It isn’t all the moments you’re doing the action but the moments of another candidate winner being surfaced in consciousness giving you the affordance to do something else instead. In that moment you can reaffirm your commitment to the thing or choose the distraction. Poor modeling of the self who has to make that microdecision is behind much confusion.
This is a good clarification. Technically you’re right, you can maintain motivation so long as you reaffirm commitment in each moment you are tempted, which admittedly might not every moment (consider flow states).
Though I’d still argue that you should still be thinking about causing yourself to win in every moment. You might maintain motivation through to the completion of a task because either: a) you successfully reaffirmed commitment, or b) no alternative candidate winner was surfaced in a given moment to begin with, yet it matters that one of those is true for every moment of necessary execution.
Though not covered properly in this post, the eventual goal here is to explore how to engineer circumstances, both internal and external, so that you win in each moment whether it be because of a) or b). And that applies to every moment.
It isn’t all the moments you’re doing the action but the moments of another candidate winner being surfaced in consciousness giving you the affordance to do something else instead. In that moment you can reaffirm your commitment to the thing or choose the distraction. Poor modeling of the self who has to make that microdecision is behind much confusion.
This is a good clarification. Technically you’re right, you can maintain motivation so long as you reaffirm commitment in each moment you are tempted, which admittedly might not every moment (consider flow states).
Though I’d still argue that you should still be thinking about causing yourself to win in every moment. You might maintain motivation through to the completion of a task because either: a) you successfully reaffirmed commitment, or b) no alternative candidate winner was surfaced in a given moment to begin with, yet it matters that one of those is true for every moment of necessary execution.
Though not covered properly in this post, the eventual goal here is to explore how to engineer circumstances, both internal and external, so that you win in each moment whether it be because of a) or b). And that applies to every moment.