The popular model of motivation is intuitively appealing and structurally wrong. It says: first the desire arrives, then it powers action. This describes some experiences accurately — the easy days when you wake up wanting to do the thing. It describes the harder days catastrophically.
The functional order, on the harder days, is closer to the reverse. Action first, in a small concrete form, before the felt motivation arrives. The motivation tends to show up in response to action having already started — the body in motion produces signals the brain reads as engagement. Sitting down to write produces (some) wanting to write. Putting trainers on produces (some) willingness to run.
This isn't a productivity hack. It's a regulatory observation. Behavioural activation, used in treatments for depression, leans on it directly: when desire is unavailable, action becomes the lever, and desire follows. People sometimes find this strangely freeing. Waiting to want to do something is often the trap; doing a small piece of it almost always loosens the trap.
The threshold is the only thing that matters. Not the size of the action. Not the elegance of the plan. Whatever is small enough to start. Writing one sentence. Running to the corner. Opening the document. The motivation that doesn't exist before action will start to exist after it.
You will still have days where it doesn't fully come back. That's fine. The action was still useful. And there are days where the feeling never had to arrive at all — the action was already enough.
The order you were taught had the dependencies wrong. The one with action first works on more days.