Know your reasons#

A goal tells you what you’re aiming at. Your reasons tell you why — and the why is what carries you through the dull middle of a learning project, long after the novelty has worn off. The aim of this task is to turn a vague sense of “I’d like to do this” into clear, explicit reasons you actually own.

This matters more than it looks. Decades of motivation research keep finding the same thing: how a goal is fuelled predicts whether you stick with it. When your reasons feel like genuinely yours — your own values, your own curiosity, something you’d choose freely — you persist longer, perform better, and enjoy the work more. When the only fuel is outside pressure (“I have to”, “they expect it”, “I’d feel guilty otherwise”), you tend to push hard for a while and then quietly stall. Psychologists call the first kind autonomous motivation and the second controlled motivation, and the gap between them is one of the most robust findings in the field (Ryan & Deci, 2000).

So spend a few minutes making your reasons explicit. You’re not just listing benefits — you’re checking that the goal is genuinely yours.

Two kinds of reasons#

Most goals come with two groups of reasons. Some arise from the goal itself. Others come from the underlying personal skills you’ll develop on the way. Here’s a list from someone wanting to learn to fly:

The reasons on the left are benefits that come from flying itself. The reasons on the right are skills and qualities you build on the way to the goal — and they transfer to everything else you do.

Find reasons from both groups. This isn’t busywork. Sometimes the personal-skill reasons turn out to motivate you more than the activity itself — and naming them gives you a second tank of fuel for the days when the surface goal feels far off. Other times you simply hadn’t noticed you were growing real skills along the way; once you see it, the work feels more worthwhile.

When the goal isn’t really yours#

Sometimes you face a learning goal that doesn’t fit your own direction — common at work, where the course was chosen for you. You can’t always change the goal, but you can change your relationship to it. This is what researchers call internalising a goal: taking something that started as an external demand and finding the part of it you can genuinely endorse (Vansteenkiste, Ryan & Soenens, 2020).

The handle for that is usually the personal-skill column. Ask: what could this help me do later? What would I gain by getting good at it, beyond ticking the box? Even a dull-seeming course can build discipline, judgment, or a skill you’ll want one day. Find your own reasons, and a “have to” can quietly become a “want to” — which is precisely the shift that keeps you going.

If you genuinely can’t find a single reason of your own — if the only thing driving you is someone else’s expectation — that’s worth noticing rather than ignoring. A goal fuelled purely by outside pressure is the kind people abandon. Ask who set it and why. You may decide it’s still worth doing; just go in with your eyes open and at least one reason that’s yours. When you commit to a goal, make it your choice to do so.

When you don’t know what to choose#

A related case: you don’t have a clear idea of what to focus on at all. This might be as small as picking a training course, or as large as choosing a career.

My view is that it’s usually better to set a direction — any reasonable direction — than to wait for enlightenment about what you “should” do. Pick something that builds your personal skills. When your real direction does become clear, you’ll get there faster than people who spent the same months sitting still, waiting for someone to hand them their purpose. Movement teaches you things that deliberation can’t.

This isn’t a licence to ignore your reasons — it’s the opposite. Choosing a direction you picked, for your own reasons, is itself an act of autonomy, and that’s exactly what makes the choice stick. Waiting passively for the perfect goal tends to leave you with neither motion nor ownership.

If you’re still struggling to find solid, realistic reasons even after this, take a closer look at the goal itself — get close to the action by talking to people who’ve done it or trying a small version first — and see whether that turns up reasons you couldn’t see from the outside.

Learning Memletics as a goal#

You might be tempted to set “learn Memletics” as a goal in itself. My suggestion: don’t. Pair it with a real learning goal and use Memletics on that. The system makes far more sense when you apply it to something you actually care about, and your own reasons for that real goal will pull you through the learning.

You don’t learn to drive a car by studying the car. You learn by driving it. Treat Memletics the same way.

You don’t have to learn it all at once, either — the appendix has some tips on picking it up gradually.

The takeaway: before you start, write down why. Reach for reasons that are genuinely yours — your values, your curiosity, the skills you want to build — not just the ones other people would approve of. Those are the reasons that are still there at week six.