Getting Started

Welcome to The Willpower Engine and my “getting started” page. On this site you’ll find dozens of articles based on research and real-life experience that offer specific ways to get and stay motivated, whether your goal is professional or personal, long-term or short-term, and regardless of whether you’ve had trouble with it in the past. The information here can help with organization, fitness and weight loss, health, relationships, writing, study habits, patience, finances, decluttering, productivity, happiness, and a lot of other aspects of life–anything that requires self-motivation or willpower.

The author of the site, Luc Reid (that would be me), is a writer with years of experience studying and writing about society, culture, community, and personal growth. I’m not a psychologist–I don’t conduct research studies or offer therapy–but rather a writer: I do in-depth research, find connections, and present practical ideas from the information I find, as well as accounts of my and other people’s experiences with self-motivation.

This site isn’t a “motivational” site in the sense that it’s not designed to just make you excited: instead, it just offers practical information, examples, and new ways of looking at things. If that inspires you, that’s terrific, but you don’t need inspiration for self-motivation: all you need is to decide what you want to do, learn about motivation, and set aside some time and attention regularly to follow through. Self-motivation has many parts to it, which is one major reason so many people think it’s difficult, yet none of these parts is really very hard to manage once you understand it.

Some of the articles on the site can help you with the fundamentals of self-motivation: you can

• Test to see how viable your goals are
• Use 12 key self-motivation techniques to get on track toward any goal
• Find out how to get started on big tasks (including big tasks you’ve been avoiding)
• Learn about broken ideas, how to detect them and how to repair them.
• Get familiar with emotional antidotes
• Learn to use feedback loops to stay on track,
• Understand yourself better and strengthen your willpower through decision logging
• Learn how to handle multiple priorities
• Keep an eye out for the 10 most common things that go wrong with self-motivation
• Want to get organized? Read Organization: Where Do I Start?

There are also special articles to get you started if you’re interested in fitness or weight loss, or if you’re a writer. I expect to add starter articles for other kinds of goals too, over time.

Once you’ve read up on the basics, you may want to read the site regularly to keep yourself focused and get new perspectives and new information, or you might want to look through the archives of the site from time to time for troubleshooting articles that can help you if you’re having problems.

If you’d like, you can keep up with every post by subscribing through RSS or e-mail. You can also follow me on Twitter. You’ll find new articles here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, and I sometimes post more articles throughout the week on other days, especially quick pointers to resources around the Web.

I would love your feedback, including criticism, questions, things you want to see more or less of, offers to guest blog here or to have me guest blog elsewhere, ideas of people to interview, and so on. You can contact me by commenting on one of the pages or posts here on the site or by sending me a message using the contact form .

For more on me and on the site itself, see the About page.