4 Firecracker Strategies to Use Negative Motivation to Become More Powerful

You have to embrace the negativity, the cynicism, the criticism of others so you can control how that fire burns. Fire can destroy but it can also forge new creations. The more you can withstand, and the sooner you take action, the greater your chances of getting back in the race. – Tim S. Grover, Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness

In popular culture, a lot of energy and time has been dedicated around the topic of “positive thinking”.

This is all well and good, but the unfortunate aftermath of this is the disregard of what I call “negative thinking” or “negative motivation”.

Not too long ago, I wrote about the science of motivation and how to get yourself going from a physiological perspective.

Here’s the psychological perspective from a slightly “darker” side.

Much like knowing your shadow self and getting in touch with it, negative visualization and negative motivation are powerful instruments to create action when used properly.

In fact, I’d say it’s something that’s absolutely necessary. And you’ll soon see why. Here’s what you’ll also learn:

• What exactly “negative motivation” is and why it’s so powerful
• When to and when not to use negative reinforcement
• How to use the Stoic method of “negative visualization” to ramp up your progress towards your goals

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What is “Negative Motivation”?

I’ve mentioned this before many times, but for those just joining us, I’ll mention it again:

Our ancestors were human beings who lived in a time of extreme scarcity and immediate threats.

Droughts, famines, dangerous animals, low resources, and warring tribes were par for the course. The world they lived in was hunt-or-be-hunted. Luckily, they had a biological system to help them deal with potential threats. This is known as “fight-or-flight”, which is based on the chemical “adrenaline”.

Adrenaline makes someone’s hearing more acute, their vision sharper, their reaction time faster, increases their strength, along with a wide variety of other effects.

The fight-or-flight system is a (mostly positive) mechanism triggered by a (potentially negative) response. This is an example of negative motivation in a biological sense. Without it, our species would be extinct.

As a species, we are primed to respond to negative reinforcement.

Whether you think about it or not, you yourself have been motivated by negative stimuli to act in various times in your life.

Here’s some examples:

• When you were a kid, your parents threatened to take away your favorite toy if you didn’t behave.
• As a teen, you behaved well because your same parents would yell at you.
• In college, you studied extra hard when you were one major test from failing the course.
• Your boss tells you if you’re late to work one more time you’ll be fired.
• Your lights will be cut off if you miss next month’s payment.

All of these are examples of negative stimuli to get you to act. This is proverbial “light a fire under your ass” type motivation.

What is negative motivation NOT good for?

Negative motivation is not putting yourself down by saying “I’m stupid, I’m worthless, etc”. That’s putting yourself down. That’s having a negative mindset. It’s not productive. That’s not what I’m talking about.

When we’re talking about using negative stimuli to motivate towards an action, here’s what I mean:

You will never rise to the higher levels of a field based on motivation alone, much less negative motivation.

You will never have a good relationship with your significant other if that relationship is based on fear.

You will never become a master in your field of choice if you just want to “grind” and “make tons of money”.

You will never get a super shredded physique if you just want to impress chicks.

If you want to reach the peak, the top 5% of a paradigm where all the fun, rewards, and excitement is; sorry, motivation alone just won’t cut it.

However, using negative feelings and negative sources of motivation can be a good start to action.

But if you’re looking to get to “the next level”, you need inspiration and discipline, which is a completely different topic and beyond the scope of this article.

If you’re just looking for something to help you “get started”, then read on.

Why Negative Motivation Works Well to Create Change

If you ask most people “what do you want out of life?”, most of them, 9 people out 10 will not be able to tell you.

They may have some idea like “make a lot of money” or “live a good life”, but these answers are vague, fuzzy, and lack clarity.

But ask someone “what don’t you want out of life?”, oh, everyone will be able to tell you.

• “I don’t want to be homeless”
• “I don’t want to be poor”
• “I don’t want to be in bad health”
• “I don’t want to be shunned by my friends”
• “I don’t want to get divorced”

That’s because it’s fairly easy to know what we don’t want. As humans, we are naturally averse to pain, so we seek to subdue it at all costs. This means doing whatever it takes to minimize it in our lives.

This is why negative motivation helps you keep your head above water if you’re drowning. It doesn’t help bring you out of the water.

It doesn’t create plans. It doesn’t create goals. It doesn’t help you achieve your eventual dreams.

This is why many people are just “getting by” instead of actually thriving.

Negative Visualization: Imagining the Worst Case Scenario

Rehearse death. To say this is to tell a person to rehearse his freedom. A person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. 

 Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

When you want to motivate yourself or others, you want to focus on antecedents, behavior, and consequences (ABC).

Antecedents are things that inform the behavior, the behavior is the action, and the consequences are the result of the behavior.

This is very similar to the “cue, routine, reward” loop from Charles’ Duhigg’s The Power of Habit.

We want to focus on the “C” part of motivation – the consequences.

You may see people out and about (maybe even some of your friends are like this) who are chronically unemployed, doing drugs, smoking cigarettes, spending all day gaming and watching TV, and generally leading lives of quiet desperation. You are looking at someone who has not felt the effects of negative motivation.

Maybe they gave it a passing thought or they said:

Nah, it’s not going to happen to me, man

But it always inevitably ends up happening to them.

Everyone knows that taking drugs, smoking cigarettes, and living a sedentary lifestyle is not good for you. But what happens?

They get the cancer diagnosis, they get the drug overdose, they get overweight, they get divorced. Why? Because they did not see the effects of their behavior in the long term.

There are serious consequences for failure, there are serious consequences for laziness, there are serious consequences for inaction.

Poverty. Death. Pain. All not good things.

In Stoic philosophy, there’s a concept known as negative visualization. Stoic philosophers Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus called it premeditato malorum (premeditation of evils).

It helps you think about negative consequences that may happen as a result of your current trajectory in life.

Is it possible to see the possible negative outcome of every situation in your life? Absolutely not. That’s impossible (unless you’re some type of enlightened sage).

Is it possible to see the possible negative outcome of actions that you KNOW are negative? Hell yes.

Here’s an example of how I used this in my life:

In my late teenage years, around 18 and 19, I entered a year and a half period of absolute mediocrity and stagnation.

There were many variables that impacted me at that time, but simply put – I was not living to my maximum potential.

I didn’t have the dating life I wanted, the social life I wanted, the academics I knew I could achieve, and I found myself in a persistent “fog of war”. My 20th birthday was coming up in a couple of months and I knew “these were not my dreams of Bunker Hill”.

So I visualized. I saw what my life would look like in a year, 5 years, 10 years, 30 years.

I saw myself as a bitter and jaded old man regretful that he wasted his 20s and 30s, the prime of his life. I saw all the dreams, the goals, washed down the toilet due to my own inaction. I saw the negativity. I felt it, raw and unfiltered. It was a living nightmare.

I came back to reality. No more. No more of it. The next day I started making changes. I started reverting back to my old-school discipline that arose as a result of hard drilling at home.

I started cutting off “friends”, I started reading books, I started going to the gym. My life started transforming before my eyes.

I was in a completely different place than where I started because I used negative motivation and negative visualization. That was the starting point.

“Day One” and Breaking Free

This then brings me to what I call “the day one mentality”.

The “day one mentality” is the mindset you have where you’re chomping at the bit to get to where you want to be in your mind’s eye. “Day one” is the day when you say “no more”.

No more to being a fat piece of shit.

No more to having lint in your pockets.

No more to not having a good group of friends.

No more excuses, no more wasting time. No more.

It could be the day that changes your life.

People who were born with everything given to them, people who are victim to what I call “the silver spoon” in their mouth since birth; they do not have this day one mentality. All of their needs are met, so they have no reason to strive for anything.

It’s when you’re in a state of hunger, a state of lack, a state of emotional, physical, or mental pain that you do whatever fuck it takes to get to where you want to go.

That’s what starts the gears in motion. That combined with the negative visualization of the continuance of that lack, continuance of that pain from inaction, breaks you out of your sleepwalking inertia and gets you on the road to achievement.

Here’s a podcast episode talking exactly about this:

Steps to Using Negative Motivation to Achieve Your Goals

Now, here’s the actionable part of the article.

1. What don’t you want to happen?

Ask yourself: what is the worst-case scenario? What will happen to you because of your laziness? What will happen to you because of inaction?

In Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill said there are six basic fears that all human beings have. These are:

1. Fear of Poverty
2. Fear of Criticism
3. Fear of Ill Health
4. Fear of Loss of Love
5. Fear of Old Age
6. Fear of Death

If you sort out all of the things you don’t want to happen, you’ll see that they fall in one of these six buckets.

There’s little you can do about the last two, but what about the first four? These things can easily be avoided with a little foresight and action. Make sure you don’t fall victim to them because of your laxity.

Fear is a paralyzing agent. It only feeds on anxiety which becomes worse from inaction. 

Cut your fears off at the source by being intensely action-oriented.

2. What are the long-term implications of inaction?

The fruit of your action or inaction will not be seen in the present.

If you just started smoking, you won’t get lung cancer and die tomorrow (most likely not, at least).

Ten years later, you go and get a doctor’s check up. He tells you you need to stop your habit/addiction or else you will die very shortly. At that point, you have a choice.

You can avoid this if you bring those long-term implications into the present.

3. Bring that feeling into the present moment

This is where negative visualization comes in. Vividly imagine and picture all of the negative feelings and things that will happen to you if you don’t change course.

Ask yourself: “what will happen to me over time as a result of my negligence?”

Write down full length descriptions on paper. Record your voice and play it back to yourself.

You want the pain and consequence to be as immediate as possible.

4. Develop mental toughness.

There’s a saying that goes “life is tough, be tougher“. All things considered, this is very true. You need mental resilience in order to live a successful life.

Mental toughness is an intangible quality that helps people push through difficulties, setbacks, and obstacles in order to achieve a large, overarching goal.

If you want to take advantage of negative motivation to its fullest, you’ll need to develop some form of mental toughness.

5. Take action.

Then, you take action.

You can’t expect to fix all your problems in a day. You want your actions to trend in a general direction of positive over a period of time.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s over a period of a month, a year, or a couple of years, you always want to make progress on whatever you are doing.

No one starts benching 100 kilograms the day they walk into the gym. But you get there by progressive steps that build on top of each other.

Eventually, you will reach a breaking point where all of your progress compounds on top one another and you are shot way, way up.

But it starts today, it starts right now.

Conclusion + Wrapping Up

Negative motivation is the act of using negative current or future consequences to create change in the present moment. It is taking stock of all the bad things that are happening or could happen and making sure they are addressed or mitigated. You bring the downside of a situation into the present by using negative visualization and worse-case scenario planning.

Your physiology and psychology are primed to take advantage of negative cues in your environment, so this makes taking advantage of negativity helpful in creating sustainable change.

When you are in a state of hunger, desperation, or survival – you will fight twice as hard to make it through.

Have you used negative motivation in your life to start change? Let me know in the comments.