Keys to Motivation

Get excited and make things

            Cultivate curiosity. Explore what excites you. Express that excitement in your work and in your play.

            Regularly practice play without expectation. Find others who are equally willing to explore and experiment, without imposing external goals or rules or structures.

Love the process

            Learn to love the work itself, not the rewards. Cultivate a capacity to value the act of doing something above others’ response or external reinforcement. When your goal is praise, positive feedback, accolades, being liked, or money, you giving away control of your self-worth and motivation. If your goal is intrinsic, you’re much more likely to achieve it, and you’re much more in control of figuring out how to achieve it.

            Brené Brown, author of ‘Daring Greatly,’ recommends not attaching your self-worth to the thing you have done. It is your work, and you have invested yourself in it, but the work is not you.

            “Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity.” —Teresa Amabile

When you fail, celebrate your successes

            It’s important to learn from failure, but if you focus on failure, you get in the habit of thinking about those times. Share your successes with people you trust to share in your excitement without envy or bitterness. Remember times when everything clicked, and everything felt right. Remember times you have loved the work. Take time regularly to bask in those memories, to call up the confidence and enjoyment those memories inspire in you. Confidence and enjoyment counter fear of failure, rejection, humiliation, and shame.

Do Something

            “…we’ve all slacked off for lack of motivation before. Especially in times where we shouldn’t.  We feel lethargic and apathetic towards a certain goal that we’ve set for ourselves because we lack the motivation and we lack the motivation because we don’t feel any overarching emotional desire to accomplish something.

Emotional Inspiration –> Motivation –> Desirable Action 

             But there’s a problem with operating under this framework. And that is that often the changes and actions we most need in our lives, are inspired by negative emotions which simultaneously hinder us from taking action.” —Mark Manson, ‘The Do Something Principle’

            In behavioral therapy circles it’s well-understood that behavior can prompt changes in cognition and emotional responses. The brain, that master rationalizer, will eventually come up with an explanation for why you’re doing what you’re doing, a story that puts the behavior in context with your life. And your emotions will respond both to what you’re doing and the story your brain tells you about it.

            Mark Manson proposes this behavioral-therapy-worthy hack to overcome the problem of lack of motivation:

“Action –> Inspiration –> Motivation”

            Even the smallest of actions can prompt you to do something else. Taking small steps, doing one thing at a time, and celebrating successes can boost confidence, and higher confidence makes it easier to do something and to take bolder risks.

            “My math teacher used to tell us in high school, “If you don’t know how to do a problem, start writing something down, your brain will begin to figure it out as you go.” And sure enough, to this day, this seems to be true. The mere action itself inspires new thoughts and ideas which lead us to solving the problems in our lives. But that new insight never comes if we simply sit around contemplating it.” —Mark Manson, ‘The Do Something Principle’

            “The only way you’ll find out if you “have it in you” is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your “limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude” is to produce.” —Dear Sugar, ‘Write Like a Motherf***er’

            Rinse. Repeat. Especially on days when you don’t feel like it. Especially on days when you have a hundred excuses not to. Train your schedule and your brain to the habit of doing something, anything. And do it again. And again.

Ignore Everybody

            “I feel like I’m on my back, and there’s the Sistine Chapel, and I’m painting away. I like it when people say, ‘Gee, that’s a pretty good-looking painting.’ But it’s my painting, and when somebody says, ‘Why don’t you use more red instead of blue?’ Good-bye. It’s my painting. And I don’t care what they sell it for. The painting itself will never be finished. That’s one of the great things about it.” —Warren Buffett

            “The professional cannot allow the actions of others to define his reality. Tomorrow morning the critic will be gone, but the writer will still be there facing the blank page. Nothing matters but that he keep working.
            …Remember, Resistance wants us to cede sovereignty to others. It wants us to stake our self-worth, our identity, our reason-for-being, on the response of others to our work. Resistance knows we can’t take this. No one can.
            The professional blows critics off. He doesn’t even hear them. Critics, he reminds himself, are the unwitting mouthpieces of Resistance and as such can be truly cunning and pernicious. They can articulate in their reviews the same toxic venom that Resistance itself concocts inside our heads. That is their real evil. Not that we believe them, but that we believe the Resistance in our own minds, for which critics serve as unconscious spokespersons.
            The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.” —Steven Pressfield, ‘The War of Art’

            “Try advice that appeals to you, and ignore the rest.” —Jason Hough

             “The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you.” —Hugh MacLeod, ‘Ignore Everybody’

             “My advice? You don’t need my advice. You really don’t.” —Hugh MacLeod, ‘Ignore Everybody’

Quo Vadimus?

            You’re not always going to succeed. Edison famously found a thousand ways not to make a light bulb before he found the right way. You’re likely to fail a lot of the time, especially in those crucial times when you’re just starting out, or you’re taking new risks and you don’t have a lot of support. That’s when it’s important to support yourself with memories of your successes, and focus again and again on what your goal is.

            There are a thousand ways to get there. Find new ones, and if there aren’t any, forge them yourself. Leave the beaten path, ignore everyone, and cut your own way through the resistance. You’ll figure out what works, and keep doing it.

“Just keep swimming.” —Dory, ‘Finding Nemo’

“Around here … we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious … and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” —Walt Disney 

Sources and further reading: 

            • ‘Get Excited and Make Things’ by Wil Wheaton

            • ‘The Do Something Principle’ by Mark Manson

            • ‘Flow, the secret to happiness’ TED Talk by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

            • ‘Flow’ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

            • ‘The puzzle of motivation’ TED Talk by Dan Pink

            • ‘Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us’ by Daniel Pink

            • ‘The War of Art’ by Steven Pressfield

            • ‘Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity’ by Hugh MacLeod