There are two kinds of fuel.
The first is dirty fuel. It starts from what you dislike and what you’re afraid of. You burn it to get away from something, or to prove something to the people watching.
At work, dirty fuel sounds like this: you start thinking about a change, and the strongest thing driving you is that you can’t stand the environment and the people in it. You want out, fast. In a business of your own it sounds like: make money quickly, so everyone can see I’m good enough.
Dirty fuel works. It can be extremely efficient. But it has two side effects. It doesn’t last, and you find that out precisely when things get hard, which is the moment you needed it most. And it generates its own weather along the way: worry, anxiety, impatience, that constant accounting of what you might gain and what you might lose.
The second is clean fuel. It starts from wanting something, from being drawn towards it. The attention is on your own growth and your own experience of the thing. What it feels like from the inside: there’s a clear picture up ahead and it’s pulling you forward.
Same situation, clean fuel version. You’re considering a change, and the question isn’t how to escape a toxic environment, it’s what you want to create and what you want to become. You leave because of the new thing, not because of the old one. You start something of your own not to prove anything, but for what you want to experience and learn as its owner.
On top of being just as efficient, clean fuel has one large advantage: it doesn’t drain you. Almost all the time and energy you put in goes into producing something, instead of being consumed by thoughts and feelings about it.
Here’s the part I find genuinely interesting. The same objective situation usually contains both fuels at once. You can run it on dirty fuel and you can run it on clean fuel, and which one you use is something you get to frame for yourself. I know how that sounds. It sounds like I’m telling you to think your way around reality. I’d put it more precisely: before you act, you tune yourself, and you choose the better and more durable energy.
So if you find your follow-through isn’t strong, or that you start things and drift away from them halfway, and then blame yourself for having no discipline, I don’t think that’s a problem with you as a person. I think nobody ever told you to check what you were burning. Which usually means you’ve only thought about what you don’t want, what you’re trying to get away from, and how it looks to other people, and never about what you’re moving towards, what you want to achieve, and what you want the experience of it to feel like.
There’s a related idea in Conversations with God. The book says there are two energies in the universe: fear and love.
Circumstances themselves are neutral. What decides things is how we read them and what we choose. Where you can, choose what you love, the picture you want, the thing you actually desire. Clean fuel is what lets us go the distance.