>>214009645
The way I think about it is:
Motivation is the subconscious internal drive that compels you to do the work, and discipline is when you lack motivation but you decide to force yourself to do it anyway because you have some higher abstract reasons ("motives"). You acquire motivation naturally once you demonstrate to yourself that a certain set of actions leads to a desired result through direct experience. Discipline requires conscious willpower to maintain and overrides your instincts ("internal resistance") temporarily so you can get the work done, but in the long-term it's unsustainable and you end up burning out (and that's a good thing because you don't want to keep doing something that doesn't work).

Language learning is tough to get into because there's a huge delay between doing the work and seeing progress, so you need to go in blind for a while and trust the process, which requires some amount of discipline. Once your brain learns that doing A leads to B i.e. studying leads to progress, you no longer need discipline and you now have an internal drive to do it and the anticipation of making progress makes you feel good.

The way people think about motivation misses the mark, in my opinion. There is a focus on "motives", coming up with abstract reasons for why doing the work will pay off i.e. I might get a job or girlfriend or people will think I'm impressive, but this doesn't lead to motivation because the path is still unknown and unproven. Motivation is the implicit, experiential knowledge that a set of actions can lead to a desired result, you need lived-experience as a basis for it. Until you do the work and it produces results, your brain is still uncertain if putting in more energy into this endeavor will pay off so it creates internal resistance that you have to overcome with discipline.