How to Stay Motivated When No One Is Watching

There is a category of endurance cycling in which riders cross a continent alone, unsupported, with no crew and no spectators, and the interesting thing about the people who finish is that when you ask them about motivation they tend to look slightly confused by the question. One of them, asked what kept her going at four in the morning on an unlit road in central France, said: nothing kept me going. Going is what I was doing. There was no separate thing keeping me at it.

This is not mysticism, and it is not toughness. It is a structural observation. Motivation is a feeling, and feelings are generated by circumstances — audience, novelty, progress, praise, fear. At four in the morning on an empty road there are no circumstances. Every input the feeling depends on has been removed. If your continuation depends on the feeling, you will stop, and no amount of character will save you, because you are not being asked for character, you are being asked for a feeling that the situation is physically unable to produce.

What the finishers have instead is not more motivation. It is fewer decisions. Almost every one of them, when pressed, describes some version of a rule that removes the question from the road entirely: I ride until the odometer says a number. I stop at a town, never between towns. I do not evaluate anything before I have eaten. The rule is decided at a kitchen table, in daylight, by a rested person with reasonable judgement. The person on the road at four in the morning is not qualified to make decisions and, crucially, is not asked to.

This is the piece that most advice about self-discipline gets backwards. It treats the unwatched hours as a test of willpower, when they are actually a test of the quality of your prior arrangements. The version of you that is tired, alone, and unobserved is a poor negotiator and an excellent lawyer: given an open question, it will construct a genuinely persuasive case for stopping, and it will be right about several of the facts. The only defence is to have not left an open question.

There is a second element, and the riders mention it more often than the rules. It is a small, specific, physical ritual that marks the beginning of work — a particular jacket, a particular order of packing, the same first two miles ridden slowly. It sounds superstitious and it is not. A ritual is an action that does not require any belief in order to function; it works by association, and the association keeps working long after the enthusiasm has gone. Enthusiasm is what gets you to build the ritual. The ritual is what operates when enthusiasm is unavailable, which is most of the time.

The last thing worth saying is about the audience. People assume that working unobserved is harder because nobody is there to impress, but the riders describe something different. They say the absence of an audience removes the temptation to do the visible parts well and the invisible parts badly. Nobody is watching, so there is no point in performing, so all that is left is the actual work — and the actual work, done without an audience for long enough, is the only thing that has ever reliably produced people who are good at something.

She finished in nineteen days. There was no crowd at the end, because there is not one in that sport; there was a photograph taken by a man who runs a café. She said it was, honestly, a bit flat, and that the part she thinks about is not the finish but a specific stretch of road at four in the morning where nothing whatsoever was keeping her going and she went anyway, because that was the arrangement.