resolving any conflicting motivation that interferes with action, and reprogramming any irrational or out-of-date motivation.

Motivating Action

The first step in motivating action is validating the reason for the action. If you are certain that the action is good for you — in every respect — you will feel motivated to act. This requires a logical process of applying moral principles to the issue at hand.

Sometimes people think of this as practical rather than moral work. They recognize that they need to set goals that are worth the effort and that will not sabotage their lives in some way. They see that they need to make only plans that they believe they can execute. They see the problem with burnout and quality of life when they don’t balance work and play, relationships and alone time. But they don’t see how virtues such as honesty and integrity help in this process.

I find that such people view morality as concrete-bound rules instead of principles. For example, they see honesty as relevant only when they are tempted to lie to someone. But honesty — the principle of honesty — is supremely relevant to every aspect of your life, including managing your own motivation. Faking damages social relationships but it also damages your ability to pursue goals. Honesty as a principle includes facing the predictable long-term consequences of your action — whether pleasant or unpleasant — because indulging in wishful thinking backfires sooner or later. If you want to succeed in reality, you need to face reality even when that’s uncomfortable.

Resolving conflict

The most obvious challenge in motivating action is dealing with inner conflict that stops you from following through. Whether you feel resistance to doing the task on the docket or you are tempted to do something else, that feeling of being pulled in two directions is dreadful.

Here, too, a concrete-bound view of morality gets in the way. If you think integrity is a rule that dictates you “do what you say you’ll do,” or “just do it,” you have no choice in how you deal with inner conflict. You need to pressure yourself to suppress it. There is no thinking to be done.

In contrast, the principle of integrity — which you can think of as “loyalty in action to [your] convictions and values” — helps you see what you need to think about in order to resolve the conflict. There are values on both sides of the issue when you feel conflict. Some may be mistaken, but until you can identify the source of the pull and untangle the valid from the invalid, you literally don’t know which side of the conflict is the rational choice. In fact, neither is rational until you address the conflict.

Sometimes you can resolve the conflict in a timely way by analyzing it. Other times you address it by taking a small step that will bring you more information to help resolve the conflict. This latter approach, the small step in which you get more information, is how you remain loyal to all of your convictions and values rather than ignoring them.

Reprogramming motivation

The most difficult challenge in managing motivation occurs when you realize that your existing motivation is insufficient to achieve your goal. If you keep resolving conflicts retail, you will always decide that your existing values are more important than the new goal.

When you identify this state (which takes honesty), you face a choice: drop the goal as not worth the extra effort it will take to overcome the status quo or reprogram your existing motivation by means of targeted effort. This is a big commitment of effort and a commitment to work through a deal of unpleasantness in the name of developing values. Unfortunately, most people think this means you just “suck it up” and “just do it,” no matter how unhappy you are.

But a rationally principled approach to morality treats your ongoing happiness as a necessary part of any plan. You need a more creative solution to build in collateral gains as you are working to reprogram your values. Your recognition of how you are taking care of all that matters to you is critical to marshalling the effort and creativity to make a practical plan for reshaping your psychology in the image of your ambitious goals.

The Ayn Rand connection

What you have above is a terse summary of the role of morality in every piece of motivational advice I give. The value orientation, my work on happiness, my discussion of central purpose, my productivity advice, etc., all were developed as applications of Ayn Rand’s theory of ethics to the practical problem of living a happy, productive life.

If this interests you, you may want to take my husband’s upcoming class on “The Objectivist Ethics.”