No, I haven’t made a successful effort to get myself to be passionate about doing X where I was not passionate about X before—with one minor exception.
I try to factor my motivations into things that seem like complex function adaptations. For example, my motivation for coding projects comes from a strong desire for my being in the flow state and for being dissociated (which might or might not be the same complex function adaptation), but also the desire to “get ahead” or advance my status or position in society and occasionally from curiosity. Curiosity I consider a mildly good intrinsic motivation for me to have (but it does cause me to waste a lot of time doing web searches or listening to long Youtube videos). I wish to strengthen my desire to get ahead; my desire to be in the flow state or to be dissociated I strong try to discourage (because I need to learn ways to keep my nervous system calm other than the flow state and because I was addicted to flow for many many years). I try to encourage what small amount of intrinsic motivation I have to help other people.
So the “one minor exception” I refer to above is that over many years, my efforts to encourage some intrinsic motivators while discouraging others has had effects, the strongest of which has been that these years I mostly succeed in my policy of staying out of deep flow states unless I’m under severe stress. (To reach deep flow, I need to be fairly active, e.g., coding or doing math or playing chess online. My guess is that I’m also entering a flow state when I’m watching an absorbing movie, but if so, passive activities like movie watching never activate deep flow. I should probably mention that these years I never enter a flow state when I am coding AFAICT: my knowing that I’m a more effective at coding when I stay out of the flow state makes it a lot easier for me to stay out of the flow state while coding.) The way I understand motivation to work, by making that one source of intrinsic motivation less influential on my behavior, I am automatically making the other intrinsic motivators more influential. (And one of the major disadvantages of being addicted to something is that it is almost impossible to be intrinsically motivated by anything other than the addictive activity.)
That’s a very interesting outlook—I haven’t really considered action being a sum of motivations up until now. So, I guess my question then would be, what does encouraging/discouraging sources of intrinsic motivation look like for you?
My answer to your first question was, I don’t know, but in the interest of comprehensiveness I mentioned a minor exception, which you asked about, so here is more info on the minor exception.
what does encouraging/discouraging sources of intrinsic motivation look like for you?
It looks like making a habit of patiently watching for the desired change. My software environment is organized enough that I can usually arrange for my future self to re-read a written reminder. So, (years ago) I wrote a reminder to watch for any instance where I think my behavior and my decisions are being motivated by interpersonal altruism or I experience pleasure or satisfaction from having achieve an altruistic interpersonal outcome. Note that this did not result in incontrovertible evidence of a significant increase in frequency of altruistic behavior. But I certainly stopped my addiction to the flow motivator (over the course of many years, except I relapse when I’m under stress, but these years it takes a lot of stress) and am pretty sure that the patient watching strategy helped a lot there. (And “just watching” helped me make other kinds of internal mental changes.)
My mind seems to works such that if the only conscious effort I make to effect some internal change is to get into the habit of watching or checking to see if the change has already occurred, my subconscious sometimes seems to figure out a way to effect the change if I watch long enough (months or years).
There are much faster and more potent ways to increase motivation and drive for most people: avoiding all exposure to light between 23:00 and 05:00 every night; getting as much very bright light as possible during the first 3 hours of wakefulness; making sure to get enough tyrosine (a dopamine precursor); deliberate cold exposure; avoiding spending too much of the day in perfectly-safe pleasurable activities; doing enough things you find aversive or outright painful; doing enough risky things. But you didn’t ask about that, I don’t think: “passion” almost always refers to intrinsic motivation (i.e., basically something that feels good or that a person wants to do for it own sake rather than as part of a plan to achieve some other outcome), whereas the motivation for most of what I (and probably you) do is extrinsic. E.g., I take the time to cook a healthy meal not because I enjoy cooking but rather because I anticipate that eating well will pay dividends mostly in future years in helping me achieve outcomes that I haven’t even decided to pursue yet. I took stuff like that to be outside the scope of your question.
No, I haven’t made a successful effort to get myself to be passionate about doing X where I was not passionate about X before—with one minor exception.
I try to factor my motivations into things that seem like complex function adaptations. For example, my motivation for coding projects comes from a strong desire for my being in the flow state and for being dissociated (which might or might not be the same complex function adaptation), but also the desire to “get ahead” or advance my status or position in society and occasionally from curiosity. Curiosity I consider a mildly good intrinsic motivation for me to have (but it does cause me to waste a lot of time doing web searches or listening to long Youtube videos). I wish to strengthen my desire to get ahead; my desire to be in the flow state or to be dissociated I strong try to discourage (because I need to learn ways to keep my nervous system calm other than the flow state and because I was addicted to flow for many many years). I try to encourage what small amount of intrinsic motivation I have to help other people.
So the “one minor exception” I refer to above is that over many years, my efforts to encourage some intrinsic motivators while discouraging others has had effects, the strongest of which has been that these years I mostly succeed in my policy of staying out of deep flow states unless I’m under severe stress. (To reach deep flow, I need to be fairly active, e.g., coding or doing math or playing chess online. My guess is that I’m also entering a flow state when I’m watching an absorbing movie, but if so, passive activities like movie watching never activate deep flow. I should probably mention that these years I never enter a flow state when I am coding AFAICT: my knowing that I’m a more effective at coding when I stay out of the flow state makes it a lot easier for me to stay out of the flow state while coding.) The way I understand motivation to work, by making that one source of intrinsic motivation less influential on my behavior, I am automatically making the other intrinsic motivators more influential. (And one of the major disadvantages of being addicted to something is that it is almost impossible to be intrinsically motivated by anything other than the addictive activity.)
That’s a very interesting outlook—I haven’t really considered action being a sum of motivations up until now. So, I guess my question then would be, what does encouraging/discouraging sources of intrinsic motivation look like for you?
My answer to your first question was, I don’t know, but in the interest of comprehensiveness I mentioned a minor exception, which you asked about, so here is more info on the minor exception.
It looks like making a habit of patiently watching for the desired change. My software environment is organized enough that I can usually arrange for my future self to re-read a written reminder. So, (years ago) I wrote a reminder to watch for any instance where I think my behavior and my decisions are being motivated by interpersonal altruism or I experience pleasure or satisfaction from having achieve an altruistic interpersonal outcome. Note that this did not result in incontrovertible evidence of a significant increase in frequency of altruistic behavior. But I certainly stopped my addiction to the flow motivator (over the course of many years, except I relapse when I’m under stress, but these years it takes a lot of stress) and am pretty sure that the patient watching strategy helped a lot there. (And “just watching” helped me make other kinds of internal mental changes.)
My mind seems to works such that if the only conscious effort I make to effect some internal change is to get into the habit of watching or checking to see if the change has already occurred, my subconscious sometimes seems to figure out a way to effect the change if I watch long enough (months or years).
There are much faster and more potent ways to increase motivation and drive for most people: avoiding all exposure to light between 23:00 and 05:00 every night; getting as much very bright light as possible during the first 3 hours of wakefulness; making sure to get enough tyrosine (a dopamine precursor); deliberate cold exposure; avoiding spending too much of the day in perfectly-safe pleasurable activities; doing enough things you find aversive or outright painful; doing enough risky things. But you didn’t ask about that, I don’t think: “passion” almost always refers to intrinsic motivation (i.e., basically something that feels good or that a person wants to do for it own sake rather than as part of a plan to achieve some other outcome), whereas the motivation for most of what I (and probably you) do is extrinsic. E.g., I take the time to cook a healthy meal not because I enjoy cooking but rather because I anticipate that eating well will pay dividends mostly in future years in helping me achieve outcomes that I haven’t even decided to pursue yet. I took stuff like that to be outside the scope of your question.