On Motivation

I don’t have any faith in motivation. Or discipline. I don’t mean to sound edgy, so let me explain myself.

People often find the source of success to be motivation. And the root of failure? The lack of it. Of course, there are various reasons for failure. Not everyone who fails failed to get started or continue their projects. But there is a large enough group of people failing to achieve their goals by failing to consistently work towards that goal to warrant countless videos on YouTube and published books hoping to sell you a method of generating motivation.

I guess the thesis goes that ‘motivated’ people are able to stick to tasks better than people without the magical motivation juice. As a theory, it checks out. People who feel a greater drive to create, do, or achieve something probably would stick to a long term task or goal more effectively than someone who lacks the same urge to do something.

So where’s the problem? The problem is that this doesn’t seem to work. Not the way we expect it to, at least.

There don’t appear to be any tried and tested ways of generating motivation. Else we’d see everyone running around accomplishing their dreams left right and centre. That would be cool, but anyone over the age of 15 has probably got some measure of experience with disappointment, failure, regret. It’s purely anecdotal and maybe I’m missing something, but the point I want to make here is that motivation appears to be a fleeting resource. It gets us out of bed once or twice a week or keeps us up studying another hour or two on some days, but I think most people don’t accomplish things on the back of constantly envisaging their end goals or having a dream which they wish to accomplish. Many people wish more than anything to quit drugs, or lose weight, but they can’t. I’d hesitate to call this a lack of motivation.

So what about discipline? If we can’t effectively feel motivated all the time then we might be able to force ourselves to consistently perform a task or work towards a goal. This seems a little more plausible. Clearly people want things but can’t achieve them so the issue doesn’t lie with wanting it badly enough, but with being able to power through the things we don’t want to do. There sure are a lot of them, after all.

The issue here is that it doesn’t really square up with what we know about biology. We’re all fiends for serotonin and other chemcials, so constantly delaying your gratification for the big pay-off at the end, well, isn’t how most people appear to work. We can all do it sometimes, but when applied to your life on a macro scale, it doesn’t seem to scale up.

As far as I know, needing releases of those happy chemicals is really important for functioning ‘normally’ and without them there can be severe mental and physical side effects. Being disciplined, then, just seems like it will make you miserable (assuming that doing tasks you don’t really enjoy feeds that little goblin in your brain less of the good stuff). Even minus the biology stuff, how often is it that you are able to bear in mind the long term benefits or damage of an action? Maybe for some stuff you’re pretty good, but I think most people are generally pretty short-term motivated. Just look at the wealth of people who will dedicate thousands of hours into MMORPGs like Runescape, fueled by thousands of instances of tiny experience gains.

If I’m right, what do I make of people who are ostensibly successful? I think the answer for those people might lie a little in motivation and discipline. Those are probably a small part of it, but I think the overwhelmingly convincing reason for their success is enjoyment. If you need to put in something like 10,000 hours to become good at something or achieve something then liking the tasks involved is probably important for making yourself do it consistently. If you like the task(s) more, then you’re also probably going to make time for them. This is the biggest one, in my opinion.

I’ve never met anyone who was really very good at anything they didn’t enjoy. Of course there are some outliers and even tasks that we do enjoy, we sometimes become disillusioned with, because becoming good at anything is generally a stressful process, like it or not. However, fundamentally liking whatever it is you’re doing/required to do to work towards your goal is the key, in my opinion. I’ve yet to meet anyone crazy enough to dump thousands of hours into something they hate.

So what do I really want to say here?

Don’t bother with things you don’t enjoy. You heard me. If you try something either as a hobby or to achieve a goal and you find yourself not enjoying the process, give up. Give up, but find another way of achieving the same thing if the goal is something you really desire. For example, if you’re going the gym to lose weight but running on a treadmill is about as fun as watching a paint dry for you, and as a result you often stop going, then stop going to the treadmills and lift weights instead, or join classes, go to a martial arts class, walk in nature. Your chances of sticking to it long enough to get the results you want are more likely to come from something you actually like. And isn’t enjoying yourself a much better use of your time?

If you don’t enjoy a hobby but find yourself driven to get into it, why is that? Maybe there’s some pride wrapped up in it. I can speak from experience that I always viewed programming as a cool hobby and something supremely difficult and so the fact that I never really got into it as a kid always made me wonder whether I just hadn’t given it a fair shot, or maybe I wasn’t smart enough to get it.

Or maybe I just wasn’t into the process.

I can say confidently that my impression of programming, as opposed to the reality of programming, was what made me want to be good at it in the past. For some people, this is a good enough reason to want to do something. Especially when it comes to societal status. I’m a firm believer that almost everyone who becomes a lawyer or a doctor does so, even just a little bit, because of the allure of a traditionally difficult and academically respected title/position. This isn’t such a bad thing if you can actually stick it out in the long term, but this doesn’t work for everyone and nor should it.

Obviously there are some tasks we need to do to get by full stop e.g. go grocery shopping, cut the lawn, and exercise, but ideally if we can make those tasks enjoyable, wouldn’t we be more likely to do them well, and wouldn’t that improve your quality of life? I’m not sure that we can make every task enjoyable but, where possible, wouldn’t it be cool to look forward to going grocery shopping, even if it is only because you like the design of the re-usable shopping bag you take with you, or because the supermarket you visit plays good music.

This does mean that we can’t necessarily be good at everything, even the things we hate, by virtue of powering through, but it does mean that if you can locate the things you do like, then you almost have a free pass to success in that task/goals stemming from that task, provided you have the time to dedicate to it in the first place.

I don’t think we should place a premium on some hobbies and I don’t think that assuming we are all equally capable of success in every field is smart. I like drawing, but do I like it enough to do it every day, or become good at it? Not really. There’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t ‘lack’ motivation if I can’t achieve something in a task I initially wanted to improve in: I just didn’t enjoy it enough to continue. In that case, what was it really adding to my life? The same goes for language learning – a field I have some success and experience in. If you can’t stick to learning a language long enough to get good at it, I don’t believe there’s anything defective about you, I just think maybe it’s not your bag. Or maybe you’ve just not found the right language, culture, study method, or environment for it yet. Ultimately that’s your call.