Improving your life with motivation

While motivation is a huge topic, and the science on it is not in agreement, there are many takeaways we can use to understand how motivation operates and use it to improve our lives.

• Rewards and punishments are at the centre of motivation. For example, we may not be able to consciously link our love of sports to early childhood experiences.
• Consciously setting our intentions greatly impacts our performance. When we reframe a situation, we can be more motivated to do it.
• There are many positive feedback loops. Set hard goals and commit to them, and our performance increases. If you feel you can't do anything, your motivation diminishes.
• Motivational struggles are caused by competing forces. We might find it harder to read books in our spare time when we have easy access to Netflix.
• Many sources of motivation may be hidden from view. Our motivation is often hidden from us. Sometimes it is simply because the hardware that runs our motivation is not expressible. In other cases, motivations may be subtle and complex.