Complex Numbers

Unmotivation

Today, I'm going to talk about something I have very little experience with.

Motivation: The Scientific Guide on How to Get and Stay Motivated  

Spoiler: it's not actually scientific.

Motivation is a powerful, yet tricky beast. Sometimes it is really easy to get motivated, and you find yourself wrapped up in a whirlwind of excitement. Other times, it is nearly impossible to figure out how to motivate yourself and you're trapped in a death spiral of procrastination.

Death Spiral of Procrastination is my 80s hair cover band.

Instead, we're going to break down the science behind how to get motivated in the first place and how to stay motivated for the long-run.

For one thing, we can stop misusing "science."

So what is motivation, exactly? The author Steven Pressfield has a great line in his book, The War of Art, which I think gets at the core of motivation. To paraphrase Pressfield, “At some point, the pain of not doing it becomes greater than the pain of doing it.”

That's actually been my working definition for a while. I can only stop procrastinating when the pain of ignoring something exceeds the pain of fixing it.

This rarely happens.

What can we do to make it more likely that we cross this mental threshold and feel motivated on a consistent basis?

Something tells me the answer to that question, sadly, isn't "Drink."

You don't need much motivation once you've started a behavior. Nearly all of the friction in a task is at the beginning. After you start, progress occurs more naturally. In other words, it is often easier to finish a task than it was to start it in the first place.

This actually also tracks with my experience. Once I start writing, I write, for example. It's getting myself to start writing in the first place that's hard.

Setting a schedule for yourself seems simple, but it puts your decision-making on autopilot by giving your goals a time and a place to live.

Nah. I've been known to set schedules and then utterly ignore them. If there's no one else involved, the only person I can let down is myself, and I'm used to doing that.

It makes it more likely that you will follow through regardless of your motivation levels. And there are plenty of research studies on willpower and motivation to back up that statement.

Actually, willpower has little to nothing to do with it. See my blog entry from a couple years back: "Good Willpower Hunting" 

"I begin each day of my life with a ritual; I wake up at 5:30 A.M..."

Normally, this is where I'd simply stop reading and move on to playing video games or watching shows. The concept of willingly waking up at 5:30 am on a daily basis is so foreign, so anathema to me, that it's utterly inconceivable. Hell, I sometimes don't go to sleep until then.

Maya Angelou rented a local hotel room and went there to write. She arrived at 6:30 AM, wrote until 2 PM, and then went home to do some editing. She never slept at the hotel.

6:30 isn't really any better.

Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon writes five nights per week from 10 PM to 3 AM.

Now, see, that's more my speed. It should come as no surprise that Chabon is a major writer for Star Trek these days, and I like those shows.

Anyway, I skimmed the rest of the article after that. Who knows? Maybe someone reading this will find it useful. All it does for me is increase my dissatisfaction.

But not enough to do anything about it.