motivation

Edited on 9/16/08: Rewrote the second half to take Nathan’s excellent comment into account.

This is the third post in a three-part series about motivation.

• Part 1: The fundamental equations of motivational alchemy
• Part 2: The power of habits

If you’re a sensitive person, you’ve probably noticed that most motivational advice really sucks for you. Much of the advice you’ll find from motivational speakers, motivational books, and motivational blogs is rooted in a fear-based approach. They teach you to whip yourself into shape, how to boss yourself around, how to split yourself into a drill sergeant and a corporal. Kyeli and I aren’t big fans of fear. We follow a love-based approach.

Believe it! You can form good habits, practice self-discipline (if you want to call it that), be a highly effective person, and achieve anything you wish — and you can do it all by throwing away that stick and going for the carrot instead.

Love yourself! Motivate yourself by your desire to achieve your goals instead of by your fear of failing to achieve them. You can be kind and gentle to yourself and still be effective and productive — and as an added bonus, you won’t suffer from burnout! The key is to keep your goal in mind. If you remember how much you want to achieve your goal, if you taste it often, that yummy carrot will keep you going far longer and far happier than that nasty stick or that vicious whip.

To achieve your goals, you may need to use “hard self-discipline”: working up the willpower to do something even though you don’t feel like doing it at that moment. But you can even do hard self-discipline with love instead of fear! When you’re faced with the challenging situation where your goal lies on the other side of a chasm of stuff you don’t feel like doing right now, there’s no need to bring out the whip and force yourself to jump. There’s no need to tell yourself that you’re a lazy loser if you don’t buckle down and put your nose to the grindstone. There’s no need to beat yourself with the “fear of failure” stick. Simply do what you most want to do. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.

If you want your goal more than you want to avoid doing the unappealing things that block the path to your goal, then do it. Go for the goal. It’s what you most want to do, after all.

On the other hand, if the unappealing things aren’t worth the goodness of reaching your goal, give up! Instead, do something else entirely — something that you want to do even more. It’s what you most want to do, after all.

Whatever you do, be wholehearted about it. Remember that you’re doing what you most want to do.

If you’re working toward your goal, remember that, taste it, and it will make the unpleasant tasks feel more pleasant. Remember that you’re choosing a rough journey because you’re super excited about getting to your destination, and find ways to remind yourself of that excitement often. Focus on the goal, because achieving your goal is what you most want to do.

On the other hand, if you’re choosing to give up on this goal and focus on something different instead, keep that in mind as you go. There’s no need to beat yourself up for not being tough enough to kick your own ass into shape. Failure doesn’t even enter the picture, because all you’re doing is balancing out your competing desires. If your new choice is an enjoyable journey over a not-as-desirable destination, then don’t forget to enjoy the journey! Focus on your new goal or desire instead of the goal you gave up on. Giving up on something that you want less is a good thing, because it frees you up to focus on something you want even more.

In the long run, positive reinforcement is more powerful than negative reinforcement. Water flows longer than fire burns. Love wins out over fear.

Habits are very powerful and very important. One path toward action that effectively supports your goals and passions is the one that I talked about yesterday:

Goals + “Taste” → Inspiration

Inspiration + Energy → Motivation

Motivation + Environment → Action

but there’s an entirely separate path that runs parallel to that one! And it’s very simple!

Habits → Action

And that, my friend, is the power of habits. If you have a habit to do something, you just do it! You don’t need to do any alchemy or tasting or inspiring or energizing or motivating! You just do it.

So, how does one go about acquiring good habits (habits that support our goals and our passions) and breaking bad habits (habits that distract from our goals and our passions)? You’d think that The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People would have a lot to say about that. It has a bit to say about it, but not a lot. So I’ll use my friend Bill as a reference instead of Stephen Covey:

I have only a few hard rules, and they’re extremely rigid and specific. I spell out exactly what I have to do, and under what conditions I must do them. I only change them once a month. Any changes I want to make within that month go into my soft rules until my month is up. This helps me form a consistent habit.

Yesterday’s post was about motivational alchemy — what Bill called “soft self-discipline”, with “soft rules”. But he also talked about “hard self-discipline”, with “hard rules”. Is hard self-discipline completely unnecessary? Is it possible to be effective with just motivational alchemy and never forcing yourself to do things you really aren’t in the mood to do?

Sure, I think it’s possible to be pretty effective with just motivational alchemy. But, if you want to be even more effective, there is one really awesome use for hard self-discipline: creating habits. And get this! It’s possible to do it without resorting to fear-based motivational tactics! (I’ll have more to say about that in the next post.)

So I’ll write down an equation for it, because I’m on an equation kick with all this motivation stuff.

Commitment + Discipline → Habits

By “commitment” I mean making a commitment to yourself. Saying “This is important to me, so I am going to make a plan and be accountable for sticking to this plan.”

By “discipline” I mean the “hard self-discipline” that we’ve been talking about. Forcing yourself to do something even when you don’t feel like it at the moment, sacrificing your short-term desires in service of your long-term desires. Sticking to the plan you’ve committed to, even when you don’t want to at that exact moment.

Commitment and discipline used to have negative connotations for me. I used to associate them with fear-based motivation, and I wanted to avoid them whenever possible. But now I see how to make them positive forces in my life. I’m going to use them to create really excellent habits. And those habits will create actions that support my goals and my passions. It will be awesome!

Just think about one action where motivational alchemy is sluggish for you. Maybe you have a hard time tasting it, maybe you just don’t have enough raw passion about the goal to alchemize into inspiration, or maybe you have a lot of resistance to the action itself. Think about what it would take to create a habit for that action. Imagine how it would feel if you stuck with it long enough for it to become a habit, at which point it would require less of that hard self-discipline, eventually none at all! Feel how good it would feel to reach that goal, to establish a habit that made those actions effortless, or at least a lot less challenging. Then, if that positive feeling outweighs the resistance you feel, make a plan. Make a plan, make a commitment to that plan, and use self-discipline to stick to the plan. You’ll end up with a super awesome habit that will make you feel good all the time because you’re achieving your goal. And plus, you’ll be upping your credit score with yourself, because you will have earned your own trust in making a commitment and sticking to it.

And that is the power of habits. (:

My friend Bill and I have been talking recently about the difference between what he calls “soft self-discipline” and “hard self-discipline”. Hard self-discipline is what most people call “self-discipline”, and is basically forcing yourself to do things even if you don’t feel like doing them at the particular moment. Soft self-discipline is similar, but doesn’t involve forcing, just coaxing, and it’s totally okay to not do it if you really don’t want to do it. It’s mostly just reminding yourself of your enthusiasm, passion, and commitment to your goal, and hoping that that will alchemize into motivation to do the tasks necessary to achieve that goal. And if it doesn’t, that’s okay.

This is super awesome. I’m going to rename “soft self-discipline”, though, because the word “discipline” doesn’t feel right to me. I’ll call it “motivational alchemy”. Because that’s kind of what it’s like. We already have the long-term desire for the goal, and what we want to do is alchemize it, transform it, into the short-term desire to accomplish the steps leading toward the goal. And here are, to the best of my understanding, the fundamental equations of motivational alchemy:

Goals + “Taste” → Inspiration

Inspiration + Energy → Motivation

Motivation + Environment → Action

Isn’t that beautiful? Let’s take them one by one.

Goals + “Taste” → Inspiration

So, you have some goals. These are your long-term desires. Stuff you want that isn’t immediately achievable. You may even say you’re passionate about these things, but the passion isn’t always burning, sometimes it’s a passive passion. It’s something you can say “I’m passionate about this” about without necessarily getting up and doing something about it.

Those goals can alchemize into inspiration, but you need a catalyst to make that happen. This is the trickiest step for me. I thought for a long time about what to call this catalyst, and I finally settled on “taste”. It’s experiencing something that takes your goal out of your head and puts it back in your heart. It’s like, you remember how much you like chocolate, but then you actually taste a little bit and suddenly you’re inspired to get some more. Or you think about you much you care about being healthy, but then you have a really exciting and interesting conversation about it, it’s like tasting your goal, and that taste inspires you. Here are some examples of what I mean by “taste”:

• having a good conversation about it
• reading something interesting or exciting about it
• doing a teeny little bit of it just for a minute or two
• seeing someone else do it
• experiencing something that I associate with it (e.g. the smell of a video arcade reminds me of how much I love to play DDR/ITG)
• and sometimes, just remembering how much I care about the goal and thinking about how much I want it.

All these things are examples of re-tasting the sweet, yummy taste of your goal, the delicious flavour of what you’re passionate about. This step is very important, because if our goals and long-term desires are abstract concepts, we can attach all sorts of baggage to them. We can resent them, avoid them, and tack on all sorts of extraneous judgments and issues to them. But you can bypass all of that if you just taste them. And that taste alchemizes your goals into inspiration. Now on to the next equation:

Inspiration + Energy → Motivation

It’s not enough to be inspired. If you’re inspired and sleepy, or inspired and just feeling like a lump today, you won’t get up and do anything about it. Because inspiration isn’t enough; you also need energy. I was stumbling toward this in my post entitled “motivation = energy” in 2006. In that situation, I already had the inspiration, and what I was lacking was the energy needed to turn that inspiration into motivation. For me, I find that a judicious use of caffeine and good health habits (eating well and often, exercising in the mornings) increase my energy level.

So, now we got to motivation. Yay! Are we done? Not quite. There’s still one more important equation left:

Motivation + Environment → Action

There are plenty of times when I’ve felt motivated to do something but didn’t have the opportunity, and the motivation went to waste. For example if I’m motivated to work on the Usual Error while I’m at Cyc, I can’t act on that motivation because I’m not in the right environment; I have other things to do during that time. I have motivation but not environment.

Environment is on a scale, too: if I have a little bit of motivation to play Stepmania, but it takes 15 minutes to set up all the equipment, that motivation is a lot less likely to alchemize into action. If instead I set up a dedicated corner of a room for Stepmania, then it takes less motivation because my environment is tuned toward my passions instead of tuned against them. This is an example of environment helping turn motivation into action.

And distraction takes away from your environment. If you’re feeling motivated to do something but someone else is watching TV, it’ll be a lot harder to turn that motivation into action. If you’ve got StumbleUpon installed in Firefox, that’s part of your environment. Then, when you’re motivated to do research online, you may end up acting in a way that feeds your short-term whims instead of your long-term goals and desires. This is an example of environment making it harder to turn motivation into action.

There you go. I think those three beautiful equations encapsulate much of what I’ve been seeking for the past few years. I will, of course, post updates on how well it’s working for me and Kyeli. (: But before that, there are an entire two more posts in this motivation marathon! Off to write the next one… (:

I had an epiphany today, catalyzed by two unlikely sources: Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn and speed demos. In Radiant Dawn, there’s a conversation between Yune and Ike that goes something like this:

Yune: “You humans are so interesting. You fumble around and you really don’t know what you’re doing, but you strive so hard and fight so passionately for what you believe in. Even when you don’t really know what you believe in!”

Ike: “That’s right. I’ll fight for what I believe in until my dying breath. I’ll never stop.”

And speed demos. These people practice for months, years even, to get the perfect run and get the world record on some obscure video game. They try it, then get 40 minutes in and make a mistake, so they start all over.

What’s the #1 predictor of success, at anything? Skill. What’s the #1 predictor of skill, in any domain? Time on task. And what’s the #1 predictor of time on task? Motivation. It all comes back to motivation. If you’re motivated to do something, you’ll practice it, you’ll become skilled at it, and you’ll succeed. If you’re truly passionate about something, or obsessed, or just struck by a passing fancy that takes a long time to pass, you can achieve amazing feats of awesomeness.

But what do you do when the fancy passes? Do you stick with it, or do you move on to the next thing? In the past, I’ve usually moved on to the next thing. There have been a few notable things I’ve stuck with and finished, but I often drop them and move on to something else, or to nothing productive. The question of motivation is the most important one to answer when Kyeli and I are planning our 2nd company. How are we going to motivate ourselves? If we refuse to use fear-based motivational techniques (and we do), how are we going to discover and practice love-based ones? We know that we can succeed wildly at anything when we set our minds to it, so the key becomes setting our minds to it. Or really, setting our hearts to it.