That said, I’ve found that cultivating a gut-level feeling that what you’re doing must be done, and must be done quickly, is an extraordinarily good motivator. It’s such a strong motivator that I seldom explicitly acknowledge it. I don’t need to mentally invoke “we have to study or the world ends”.
This reminds me of the fact that, like many others, on many tasks I tend to work best right before the deadline, while doing essentially nothing in the before that deadline. Of course, for some tasks this is actually the rational way of approaching things (if they can be accomplished sufficiently well in that time just before the deadline). But then there are also tasks for which it would be very useful if I could temporarily turn on a belief saying that this is urgent.
Interestingly, there are also tasks that I can only accomplish well if there isn’t any major time pressure, and a looming deadline prevents me from getting anything done. For those cases, it would be useful if I could just turn off the belief saying that I don’t have much time left.
This reminds me of the fact that, like many others, on many tasks I tend to work best right before the deadline,
This is partially the reason why I think that there are people that are incredibly productive and efficient in a structured work environment (like having a boss), and then become less motivated and productive after quitting their jobs and working for their own start-up.
Expectations from people that depend on and demand from you is very motivating, much like a deadline. Start-ups are hard because everyday you have to get up and do something for yourself and suddenly you aren’t working as many hours as you were when you were grinding it out in the corporate world.
It’s not the belief per se, just the emotion. It would be convenient if the emotion could be changed without changing the belief (to something false). Then again, self-motivation does involve sometimes changing beliefs by changing reality (e.g. Beeminder) -- maybe it isn’t much of a stretch to change the beliefs in some structured way.
Great post!
This reminds me of the fact that, like many others, on many tasks I tend to work best right before the deadline, while doing essentially nothing in the before that deadline. Of course, for some tasks this is actually the rational way of approaching things (if they can be accomplished sufficiently well in that time just before the deadline). But then there are also tasks for which it would be very useful if I could temporarily turn on a belief saying that this is urgent.
Interestingly, there are also tasks that I can only accomplish well if there isn’t any major time pressure, and a looming deadline prevents me from getting anything done. For those cases, it would be useful if I could just turn off the belief saying that I don’t have much time left.
This is partially the reason why I think that there are people that are incredibly productive and efficient in a structured work environment (like having a boss), and then become less motivated and productive after quitting their jobs and working for their own start-up.
Expectations from people that depend on and demand from you is very motivating, much like a deadline. Start-ups are hard because everyday you have to get up and do something for yourself and suddenly you aren’t working as many hours as you were when you were grinding it out in the corporate world.
It’s not the belief per se, just the emotion. It would be convenient if the emotion could be changed without changing the belief (to something false). Then again, self-motivation does involve sometimes changing beliefs by changing reality (e.g. Beeminder) -- maybe it isn’t much of a stretch to change the beliefs in some structured way.