Motivation has always fascinated me: it seems to be so clear how one can live a good life and improve on things and yet its so easy and tempting to just … not do anything. I guess in the history of human evolution it made sense that humans should be lazy, since doing anything is a potential waste of calories and unnecessary exposure to risk. But modern society is so different…
One tip that I had in academia is to always nail the introduction of your papers. The why part should always be clearly defined. Otherwise, what’s the point of pushing yourself through all the doubt and uncertainty of doing anything novel?
I think one thing that makes chasing goals difficult is that we as human beings depend on many things. I have goals at the gym which I find to be far easier to work on if I have someone to go with and if I do more fun exercises. So even though my goal has been to bench two plates (which I have to brag about achieving recently! hooray) I also have to pay attention to my friends and making sure that I don’t just do a routine every session.
I’ve heard people talk about motivation in four tiers; there’s tier 1 as fear of death, tier 2 as fixing current problems, tier 3 as improvement (e.g. more money) and tier 4 as personal improvement. Tiers 1 and 2 are sub-prime because as soon as the problems go away, then the motivation goes away too. My takeaway is that tiers 1 and 2 are still motivation. So for motivation I think imagining negative scenarios can be a useful, however morbid, exercise.
For dealing with stress and anxiety when you’re chasing goals, I find comfort in knowing that most humans cannot multi-task effectively. That means, to do whatever you need to, write down a list of what needs to be done. It doesn’t matter what you choose to do, just do one thing and worry about that. As long as you sit down and make progress on one thing (even if the building is on fire), that’s the best you can do. And it’s honest work.
Final tip of this post: share goals with others. Other people tend to see potential that you might’ve lost track of, or they can help clarify your thoughts on your obstacles.
0 comments