What's riding on whether you study or not? Did you place a large bet? Could you be ostracized from your tribe? (Nobody wants that! Which is what makes peer pressure so effective.) If nothing is riding on success or failure, then why study? But even that's not a silver bullet. As many have noted, "motivation is rubbish! It's never there when you need it". Instead, it's self discipline, or more accurately, it's habit formation and making study "so easy you can't say no" (by making it almost frictionless) that is the key. Nonetheless, it's a fun exercise to ask: What's riding on your success with languages?
It feels as if one half of me is putting up endless roadblocks to learning and the other half is trying to tear those down as fast as they are thrown up. And it has been a stalemate. I’m faced with trying to outsmart myself. It’s not an easy thing to do. Can I outwit Tawiscara? (George Beaver suggests this.) What would Taronhiawagon do? I can organically construct my mental palace without any preconception ahead of time. “Action comes before motivation.” The corollary to that might be that looking for motivation, trying to apprehend a deterministic plan and certain reason to act, will prevent all action whatsoever. Dostoevsky said as much in Notes from Underground: “For the direct, lawful, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia.”
