Motivation is nice when it comes along, but ultimately I don’t think you need motivation from other people for things you actually care about achieving.

When I moved to Santa Monica in 2002 to start my fitness business, I woke up every day incredibly motivated to make things happen. Every day I wanted to do something measurable to move my business forward. That could mean writing an article for publication, lining up an interview with someone influential, promoting a workshop, or taking on new online program-design clients. This was long before podcasts were ubiquitous. I would record phone interviews with interesting people and then transcribe those interviews into articles for publication. I promoted just about all of my courses myself, taking care of everything from registrations to booking venues. I made DVDs, wrote ebooks, created online courses, and constantly looked for ways to expand my reach.

Nobody had to motivate me to do any of this. The goal itself—becoming a successful fitness professional—was intrinsically motivating. Success speaker Jim Rohn once made a great point: if you’re waiting for someone to motivate you, what happens if they don’t show up? Ironically, that may be one of the best arguments against needing motivational speakers that I’ve ever heard.

I don’t know anyone who is highly successful who needs other people to motivate them. That doesn’t mean successful people aren’t motivated or inspired by others. Of course they are. I’ve been inspired by countless people over the course of my life and career. We can learn from other people’s accomplishments, work ethic, ideas, and examples. But being inspired by someone is very different from needing someone else to get you moving.

At the end of the day, your success is on you. You’re the one who has to perform the necessary actions every day, especially when those actions aren’t particularly exciting. And that’s the part I think gets lost in a lot of motivational material. You have to commit to seemingly dull and mundane actions for a very long time to build anything of merit.

Whether you’re trying to develop serious strength and an impressive physique, build a lucrative business, or develop a powerful financial portfolio, much of the process isn’t exciting at all. In fact, it can feel like Groundhog Day. You do the work. You go to sleep. You wake up and do the work again. There’s no red carpet. There aren’t crowds of people clapping for you like you’re The Beatles and telling you how great you are. Most of the time, nobody is paying attention at all.

That’s the price of admission, and I think it’s one of the many reasons relatively few people achieve anything of merit. Lots of people want the outcome. Far fewer want the lifestyle required to produce the outcome.

The ability to tolerate repetition may be far more important than the ability to generate motivation. Anyone can get excited about starting something. Starting a new training program is exciting. Starting a business is exciting. Making your first investment is exciting. Announcing some enormous new goal is exciting. Then you have to live through everything that happens between the beginning and the desired outcome. That’s where things get considerably less exciting.

Another workout. Another article. Another customer email. Another investment. Another good meal. Another problem that needs to be solved. Another day when seemingly nothing significant happens. Repeat that process for years.

People often look at someone after they’ve achieved something impressive and say, “You must be incredibly motivated.” Maybe. But what they’re often seeing is someone who became very good at doing productive things without requiring those things to be exciting. When you care enough about the destination, you don’t need to be excited about every mile of the drive.

None of this means the people around you don’t matter. Building anything impressive can be exhausting, and you have to be careful about allowing other people’s limitations to become your own. Some people may genuinely think they’re protecting you when they discourage you. Others simply can’t imagine themselves doing what you’re attempting, so they assume you can’t do it either.

That’s why I believe strongly that iron sharpens iron. The more people you know who are working hard to become successful themselves, the better. Ambitious and disciplined people can raise your standards. They can give you ideas, challenge your thinking, and inspire you through their example. Surround yourself with people who raise your standards, but don’t require them to raise your motivation.

Ultimately, nobody else can perform your repetitions for you. And if you’re pursuing a goal you genuinely care about, you’ll often become so focused on persevering that you don’t even have time to keep track of who supports you and who doesn’t.

There’s an entire genre of motivational rhetoric centered around proving the doubters wrong. “They didn’t believe in me.” “Nobody thought I could do it.” “I’ll show them!” After a while, who cares? The work still has to be done. If you’re building strength, the barbell doesn’t care who believes in you. If you’re building a business, your customers don’t care whether your friends understand what you’re doing. If you’re building wealth, your portfolio doesn’t care whether anyone applauds your decisions. Other people’s approval—or lack of it—doesn’t perform any of the necessary actions.

One of the best examples from my own career occurred when I decided to get into the supplement business. In 2010, my friend Anthony Roberts introduced me to Bulbine Natalensis, which would eventually become the cornerstone ingredient in my testosterone-support supplement ASTB. I had already been using the other two ingredients that would eventually become part of the formula, Mucuna Pruriens and Stinging Nettle root, and getting great results from them. When I had a chance to try Bulbine, I felt like the trifecta was complete. I knew I wanted to turn the combination into a supplement.

There was only one problem: I had never created a supplement before, and building one from scratch seemed like a daunting task. My initial solution was to design the formula for another company and work out some kind of revenue-sharing arrangement. One company showed some initial interest, but they took way too long to take any concrete action. I became increasingly frustrated waiting for them.

Then one evening I was walking my dog Grover and thinking about the situation when I had an epiphany: Why am I trying to pass the work on to somebody else?

My entire career had been DIY. I promoted my own courses. I made DVDs. I wrote ebooks. I created online courses. I handled registrations and booked venues. Why couldn’t I make the supplement myself? Source the ingredients, find a manufacturer, develop the formula, come up with a label and brand, and then sell it directly to my customers.

Suddenly the problem wasn’t waiting for somebody else to make my idea happen. The problem became figuring out how I could make it happen myself.

That didn’t mean it happened overnight. It took a while to put all the pieces together. There were manufacturers to find, ingredients to source, formulations to finalize, labels to create, and countless details to work through. Eventually, in 2013, ASTB was released. It sold so well that by 2015 I was able to retire from being a kettlebell instructor and focus entirely on building my supplement company. I subsequently designed three more supplements: EC, RED, and Overpower.

Looking back, what’s interesting about that experience is that I never had a motivation problem. I had an execution problem. I was waiting for someone else to execute an idea that I already believed in. Once I realized that, the solution became obvious: stop waiting and do it myself.

Anthony played an important role by introducing me to Bulbine in the first place, and many other people helped me along the way. None of us accomplish everything entirely by ourselves. Other people can provide information, inspiration, opportunities, and assistance. But they cannot substitute for your execution.

Maybe this is ultimately why motivational speakers have never been particularly motivating to me. I don’t need someone on a stage screaming at me to want something more. If I genuinely want something, I’m already motivated. The much bigger challenge is being willing to continue performing the necessary actions after the initial excitement is long gone.

Motivation can help you start. Inspiration can give you ideas. Being around successful people can raise your standards. But eventually it’s Tuesday afternoon and nobody is cheering for you. Nobody is giving you an inspirational speech. The goal may still be years away. What are you going to do? Hopefully, the same thing you did yesterday: the work.

However, there’s another side to this that I think is equally important. Just as you don’t need external motivation when it involves something you actually care about achieving, sometimes a persistent lack of motivation is a sign that it’s time to move on.

When I first started teaching kettlebell courses in 2002, I was so excited to teach that I often had trouble sleeping the night before. It was the kind of excitement many of us had as kids the night before Christmas. I couldn’t wait to get up the next morning and teach. That excitement lasted for years.

Toward the end of my kettlebell teaching career, though, the courses were becoming very repetitive for me, especially the Level 1 beginner courses. Traveling overseas helped reignite some of my enthusiasm because I loved visiting other countries, and the people attending those courses were incredibly excited that I was there. Eventually, though, even that wasn’t enough.

At the second-to-last kettlebell course I ever taught, one student asked for a refund the following day and another told me that I looked like I wasn’t into it. That had never happened before. I had taught more than 200 kettlebell courses between 2002 and 2015, and of course everyone is entitled to an off performance. A great band doesn’t kill it every single night, year after year. Sometimes you simply have a bad day.

But I knew this was something different. Deep down, I didn’t want to teach kettlebell courses anymore.

Fortunately, by then my supplement business had become successful enough that I didn’t need to continue teaching. So rather than trying to watch motivational videos, attend seminars, repeat affirmations, or convince myself that I needed to rediscover my passion for something I’d already done more than 200 times, I moved on. And I have never regretted it.

There’s an important distinction between lacking motivation because the work required to achieve something is difficult or repetitive and lacking motivation because you no longer care about the destination.

The first requires perseverance. The second may require honesty.

Not everything you love doing will remain exciting forever, and that’s okay. Interests change. Priorities change. We change. Something that once consumed you can eventually run its course. That doesn’t diminish what it meant to you or what you accomplished. It simply means that chapter is finished.

Sometimes the answer isn’t to find another motivational speaker to convince you to keep going. Sometimes it’s to move on and find something else worth getting excited about.

The goal isn’t to spend your life trying to stay motivated. It’s to care deeply about what you’re doing, persevere when it’s difficult, and have enough self-awareness to recognize when it’s time to do something else.

The goal isn’t to become more motivated. It’s to become less dependent on motivation.