Motivation helps you to overcome. It helps you overcome your natural resistance to the effort of writing. It helps you to continue working your way over, around and through the problems you will encounter. It helps you to maintain the energy levels you will need in order to be successful. You’ll never be successful in writing a book or eBook if you aren’t motivated.

Without motivation, you will not succeed.

With motivation, you can achieve anything.

But how can you get motivated?

Everyone is different. Discovering what will motivates you — as an individual — is an important part of the journey of writing a book or an eBook. What motivates you will not motivate me. What motivates me will not motivate you. And because everyone is different, I’m not going to give you a cookie cutter solution.

Instead, in this blog, I’m going to focus on a series of questions you should ask yourself. Of course, motivation is only part of the equation. Finding the time for writing a book — and continuing to the end requires you to balance several elements. However, in this article, I’m going to focus on the first step. Discovering what motivates you.

Maslow discussed motivation in his “Hierarchy of Needs”. And certainly, that model can aid you in suggesting alternatives and levels that might motivate you. In general, you should focus on solving problems or avoiding pain rather than achieving goals. It’s not very positive, however it is realistic. On the other hand, you should also focus on situations that are currently troubling you.  Failing that, situations in the immediate past will motivate you more than will situations that may or may not appear in the future.

However, I’m going to focus on a process to determine you motivation for writing an ebook in this blog entry. This is only one of many methods. It involves asking three questions.

1. What?

Ask yourself, “What is missing in your life?” “What is going wrong?” With this question, you are seeking to determine a problem that writing a book will solve. We all have problems. We all have something in our lives that is out of step with our desires. You need to identify a lack in your life that could be solved by having a book. It could be a lack of money. It could be improving your sense of self-worth. It could be improving others opinion of your skills. It could be achieving freedom in your life. Or spending more time with your family.

2. How?

After writing your book, your life will be different. Ask yourself, “How?” Picture your life after your book is published. Do you have fame? Fortune? More time for your family? What would your life be like if you had that? This step is sometimes incorrectly referred to as visualization. However, what we are really talking about is creating the vision you may later choose to lock in place with visualization. It’s your target if you will.

3. Why?

With this question, you are going to focus the previous answers. And reinforce them. Now you are going to ask, “Why do you need writing a book to achieve those results?” Done properly, this will help to explain why writing a book is a solution to the motivators that you have identified to this point. With this question, you’ll create a direct link between the problem, the goal and writing a book.

By the way, if you want more information on finding the time to write and motivation for writing a book, we have a product called “Finding the Time to Write: Time Management for Writers“

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