On the Path to Reinvigorating Motivation
My friend, Paul loves to wake up early and do his best work when the sun is out. At night, he’s less focused and and not as creative.
But one thing you notice is he has compared to working during the day is he has motivation. At the end of it he has a desire to get more things done. But when it comes in the morning, it’s all gone.
I’m the opposite personally. I don’t do much in the morning and most of my work is at night.
We all go through the phases of not being in the mood to do something, but what The Don’t Podcast does is help you with that motivation.
Now researchers have found reasons as to why motivation comes and goes. So here’s some of the findings:
Creative work is based on inartistic motivation
There’s internal and external rewards. Which are like extrinsic and intrinsic respectively.
Extrinsic motivation is cleaning your room when your friend is coming over or studying when you have a test tomorrow.
Intrinsic motivation is getting good at a video game because you find it enjoyable or analytic about story motifs from reading a lot of books.
The most common as you guessed is extrinsic motivation because there’s a desired reward/consequence for accomplishing a task.
Now this works best when you have tasks that are simple as in the objective is clear. So if it’s not creative it’s a great type for this situation.
Now this works in increasing productivity, but not every context. Example tasks that take time to do but will be completed eventually.
When looking at tasks that require creativity researchers have said it actually doesn’t lead to high productivity when you have those ‘if, then’ rewards. It actually does the opposite.
That said, extrinsic motivation doesn’t work if you’re writing a book, designing a logo, performing a song. It just creates a tunnel vision of only looking at the reward. What we need are the abstract thinking so ideas are innovating and can create new opportunities.
So let’s look at the focus on three things intrinsic motivation is made of.
One is the use of a video game style reward system which is like autonomy. Using rewards like from video games have a sense of completion and boost to the next challenge. That’s why it’s important to also put the things you like to do for fun on your to-do list as well. Wether it be watching an episode of Game of Thrones or playing basketball with your friends.
This gives you a choice in how you receive your rewards. Choices are actually more motivating then the clear cut only style of rewarding.
The second one is mastery, which is about wanting to get better at something because you have a natural passion to do so. This why I love art, writing, and playing hearthstone. I’m personally motivated to get better at them because that’s what I do for most of my hobby time.
The initial problem is first finding your passion as most of the time it finds you mostly. That’s what it’s important to always be doing something new.
The last one is purpose. It’s the reason why we do what we do. I do all the thing on this podcast because it serves a greater purpose than me. I’m not doing it just to make me feel better and have understanding of productive, but rather always hearing it from people and finally having a solution that they can use.
That’s the big three you should strive for in a career and hobbies because you’ll ultimately feel more passionate and fulfilled in your life.
Motivation can be increased by knowing how you work
I can personally say when you see people benefiting from your work, it really does motivate you.
You can’t coast to inspire people. People love to see effort in what they can be able to achieve as well.
Put in practice: talk to the people who benefit from your work. Let them know how they feel and if it’s criticism then you can learn how to be better.
Track your work results from the feedback and watch it improve. It just might.
We fear losing rather than gaining
Psychology says that loss is actually twice as powerful as gaining something.
There are 2 parts of this. The first is the cognitive bias which is called lost aversion. An example of this is the happiness you have when you find $10 on the ground but get sad when you lost $10 that you had in your wallet.
This is really comes down to that we feel stronger about our emotions to what we lose rather than gaining.
The other part is ownership. The feeling of giving value to something when we own it.
So try out loss aversion in your life. So use something you would put on stake for when you feel unmotivated.
It could be money, it could be something you love, make sure it’s something you care about. That way it’ll be more effective in holding accountability. This will keep you motivated if you lose it if you don’t accomplish what you’re trying to do.
If you need it, try getting a friend with you on it. It helps greatly in your path to be m motivated when you don’t feel it.
Know someone that could use some motivational boost? Give a recommendation and share it with them!
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