What do I do when I do not feel motivated?

What about a schedule? Well, in order to reach these goals, we're going to need daily versus weekly goals. That means that we don't need motivation. Motivation is a complete fallacy. It is a wild idea. It comes and goes. I would tell anyone that the days that I work out and the times that I work out are non-negotiable. Why? Because life will consistently try to knock you off course. If you have a bad night's sleep and then you go, well, I don't feel like it, I'm not going to the gym today. Well, guess what? Over the course of six months, all those little things that add up, that get in the way, that hinder progress, incrementally chip away at the goals that you're trying to reach. So when you have a schedule, I mean a calendar, a daily, weekly calendar with time slots on it, and you know where you're supposed to be and what you're supposed to be doing. The discipline is building the understanding that in order to reach my goals, I don't have to do any big thing. I have to do a lot of mediocre and boring things along the way that incrementally add up to reach the big goals. That's the difference between a kind of childish thinking and adult thinking. A childish thinking is like, oh, I'm going to just hit it big, something magical is going to happen, everything's going to, the stars are going to align, and then yada. That's nonsense. That's total nonsense. Anyone who has reached significant milestones in their life or made significant progress on something that they wanted to accomplish did it by doing a lot of boring and monotonous things. It's one of the hardest parts about lifting weights, is the fact that over time you're doing the same thing over and over again, and you have to find there's joy in that and there's character building in that. The same thing with eating food, with making progress in school, whatever that is. The calendar should be the guide for the day. It should be the guide for the week. And it's all of those little incremental bricks that builds up the pyramid. You don't get it overnight. It isn't like 90% of your accomplishment comes from 10%. It's not true. The majority of your accomplishment comes from doing a lot of boring things and a lot of things that you don't want to do. Any businessman can tell you this. Any athlete can tell you this. Any spiritual giant, as we often read in the lives of the saints, it says they went into the desert and they prayed for 20 years. And it's one sentence, but it encapsulates 20 years of significant hard work. It's one of the things I love about St Joseph the Hesychast, was he said, look, prayer is our work. We work at the prayer daily. Meaning that we try to make progress every single day in our prayer life. Incrementally that adds up to spiritual growth over a period of time. But every day it's still hard to pray, and we pray whether or not we feel like it, because we know that we have a schedule to follow. It tells us when we're supposed to pray and how long we're supposed to pray and what we're supposed to be doing. Sometimes it's amazing and sometimes it is work. Either way, it still needs to be done.