There’s a version of the motivation conversation I find almost completely useless. It’s the version that treats motivation as something you either have or don’t have — as a personality trait, a gift some people are born with, the thing that separates disciplined people from lazy ones.
That version of the conversation is not only wrong, it’s actively counterproductive. If motivation is fixed, then when you feel unmotivated, you’re just learning something unfortunate about yourself. There’s nothing to be done.
Ericsson’s research offers a fundamentally different model. Motivation, in this framework, is a ratio. It’s the balance between two sets of factors: reasons to continue practicing, and reasons to stop. Both sides of that ratio are dynamic. Both can be changed. And working on both sides simultaneously is the actual practice of sustaining long-term motivation.
This reframing changed how I approach days when I don’t want to practice.
The Two-Sided Ledger
On one side of the ratio: everything that makes practicing worth doing. Progress you can see. Skills that are visibly improving. Performances that go well and remind you why this matters. Feedback that confirms effort is producing results. Connection to a larger purpose. The intrinsic pleasure of the craft itself.
On the other side: everything that makes stopping more attractive. Physical fatigue. Mental exhaustion from other demands on your life. The frustration of working on something that isn’t improving. Social commitments, professional obligations, the entirely legitimate competing claims on your time and energy. The specific discomfort of deliberate practice — the fact that real practice involves struggling with things you can’t yet do.
In a normal life, the second list is usually long. I was running a consulting practice and building Vulpine Creations simultaneously with trying to develop as a performer. The hotel room nights were often the tail end of days that had already demanded a lot. The energy available for deliberate practice — the kind that requires genuine cognitive engagement — was not always there.
And yet I kept going. Not always with the same intensity, not without gaps, but consistently enough to actually improve over the years. Understanding the two-sided ledger is a large part of why.
Working the Reasons to Continue Side
The most reliable way to strengthen reasons to continue is to make progress visible.
This sounds simple but requires deliberate effort. Progress in skill development is often invisible in the short term. The incremental improvements that compound over months are very difficult to detect from inside the day-to-day experience of practice. You’re too close to it.
I built two mechanisms for making progress visible.
The first was a practice journal — not elaborate, just a few sentences after each session noting what I worked on and what, if anything, shifted. Over weeks and months, this journal became a record of movement. Looking back six months would show me things that had been genuinely hard and were now genuinely easy. That’s powerful evidence that the time is doing something.
The second was deliberate comparison. Every few months, I’d record myself performing something I’d been working on consistently, then compare it to an earlier recording of the same thing. The comparison is often striking in ways that daily experience completely misses. You can’t see the change when you’re inside it; the comparison from outside reveals it.
Visible progress generates motivation directly. It also creates what Ericsson calls “the virtuous cycle” — progress feels good, feeling good makes you more likely to practice, more practice produces more progress.
Working the Reasons to Stop Side
The other side of the ledger is often neglected because it feels less heroic. Reducing friction and fatigue feels like managing weakness rather than building strength. But if you’re serious about sustaining long-term practice, managing the reasons-to-stop side is not optional.
For me, this meant several things.
It meant matching practice intensity to available energy. A session at the end of an exhausting day of client work does not have to be a full deliberate practice session. Sometimes it can be lower-intensity review — comfortable repetition of established material, maintenance rather than growth. That’s not ideal, but it’s infinitely better than skipping entirely. And maintaining the habit of showing up, even when the quality is reduced, keeps the chain unbroken.
It meant making practice sessions short enough to be completable on difficult days. A fifteen-minute genuine practice session is worth more than a two-hour session that doesn’t happen because the two hours felt impossible to carve out.
It meant acknowledging when genuine rest was needed and taking it — not as failure, but as part of the training cycle. Athletes periodize. Periods of intensity alternating with periods of recovery is not weakness management; it’s intelligent programming. Trying to maintain peak practice intensity indefinitely doesn’t work for athletes and doesn’t work for anyone else either.
The Specific Drain of Adult Learner Life
One dimension that gets underplayed in most discussions of motivation and practice is the specific challenge of adult life logistics.
A child learning violin at a conservatory has their life structured around the practice. Lessons are scheduled. Time is blocked. The social environment supports the pursuit. The competing demands are fewer.
An adult learning magic in hotel rooms, while running a consulting practice and building a startup, has none of that. Practice time has to be carved out against genuine competition. The social environment mostly doesn’t see the practice — it sees the performances, or it doesn’t see anything related to magic at all. Progress is invisible to everyone except me and the occasional person who watches me perform.
The reasons-to-stop side of my ledger included: exhaustion from professional work, the sense that magic was a strange hobby to be devoting serious time to, the complete absence of external accountability structures, and the recurring question of whether this was a good use of limited adult discretionary time.
None of these reasons to stop disappeared. I didn’t solve them. What I did was make sure the reasons-to-continue side was weighted enough to tip the balance most of the time.
The Why Underneath the Why
The deepest reason I kept going wasn’t the craft itself, though I genuinely love the craft. It was something underneath the craft.
Magic, for me, represented something specific. It was proof that the capacity to learn, to genuinely develop in a new direction, doesn’t calcify in adulthood. Every noticeable improvement in a skill I started as a complete adult beginner was evidence against the story that says we stop growing.
That’s a personally meaningful story to be able to tell, in the context of a professional life where I’m constantly making the argument to consulting clients that adults can learn, organizations can genuinely change, and it’s never too late to build something new.
If I couldn’t do it myself in a domain that mattered to me, the argument would ring hollow. The practice of magic, at some level, was the proof-of-concept for my professional worldview.
That’s a strong reason to continue that has nothing to do with becoming a great performer. It made the other side of the ledger easier to manage.
Building Your Own Ledger
The practical application of the motivation-as-ratio model is simply this: when motivation is low, identify which side of the ledger needs work.
If the problem is that progress feels invisible, add a progress-visibility mechanism. If the problem is that the reasons-to-stop side has gotten too heavy, look for specific friction you can reduce. If the problem is a failure to connect practice to a purpose that matters beyond the skill itself, do the work of finding that connection.
Motivation doesn’t manage itself. But it is manageable. The ratio is something you can actively work on, not something you wait to feel.
That realization alone is worth more than any motivational speech.
Moving from the practice of developing skill to something more interesting: what does it look like once you’re actually on stage? Keith Johnstone has a framework that changed everything about how I understood performance presence.