self-repair, ways of seeing

Motivation is anything that compels you to take action

visakanv
January 26, 2016

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HN:

I have been thinking, reading and writing about motivation / discipline / procrastination / akrasia for years now. I’m always looking for really good material on the subject. Unfortunately for some strange reason, most of the posts I’ve seen that get to the front page of Hacker News are woefully oversimplistic.

Even discipline is something that requires some sort of motivation to cultivate. It is something that you have to want to do, and getting yourself to want to do something isn’t (in my opinion) nearly as trivial as a lot of people pretend it is.

So screw motivation, screw discipline, what you need is a comprehensive, holistic solution that encompasses almost everything– that’s why it’s so difficult to change your life.

  1. You need to figure out your expectancy of accomplishing tasks. Discipline won’t help you if you bite off more than you can chew.
  2. 2. You need to figure out what’s valuable to you. There’s not much sense in getting disciplined at doing something you hate. PG wrote in one of his essays- paulgraham.com/love.html, I believe, where he talks about a doctor who became a doctor because she was so focused and disciplined– despite the fact that she never actually loved medicine.
  3. You need to engineer your environment + choose the right peers. This is way more than half the battle, and it also involves taking more drastic action than a lot of people are comfortable with.
  4. You need to chop up your tasks into things that have nearly-immediate feedback, because otherwise hyperbolic discounting makes things seem irrelevant and unimportant to us (especially bad if you have ADHD).
  5. You need to have a vested interest in doing all of the above. That means having some sort of reason or motive… which you might also call “motivation.”TL;DR:
    Motivation / discipline / getting-stuff-done is a lot more complicated than “screw X, do Y”.PS:

“Screw X, do Y” seems to be a rhetoric device writers use when want to drum up strong feelings in people, dividing people into Camp X and Camp Y. Once you learn to see it, it actually gets rather boring and underwhelming. If you skip all the rhetoric, what the writer is saying is to develop habits. “Start small”, that’s it.

Would’ve been more interesting to read a post about the specific development of habits. Because, often you’ll find, you end up needing some motivation to getting around to changing your habits, too.

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source

I relate to you a lot, so if I’m harsh towards you I’m really just being harsh to myself.

You’re not really saying anything. You’re describing your emotional state, but that’s it. You say you’re afraid, but you’re not actually getting to the root of your fear. Sure, you don’t want mediocrity. Who does, anyway. (Rhetorical question.)

Is this just a pep-talk? If so, all the best to you, live long and prosper, focus, work hard, all that good stuff. But I have a feeling that you have something you want to be addressing, but you’re not actually doing it.

I’m 23 too. I’m married to my childhood sweetheart and we have a home. I have a great job doing marketing in a tech firm. Her heart’s desire is to travel. I’d like to take her around the world, and write novels and essays about whatever MY heart desires. But I too have bills to pay (and my job’s awesome, anyway, so what’s my problem?) And I too am afraid that my ambitions and vision for myself and reality might not be easy to swallow, and/or that I might hurt people along the way. I’ve already cut ties with some of my closest friends.

Here’s a guess that’s going to sound a little pessimistic, but it’s just a guess and I could be totally wrong, and it’s more about me than it is about you- but I think you’re going to find yourself returning to this exact same position several times.

Not sure why I’m writing this, being messy and jumbled and all, but it’s probably the same reason why you wrote your post. So, uh, here it is.
Life’s crazy. You’re crazy. I’m crazy. Cheers to that. Once you’re done analysing and reviewing your emotional state, though, don’t forget to get around to doing the work- because that’s what actually matters, and that’s what people will actually want to read about, pay you for, etc. That’s the real legacy you’ll build.

Getting married almost immediately made me realize how much of my earlier thinking was narcissistic, romanticized, self-entitled bullshit.
I’m finding this an interesting position to be in now, because I completely relate to OP, but I also… don’t. It’s like hearing a teenage boy telling you how much he’s well and truly in love with a girl he met that afternoon. You don’t want to falsely encourage him, but you don’t want to cruelly discourage him either… just trying to be helpful in some way, if that’s in any way possible. Cause I think I could’ve used some help then.

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Source:

TL;DR: Don’t half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing. And then another. And then another. #manliness

I find it odd that we seem to be taking so long as a species to develop a useful, simple and broadly agreed-upon idea about the peaks and troughs on the productivity landscape. Yes, it’s better to focus than to multi-task. But it’s also good to show up every day and make a little progress. You want to do the “minimum effective dose” each time.

To use his ladder analogy, climbing a quarter-rung a day gets you nowhere, but a rung a day is superior to 4 rungs in one day and then no more rungs for a week.

Aren’t there more interesting things we can discuss about the nuances of productivity than “here there be dragons”? Or is this really just chest-beating bravado that we all do from time to time to make ourselves feel better about our choices, and I should get back to work?

Sadly for me I think I still approach productivity in a very “barbaric” way- I have long periods of idleness and procrastination, then I rush a fuckton of work all at once. I’ve seen some success in my personal projects from writing daily, but I haven’t yet adapted such practices to my work and other commitments… I’m an unproductive person who shouldn’t be talking about this, heh.

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Yeah, I think procrastination, like laziness, might be better described as “work aversion”. Procrastination and laziness both imply that the “problem” is with the individual who’s afflicted with it, and it also almost implies that the environment has little-to-nothing to do with it. But there are many ‘procrastinators’ who actually work really hard at certain things. (World of Warcraft strikes me as one of those things that actually requires a lot of hard work.)

So again, for the people who do struggle with procrastination in their own lives, figuring out how to do something about it (if they want to do something about it at all!) requires a very thorough self-examination.

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Is that so bad? Muddling through has probably gotten you further than you give it credit for, why do you think you have to be mister super productivity to get further?

I have an answer for this one, and I think the War of Art captures it- it’s the pain of missed obligations, unfulfilled promises, etc. Anxiety, stress, difficulty sleeping, etc. ‘Mr Super Productivity’ is a bit of a strawman- I think most people would be happy just to say “I have regularly productive days and I am on top of my work and my commitments”.

I know what it’s like to think “it’s not so bad, I can just waffle my way through life”. It means upsetting parents, teachers, girlfriends, friends, the spouse. It means disappointing people.

The important thing here, on hindsight, is to manage expectations and avoid overpromising. The best way to get things done is to have less things to do.

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“You basically just can’t come in, bro up, stack up and get the f* out.”

Sadly, this is a myth that has been perpetuated since the literal Gold Rush and before. Life is tough. There’s no need to drink stylish $12 wine (read Balzac’s Lost Illusions- it’s a story about a poet who borrows money from his friends to Make It Big in Paris and utterly fucks everything up. It seems like we never learn from history.)

I don’t think it’s safe or fair to say that any place is unplugged from reality. Reality is what it is. And when you have opportunists flooding a place, it behaves differently, operates differently.

Sorry about your GF, but again– nobody owes anybody anything. Welcome to reality. You should probably take a long break. Things might not be as bleak as they seem- your experience might teach you some things you don’t realize you’re learning. (That said, some people seem to just blunder ahead for years and years: http://michalsobel.com/en/experiences/the-idea-of-giving-up-… )

Thinking further about this: How do you avoid tiredness? What you describe isn’t just run-of-the-mill tiredness, but the sort of exhaustion you get when you’ve been pushing at a door marked ‘pull’. If you create something of value and get positive feedback, that gives you the energy you need to continue along the process. It’s absolutely crucial to get to your personal a-ha moments as fast as you can, because otherwise you run yourself aground.

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I’ve thought very long and hard (and written loads) about writer’s block, and have made a lot of personal progress in dealing with it. [I’m currently 550,000+ words into a “write a million words” project.] I’d be happy to chat about it with anybody who struggles with it.

I like to think of writing (or any creative work, really) as a large-scale process with many intermediate steps, like say, producing diamonds. You have to start by locating the raw materials, drilling them out, getting a sense of what they are, isolating them, cut them up, polish them, set them, present them, sell them.

Block can happen at any point along the process. It could be that you don’t have enough raw material. It could be that you’re not sure how to cut the particular stone that you have. It could be that you’ve got the wrong tools for the job, or that the job itself is not worth doing.

The challenge is to zoom out from the present moment and to see the bigger picture, and often to move upstream in the process. Sometimes you need to abandon the process altogether, and maybe return to it later.
The creative person’s anxiety and paranoia can seem like a petty thing compared to say, somebody who has to deal with “real” problems. (I’m reminded of Anthony Bourdain saying “Cooking professionally is hard work. Writing is a privilege and a luxury. Anybody who whines about writers block should be forced to clean squid all day”)

It’s a fair point. That said, I think it’s useful to try and understand what exactly the block is. It’s fear, anxiety, attachment to outcome, a sense of incompetence and worthlessness.

Elizabeth Gilbert also has a great TED talk on dealing with that, about separating your self-esteem from your work.

[…]

Certainly! I experience this periodically, usually (perhaps always) when I’m approaching new topics or ideas that I’m not familiar with.
I wouldn’t say it’s writer’s block altogether, I think it’s just the “stretch” of trying to communicate something you haven’t effectively communicated before.

The analogy I would use here is– it’s like a standup comedian trying out new jokes. He knows that it’s funny, but the audience isn’t laughing– because there’s something about the delivery that he isn’t getting right.

My advice for people struggling with these things is to do multiple drafts. Try to write it down, then start over altogether from scratch. Explain it to other people. After a while, you’ll start “catching” the right turns of phrases and sentence structure and so on.

The writing and editing process should be decoupled– trying to do both at once typically leads to frustrating contortions.

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I’m very passionate about the problem of procrastination, having suffered terribly from it all my life. For some people it’s a relatively minor thing, but for others it’s debilitating– ruining educations, careers, relationships.
What has been blowing my mind lately– and I’m always doing all the reading and experimentation I can about this– is how much of this is PHYSICAL. Hanks talks about headaches and stomach disorders– for me, it’s always been anxiety and loss of appetite. Which leads to low/volatile blood sugar, which leads to mental fogginess, inaction, and worsens the cycle of procrastination.

If I could go back in time to my teenage days and change one thing, it wouldn’t be scheduling, prioritization, visualization, environment-management, monotasking, and breaking down tasks into little chunks. (Though all of those things are very helpful.)

It would be to eat a hearty breakfast every morning. I’m thoroughly convinced on hindsight that it makes the biggest difference. You need a clear mind to do all of the hard, messy work of dealing with reality, and to have a clear mind you need to eat, hydrate, sleep and exercise.

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I had a blogpost about leadership, but I decided to put it under motivation, because… leadership seems to be to largely be about motivating and directing others.

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