No Motivation. No Excuses. Only Gaman
Source: Presence & Path
Have you ever woken up one day knowing exactly what you needed to do—and you didn’t? You knew how to do it. You had enough time. And yet you put it off. Maybe you didn’t do it because you simply didn’t feel like it. And then came the usual excuse: “Today is not a good day.” “I’m tired.” “I’ll start on Monday.” “When I feel better, I’ll do it.”
But Monday turned into another Monday. The “when I feel better” never came. And deep down, you know it.
There’s a Japanese concept that can help you understand that your problem was never laziness, much less a lack of motivation. When you discover the philosophy behind this concept, you’ll never be able to use that excuse again without remembering it.
I’m talking about gaman.
We don’t need motivation. We need gaman. And this can change the way you face each day of your life.
Chapter 1: The Man Who Waited to Be Ready
Marcus was 34 years old, lived in Columbus, Ohio, and had a list. Not just any list. It was the list—the one you write when you’re feeling excited on a Sunday afternoon with coffee in hand and the feeling that this time it’s going to be different.
On Marcus’s to-do list: waking up at 5:00 a.m., writing the book he always wanted to write, starting serious weight training, calling his father more often, quitting his mediocre job, and starting the business he’d had in his head for 3 years.
The list was good, detailed, realistic even. The problem was that Marcus had rewritten that list 11 times in 2 years—always on Sundays, always with coffee, always with the certainty that this time it would be different.
And every Monday morning the alarm clock would ring at 5:00 a.m. Marcus would turn it off without opening his eyes, and the list would be left for next week.
He worked as a data analyst at a logistics company. Eight hours a day staring at spreadsheets that meant nothing to him. He’d come home at 7:00 p.m., eat something standing in front of the refrigerator, open his laptop intending to write, and two hours later he’d be watching videos on his phone in bed without having written a single word.
He wasn’t exactly an unhappy man. He was a sleeping man. He had this feeling that life was happening all around him while he watched from afar—as if he were behind a glass, present in body, absent in everything else.
When his friends asked how the book was going, he’d say, “I’m almost started.” When his girlfriend asked about the business, he’d say, “It’s not the right time yet.” When his father called, he’d let it go to voicemail and promise to call back tomorrow.
Tomorrow. Always tomorrow.
The curious thing is that Marcus knew this. He could see the pattern. He could see that he was trapped in a loop of intention without action, of planning without execution, of waiting to be ready without ever truly preparing.
He used to read productivity books. He had read Atomic Habits, The 4-Hour Workweek, The Power of Habit, Mindset. He had post-it notes scattered around his apartment with motivational quotes that he didn’t even read anymore.
He knew what to do. He simply didn’t.
Chapter 2: The Night That Changed the Game
It was almost midnight. Marcus was lying in bed with his phone to his face, scrolling through his feed without really seeing anything. Then the phone rang. It was Diane, his girlfriend.
They had been together for 2 years. Diane was a teacher. She worked hard, complained rarely, and loved constantly. The kind of person who does what needs to be done without making a drama out of it.
“Marcus, are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Why?”
A pause. “You canceled dinner tonight. Third time this month.”
Marcus didn’t say anything.
“I don’t want to fight,” she continued. “I just need to understand. You have a project that you say you love. You have a dream that you’ve been repeating for 3 years. But every time the time comes to do something about it, you disappear. You get tired. You procrastinate. You don’t show up.”
“Diane, I was exhausted today.”
“You’re always exhausted, Marcus. But you’re never too exhausted to stay on your phone until midnight.”
Silence. “I love you, but I don’t know how else to help you want your own life.”
She hung up.
Marcus stared at the ceiling for a long time. He wanted to be angry. It would have been easier. But he couldn’t, because Diane was right. Marcus wasn’t exhausted from work. He was exhausted from avoiding life itself.
The next morning, having slept poorly, he went to work. He sat at his desk. He opened the spreadsheets and stared at the screen thinking, “Is this it? Is this the rest of my life?”
At lunchtime, instead of staying at his desk as usual, he wandered off aimlessly. He just needed to get out of that building for a moment. He passed a small park that was two blocks from work—a park he had never entered in his 2 years working at that company address.
And there was an old man sitting on a bench, wearing a faded beige jacket, reading a book with a concentration that caught Marcus’s attention. It wasn’t the concentration that caught people’s attention. It was the calm.
The man was about 70 years old, Japanese face, completely white hair, the posture of someone who had seen a lot and no longer needed to prove anything. And there was something in his expression that Marcus couldn’t name.
Marcus went to sit on the bench next to him. The old man closed the book and looked at Marcus.
“You seem like a man with many plans and few beginnings.”
Marcus turned to him. “Excuse me?”
The old man gave a half smile. “My name is Satoshi. I’ve been sitting on this bench for many years. I’ve learned to read people the way one reads the weather.”
Marcus didn’t know whether to laugh or leave, but he decided to stay.
Chapter 3: The Word Marcus Had Never Heard
They talked for 40 minutes. Marcus missed lunch and didn’t mind. He spoke with Satoshi about the list, about the book, about the business, about Diane, about the feeling of sleeping with one’s eyes open.
Satoshi listened to everything without interrupting once. When Marcus finished, the old man was silent for a moment. Then he spoke a word.
“Gaman.”
“What?”
“Gaman.” Satoshi repeated slowly. “It’s a Japanese word. It doesn’t exist with the same force in any other language I know. This word means to endure what cannot be endured, to act with dignity within discomfort, to continue not because you want to, but because it’s necessary.”
Marcus scratched the back of his neck. “Okay, but I don’t have a problem enduring discomfort. I work 8 hours a day in a job I hate.”
“That’s not gaman,” Satoshi said calmly. “That’s passive tolerance. You put up with the job because you do nothing to change it. Gaman isn’t about enduring what holds you back. It’s about acting despite what paralyzes you.”
Marcus remained silent.
“Tell me something,” Satoshi continued. “When you don’t do what you know you need to do, how do you feel before you stop doing it?”
“Laziness, tiredness, sometimes a kind of weight.”
“And when you give in to that pressure, when you decide not to do it, how do you feel afterwards?”
A long pause. “Worse than before.”
“Always.” Satoshi nodded. “Because the discomfort of not acting is always greater than the discomfort of acting. But your brain lies to you. It tells you it will be very difficult, that you will suffer, that it’s not the right time. And you believe it. You wait until you feel ready, and ready never comes.”
“So what do I do?”
“You act first and let the feeling come later.”
Marcus looked at the old man. It seemed too simple.
“The truest things always seem to,” Satoshi said.
He wasn’t a teacher. He wasn’t a doctor. He owned a small watch repair shop two blocks away. He had arrived in the United States in his early 20s without speaking English, without money, without anyone. And he had built his entire life on a single principle that his grandmother had instilled in him when he was 8 years old.
“My grandmother told me something I’ve never forgotten,” Satoshi recounted. “She said, ‘Satoshi, the day will come even if you don’t want it to. The question is, what you will have done when it arrives.’”
“Do you know what the real problem with motivation is?” Satoshi continued. “Motivation is an emotion. An emotion that rises, falls, and disappears without warning. You can’t build a life on an emotion that doesn’t obey you. But everyone talks about motivation. Everyone talks, and everyone fails because of it.”
Satoshi opened the book he was reading and showed Marcus a page. It was Japanese text, but at the bottom there was a handwritten English translation:
A discipline that waits for feeling is not a discipline at all.
Marcus read that three times.
“Gaman isn’t about eliminating discomfort,” Satoshi said. “It’s about acting within it. It’s about understanding that discomfort isn’t a sign that you should stop. It’s a sign that you’re growing.”
“And how do you start?”
Satoshi closed the book. “Meet me here tomorrow morning.”
“At 6:00 in the morning?”
“At 6:00. If you come, I’ll show you. If you don’t come…” The old man shrugged. “You already know what happens when you don’t come.”
Chapter 4: 6:00 in the Morning
The alarm clock rang at 5:30 a.m. Marcus lay on the bed for a few minutes with that familiar feeling rising in his chest. The voice: “It’s cold. You don’t even know this man. It’ll probably be a waste of time. You can meet him another time.”
The apologies came automatically, as they always did. But this time Marcus heard something else beneath the apologies. A phrase: A discipline that waits for feeling is no discipline at all.
He stood up. He wasn’t excited, but he got up because he decided to get up. And there was a huge difference between those two things, even though he couldn’t name it yet.
Satoshi was sitting on the bench when Marcus arrived with two cups of coffee.
“You came,” the old man said without surprise.
“And because? How are you feeling?”
“Honestly? Sleepy. It’s a bit silly of me to be here at 6:00 in the morning with an old man I barely know.”
Satoshi chuckled briefly. “Good. That’s the right feeling.”
They walked through the park. Satoshi didn’t talk much for the first few minutes. He just walked, and Marcus walked along with him. After a while, the old man asked, “Do you know why most people never start what they want to start?”
“Why don’t they have discipline?”
“No.” Satoshi shook his head. “Because they confuse the absence of willpower with the inability to act. People think that if they don’t feel the impulse, if they aren’t excited, if they aren’t in the right state, then it’s a sign that they shouldn’t act.”
“But isn’t it?”
“If you only went to work on the days you felt like it, would you still have a job?”
Marcus frowned. “No.”
“You go to work whether you want to or not. Why?”
“Because I need to pay the bills.”
“Exactly. You act because it’s necessary, not because you want to. That’s gaman applied unconsciously. The question is, why do you apply this to the things that sustain the life you don’t want, but not to the things that build the life you do want?”
Marcus didn’t answer. He didn’t have an answer. Or rather, he did, and it was too uncomfortable.
Chapter 5: The First Test
Satoshi proposed an experiment.
“For 2 weeks, you’re going to do one thing. Just one.”
“What thing?”
“Every day when you get home from work, before doing anything else—before opening your phone, before putting food in the microwave, before sitting on the couch—you’re going to sit at the table and write a paragraph of your book. One paragraph. That’s all.”
Marcus waited for the rest. It didn’t come.
“A paragraph? Like, just one paragraph?”
“A paragraph. It can be bad. It can be the worst you’ve ever written. But it has to be a new paragraph in the book written by you that day.”
“Satoshi, with all due respect, a paragraph isn’t going to write a book.”
“No,” the old man agreed, “but it will prove to you that you can do what you say you want to do. That proof is the only thing you need right now.”
Marcus remained silent.
“The problem isn’t the book,” Satoshi continued. “The problem is that you don’t trust yourself. Every time you made a promise and broke it, you deposited proof of your unreliability in your own mind. You’ve done it so many times that now your brain believes you’ll fail before you even try.”
“So why do I write a paragraph?”
“To begin depositing evidence to the contrary.”
That night, Marcus arrived home, threw his backpack on the floor, and went straight to the table. He opened the document that had been blinking for 8 months without a single word written. He stared at the blank screen for 3 minutes. Then he wrote:
“He never knew for sure when he began to disappear from himself.”
He closed the laptop. He stared at the ceiling. The phrase was good. He knew it was good. And there was something stirring in his chest that he couldn’t quite name yet.
The next day he wrote another one. On the third day he wrote three without realizing he was writing three. On the seventh day, he sat at his desk for 45 minutes and wrote almost a page.
But what Satoshi didn’t say, and Marcus only understood later, is that it wasn’t just about the book. It was about something much more fundamental.
A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology revealed something that challenges everything motivational gurus teach. Researchers followed two groups of people trying to create new habits. The first group waited to feel motivated to act. The second group acted regardless of how they felt.
After 3 months, the second group not only maintained the habits with much more consistency, but participants reported that over time, the action itself began to generate the positive emotional state that the first group had hoped to feel before starting.
In other words: action creates motivation, not the other way around.
Professor Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania, who has spent years researching what she calls grit—that combination of passion and long-term perseverance—discovered something similar. She says:
“The most successful individuals I studied were not the most talented or the most motivated. They were the ones who kept acting even on days when they didn’t want to. They had separated action from feeling in a way that most people never learn.”
A neuroscientist from the University of Toronto, who studies the brain mechanisms of procrastination, was even more direct. He explains that when the brain anticipates a difficult or uncomfortable task, it activates the same regions associated with physical pain. It’s literally as if it were pain. And the instinctive response to pain is avoidance.
What gaman practitioners have intuitively learned, he says, is that this anticipatory pain is almost always greater than the actual discomfort of the task. The brain overestimates how difficult it will be, but you only discover this when you start.
Chapter 6: The Failure
On the 11th night, Marcus didn’t write. It had been an impossible day at work. A system crisis that he had to resolve for hours. He arrived home at 9:00 p.m., truly exhausted. He sat on the sofa “just for 5 minutes,” and at 11:00 p.m. he woke up groggy with his cell phone in his hand. The sequence had been broken.
That old voice returned immediately, as if it had been waiting: “You saw. You can’t do it. You always do this. You start and stop. It’s no use.”
The next morning in the park, Marcus told Satoshi with a defeated tone that he didn’t even try to hide. The old man listened. Then he was silent for a moment.
“Did you write in the 10 days prior?”
“I wrote.”
“And today, are you going to write today?”
Marcus frowned. “But I broke the sequence.”
“Yes,” Satoshi nodded. “So what?”
“I lost my rhythm. I told myself that—”
“Marcus,” the old man interrupted him gently. “There’s a concept in Japan called shokunin. It’s the idea of a craftsman who dedicates himself to perfecting his craft not for a day, but for a lifetime. But do you know what true shokunin understand that beginners take longer to grasp?”
Marcus waited.
“That mistakes are not part of failure. They are part of the process. A potter who breaks a piece doesn’t stop making pottery. He cleans the floor, gets more clay, and starts again. The value lies in continuity, not in perfection.”
“But the motivation disappeared when I broke down.”
“The motivation is gone because you let one day define who you are.” Satoshi looked at him firmly. “You’re not someone who wrote for 10 days and stopped. You’re someone who writes. One difficult day doesn’t change that unless you let it.”
“And how can I not let that happen?”
“You write today. This won’t undo yesterday’s mistake, but it will define what the next few days will be like.”
That night, Marcus opened his notebook. He wrote: “It wasn’t a good session.” It was three disjointed paragraphs, but it was three paragraphs. And something remained there.
Chapter 7: What Satoshi Hadn’t Told You Yet
Three weeks later, sitting on the same park bench, Satoshi asked a different question.
“Marcus, why do you want to write this book?”
“Because it’s a story I’ve had in my head for years and—”
“No. Why do you really want to? Don’t tell me the project. Tell me why.”
Marcus remained silent for a while.
“My father,” he began. He stopped. He started again. “My father never did the things he wanted to do. He always was going to do them. He was going to open his business. He was going to travel. He was going to write the stories he told me when I was little. And then one day he had a heart attack. Mild, thank God, but it was enough to scare us. And I sat in the hospital with him and realized I was doing the same thing he was doing. Waiting for a moment that was never going to come.”
Satoshi listened to everything without blinking.
“I don’t want to reach 60 years old with a list of things I was going to do.”
The old man nodded slowly. “That’s your ikigai.”
“Ikigai?”
“Our deepest reason. The Japanese believe that every human being has a central purpose that, when found, fuels everything you do. It’s not a profession. It’s not a project. It’s the truest why that exists within you.”
“Mine would be… not to become my father.”
“No. It would be honoring who you truly are before it’s too late. The difference is enormous. One pushes you through pain. The other pulls you through love.”
Marcus stared at the park for a long time.
“When I write with that why in mind,” he said slowly, “it’s different. It’s not like doing an assignment. It’s like keeping a promise.”
“Yes. Exactly that. Gaman without ikigai is pure resistance. You endure but without knowing why. When you connect the two, resistance becomes something different. It becomes commitment. And commitment doesn’t need motivation. It sustains itself.”
But here’s the part of the story Marcus didn’t expect. Six weeks after that first conversation in the park, he texted Diane with one sentence:
“I’m doing what needs to be done because I’ve decided I’m going to be the kind of person who gets things done.”
Diane took two hours to respond. When she finally did, it was simply: “Can you prove it to me?”
Three months later, the book manuscript was 42 pages long. There were chapters he knew he would rewrite entirely, but these were 42 real pages written by him one sentence at a time.
He hadn’t quit his job yet. He hadn’t started the business yet. But he had done something that seemed more important than any of those things.
He had learned that he could trust his own word.
And do you know what happens when you learn this? When you prove to yourself that you do what you say you’re going to do, everything changes. Because you change your relationship with difficulty. Discomfort stops being a sign that you should stop. It becomes a sign that you’re in the right place.
This is what Satoshi called mature gaman. It’s no longer resistance. It’s embodied wisdom. You can’t take it anymore. You act. And the difference between the two is everything.
Chapter 8: The Day Satoshi Told His Own Story
On a cold gray November morning, Marcus arrived at the park and Satoshi wasn’t on the bench. He went to the watch repair shop. It was the first time he had ever been inside.
The place was small, organized with an almost meditative precision. Clocks on the walls, tools arranged in order, a workbench where Satoshi was bent over a tiny mechanism with a magnifying glass in his hand.
“Marcus.” The old man didn’t look up from his work. “Sit down.”
Marcus sat on a stool beside the workbench and watched the old man work for a few minutes. There was something hypnotic about it. The absolute concentration. The precise movements of his hands.
“How long have you been repairing watches?”
“42 years.”
“And you still like it?”
Satoshi paused his hand movements. He truly thought. “Not every day. There are days when I wake up tired. There are days when the task is tedious. There are days when I question.”
“And on those days?”
The old man resumed his work. “These days, I open the shop the same way. I grab the first item. I start working. And at some point during the work, the boredom goes away. Not always. Sometimes it stays, but I don’t wait for it to go away to start.”
“Gaman?”
Satoshi confirmed. “But there’s something I’ve never told you about how I learned this.”
He put down his tools. He turned to Marcus.
“When I arrived in the United States, I was 23 years old and didn’t speak English. I worked in construction. I didn’t understand my boss’s orders. I couldn’t communicate with my colleagues. I would go back to the room I shared with three other men and stay silent because I had nothing to say that anyone could understand.”
Marcus listened in silence.
“There were nights when I thought about going back to Japan. Many nights. The discomfort was real. The loneliness was real. The humiliation of not understanding anything was real. And there was a voice, very similar to the one you described to me, that said I wasn’t capable. That I had made a mistake. That I would never succeed.”
“What made you stay?”
Satoshi was quiet for a moment. “Something my grandfather taught me. He said, ‘Satoshi, the discomfort you feel now isn’t evidence that you’re in the wrong place. It’s evidence that you’re growing. Growth always hurts before it brightens.’”
“And you believed that?”
“Not immediately.” The old man smiled. “But I acted as if I believed. And that turned out to be the same thing.”
It stuck in Marcus’s pocket like a rock. Heavy, but solid.
I acted as if I believed. And that ended up being the same thing.
Chapter 9: Six Months Later
The following spring, Marcus had 94 pages of the book. It wasn’t a perfect 94 pages. There were sections he knew needed a complete rewrite. Characters that weren’t fully alive yet. Dialogues that sounded artificial.
But there were 94 pages. And there was one morning when he woke up at 5:00 a.m. without an alarm clock because he wanted to write.
Diane had returned. Not because the book had 94 pages, but because she could see that something had changed in the way he inhabited his own life. There was a presence that hadn’t existed before.
At work, he had requested a meeting with his boss and presented a proposal to lead a new larger project that had stalled due to a lack of anyone willing to take it on. The proposal was accepted. Not because he was motivated to have the meeting, but because he did it even when he wasn’t.
One morning in April, returning from the park after meeting Satoshi, Marcus stopped on the sidewalk and stared at the apartment where he lived. He thought about the list, the one he had rewritten 11 times. It still existed. But it was different now. It was no longer a list of postponed dreams. It was a map of what was being built.
He hadn’t arrived there. He hadn’t even come close. But he was in motion. And motion, he had learned, was everything.
The psychologist William James, considered the father of American psychology, said something at the end of the 19th century that modern science only managed to confirm a hundred years later:
“Action seems to follow feeling, but in fact, action and feeling go together. By regulating action, which is under the direct control of the will, we can regulate feeling, which is not.”
In other words: you can’t choose how you feel. But you can choose what you do. And what you do ultimately changes how you feel.
A study conducted with over 3,000 people who overcame procrastination identified a consistent pattern. Almost none of them reported finding motivation before starting. Motivation appeared after a few minutes of action as an effect, not as a cause.
Researchers called this behavioral ignition. The idea is that the behavior itself generates the emotional state necessary to continue. You don’t wait for the flame. You strike the match.
And neuroscience explains the mechanism. When you act, the brain releases dopamine. Not before. After. The anticipation of a difficult task generates discomfort. The beginning of a difficult task generates reward. It’s a reversal that most people never discover because they give up before even starting.
Gaman is, in essence, the wisdom of striking a match.
Chapter 10: What the Old Man Left Behind
During the summer, Satoshi closed the shop for three weeks. He traveled to Japan to visit his family. When he returned, he and Marcus met on the bench as usual. And Satoshi said something that Marcus never forgot.
“Marcus, I need to tell you something about gaman that many people misunderstand.”
“What?”
“Gaman isn’t about suffering. Nor is it about self-harm. It’s not about enduring what destroys you.”
Marcus frowned.
“The superficial translation makes it seem so—enduring the unbearable. But the true spirit is different.” Satoshi looked at the park. “Gaman is about acting with dignity within the discomfort of growth. It’s distinct from the pain that warns something is wrong. It’s the discomfort of someone becoming bigger than they were yesterday.”
“How do you know the difference?”
“You ask yourself: is this discomfort destroying me or building me up? If it’s destroying you, you stop. If it’s building you up, you continue.”
Marcus let it land.
“There’s a second part,” Satoshi continued. “Gaman in its highest form isn’t just about what you do. It’s about how you do it. Calmly, without drama, without turning every obstacle into a tragedy. The Japanese have a way of doing difficult things that seems almost simple on the outside. Not because it’s easy, but because internal drama doesn’t serve the task. You do what needs to be done. Silently, if possible. Always with presence.”
Marcus thought about how many times he had transformed the difficulty of writing into an existential crisis. How many times the resistance to sitting down at the table had turned into a story about who he was. About whether he had talent. About whether it was worthwhile.
“The excuse isn’t a weakness of character. It’s a skill the brain developed to protect you from discomfort. The problem is that it protects you so much that it also isolates you from the things that matter most.”
“So how do I stop making excuses?”
“You never stop.” Satoshi turned to Marcus with that direct look. “You recognize them. You call them by name. ‘That’s an excuse.’ And then you act anyway.”
The Essence of Gaman
Everything that Marcus’s story shows us converges on one single thing: The problem was never a lack of motivation. The problem was the belief that motivation needed to come first.
Satoshi taught Marcus that gaman isn’t about being a machine without feelings. It’s about not letting what you feel decide what you do.
You’ll wake up some days when you don’t want to do anything. There will be afternoons when the task will seem impossible. There will be moments when the excuse will be so good, so convincing, so reasonable that you’ll almost believe it.
And in those moments, you will have a choice: waiting for a desire that will never come, or acting as if it will.
Gaman is that choice made in silence every day—without an audience, without any guarantee of results. But also without the excuses that keep you where you are.
To recap what we covered:
- Marcus was a man trapped in a cycle of intention without action. He knew what he needed to do. He simply didn’t do it. And the reason wasn’t a lack of information. It was the belief that he needed to be motivated to act.
- Satoshi showed that gaman reverses this logic: action comes first, feeling later.
- Writing one sentence a day didn’t write Marcus’s book. But it proved to him that he was capable of keeping a promise to himself. And that proof was the foundation of everything that came after.
- Gaman connected to ikigai—to true purpose, to the most genuine why—transforms resistance into commitment. You can’t take it anymore. You act. And the difference between the two is the difference between a life built and a life postponed.
- And what happens when you fall? Because you will fall. Yes, you will. You don’t punish yourself. You don’t rewrite the list. You don’t wait for next Monday. You do the next thing. The smallest thing possible. And you start again from there.
Because consistency isn’t about never failing. It’s about always coming back.
Now, I need to ask you the same question that Satoshi asked Marcus: What is the thing you keep putting off the most? What action are you putting off? It could be a sentence, a phone call, an email.
Take this action and carry it out today. Because time will pass anyway. The question is what you will have done when it’s gone.
Gaman is not an exotic concept from a distant culture. It is the simplest and most difficult wisdom that exists:
Do what needs to be done, even if you don’t want to—especially if you don’t want to.
No motivation. No excuses. Only gaman.