The Motivation Machine: How to Get & Stay Motivated for Any Goal - Nat Eliason

If you're trying to pick up a professional skill, "I should learn some programming" won't get you very far. But if you're thinking "if I learn some programming I can start building my own web apps and run them on my laptop while traveling the world like Levels " you'll have a much higher value attached.

However you choose to frame it, focus on creating a value that is intrinsically meaningful to you . If you try to justify pursuing a goal because of something you think you should do or that you're supposed to do, it won't work. That's not high value. They can't just be goals that you have chosen, they have to be goals that were generated autonomously and that resonate with your personal desires.

The best way to increase Value is to have a specific project you want to work on . "Learn programming" is not motivating, but when you want to be able to build a certain site you have the idea for or design a mobile app you want to see in the world, you'll be amazed at how motivated you become.

Your Expectancy is how likely you believe you are to succeed at this project you're taking on. Increasing it requires pulling two levers: decreasing your learned helplessness , and increasing the perceived ease of accomplishing it .

If you've ever taken on self-directed projects and failed before, or you've never been able to get yourself motivated to start them in the past, you may have developed a degree of " Learned Helplessness " around motivating yourself. It's a psychological phenomenon in which repeated failures conditions you to not bother trying, even when the factors that caused you to fail in the past have been removed.

There are certain kinds of statements that give away if you've developed learned helplessness:

"I'm not good at teaching myself new things.""I've never been good at waking up early.""I'm just not good with languages.""I don't think I have the motivation to do my own projects.""Some people are just better at getting themselves to do things."

If those sound familiar, the only solution is to realize you're not stuck and force yourself through the activity, or get someone else to help force you through it. This was apparently the only way to de-condition the dogs in the original experiments from their learned helplessness:

Luckily, the other way to increase Expectancy helps alleviate learned helplessness as well. Part of why goals can seem unachievable (and thus low Expectancy) is that they seem too big. What does "learn programming" even mean?

To avoid this, break your goals down and keep breaking them down until they reach the point where they're hilariously easy . If they're easy, but still have a high value attached to them, you'll find it much easier to find the motivation for starting.

Say you want to learn design. You find Karen Cheng's guide to learning design , but accomplishing that whole list is a pretty big goal, so you start with the goal of getting through her first recommendation, " You Can Draw in 30 Days ." Even that might feel daunting. So you start with the goal of doing three drawing exercises from the book. That feels more achievable while still being attached to the high Value goal of becoming an employed designer.

But even with these interventions, you may still put off starting, which is why you need to decrease your reasons for putting it off.

With strong reasons to start project you still might not feel like you need to do it now , which is why you also have to tackle the bottom of the equation: how to decrease the Delay (by making it seem like you'll hit the goal sooner), and decrease the Impulsiveness (so you don't procrastinate and do other things).

By breaking the project down as we did for increasing the Expectancy, you can decrease the Delay since the smaller scope of the broken down project will have a nearer completion date. Finishing Karen's full guide might take months, but finishing the first three exercises in the first resource might take an afternoon.

To make it more effective, though, assign a date to complete it by . "Finish the first three exercises" isn't particularly urgent, but "finish the first three exercises by Friday" is. There are two competing philosophies for how to best do this:

The Parkinson's Law Philosophy : The Parkinson's Law philosophy says that you should set an artificially short deadline so you don't waste time dilly-dallying on unimportant things. It says that by giving yourself a smaller window to complete the task in, you'll be more likely to get it done efficiently , since "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

The solution, then, is to set a deadline that's just below how long it has taken you to do a similar task in the past , so that it's motivating enough to make you start now and work efficiently (taking advantage of Parkinson's Law) while avoiding overexerting yourself and failing (from the Planning Fallacy).

Again, there are checklists at the end to help you remind you of the finer details .

Starting is easy. Keeping going is hard. All projects will eventually land in The Dip and you'll have to decide if you're willing to push through to the other side, or if you're going to quit and move on to the next thing.

Getting through the dip is primarily a function of maintaining motivation, which we can solve based on the motivation equation from the beginning and a similar breakdown from the last section. We need to make sure that we have consistently high reasons to keep going, and consistently low reasons to quit.

To keep going, you'll have to maintain the same or greater level of Expectancy and Value that you used to get yourself going. That will require maintaining your belief that you can achieve the goal, and keeping in mind the greater goal that you're working towards.

One reason that you might give up or lose motivation is if your belief that you can pull off the goal diminishes. If your Expectancy decreases too much, you may no longer feel sufficiently motivated to push through the distractions and challenges regardless of how big the potential value is.

"Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work . And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run. Whether they are trying to solve a major scientific mystery or simply produce a high-quality product or service, everyday progress- even a small win-can make all the difference in how they feel and perform ." (emphasis mine)

It's also a key for feeling good about your work. According to the same research, " Steps forward occurred on 76% of people's best-mood days... If a person is motivated and happy at the end of the workday, it's a good bet that he or she made some progress."

Unfortunately, the reverse is also true.

The solution?Set small, incremental goals that are sufficiently exciting to be motivating and which you have a reasonable expectation of hitting . A good technique for this is setting process goals instead of outcome goals. An outcome goal is great for planning, but it's bad for day to day tracking since you can't control your outcomes. You can only control what you do in pursuit of those outcomes.

Find a way to keep reminding yourself of what your daily tasks are supporting . That's the only way to keep the Value up.

With starting a project, the challenge you had to get over was Delay: making yourself start the project now rather than later. But for keeping going on a project, the challenge you have to get over is Impulsiveness: making sure you don't get distracted by shiny objects or minutia instead of sticking with your goal.

As such, these methods will focus on preventing distraction, avoiding procrastination, and stopping doing the "urgent unimportant" tasks instead of the " important non-urgent " ones you should be doing.

First, figure out what you need to do:

Do you need the motivation to start? Or do you need the motivation to continue?

If you need the motivation to start:

Clearly define an exciting, high-level value to starting the projectSet small, easily achievable goals for the project to startCreate a deadline for the first goal that's motivating without being overly ambitiousPre-commit yourself to accomplishing the goal using a commitment device

If you need the motivation to continue:

Keep setting intermediate process goals that you know you can achieveRegularly remind yourself of the greater vision your daily goals are feeding intoBuild a habit around the goal so you keep working on itFind the sweet spot within the process that gets you into flowClearly define your follow-on goals so that you know where to go nextKeep your energy up with good lifestyle habits