(This is a post from a personal daily blogging project on finding and cultivating intrinsic motivation, that I thought might be of interest to LessWrong readers)
I find that my motivation for tasks tends to divide into two very different kinds, extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is something outside myself, a feeling of guilt or obligation, something I need to do. An expectation I need to meet, a deadline I can’t miss. While intrinsic motivation comes from within, and is mostly characterised by a feeling of excitement. I really care about what I’m doing, it feels important to me, and I want to do it. With extrinsic motivation, I’m always pushing myself to keep up with it, while with intrinsic motivation it’s driving me forwards.
And I find tasks driven by excitement are awesome. I can spend far longer on them without feeling drained, I procrastinate less, I feel less guilt and anxiety. It’s far easier to focus. I feel joy and passion at what I’m doing, and the insecurities and doubt feel far distant.
And yet, when I look at my life, most of my motivation is extrinsic. Occasionally I have awesome tasks that I feel excited about, but it mostly feels like this is just something that happens to me, that finding excitement is not something I have any agency in. And, if I’m not paying attention, this will be true. But this is crazy. I’m still doing tasks either way, motivation is a property of my mind and how I approach things. And I refuse to spend most of my life in a shitty local optima, just because my mind is framing things badly. As with all things that matter in life, excitement can be optimised, and this post is about my best tools for doing so.
Building excitement is hard, and the approach will vary a lot between people. And it probably doesn’t seem obvious that it can be done at all. Excitement is a difficult and delicate equilibrium—once it’s gotten going it can have a lot of momentum behind it, but it’s rarely the kind of thing you can trivially make happen. And seeing this, it’s easy to conclude that it “can’t be forced” and move on. But this is just a failure of inner optimisation, trying harder in the moment. There are a lot of properties that can make a task more or less exciting, and a key skill is to notice these, and to shape your life about them.
If you enjoy physics analogies—being excited and not being excited are both stable equilibria, and our intuitions think only about the local shifts we can achieve, where moving between equilibria is hard. But this is something you can achieve, you’ll just need to be creative about it!
In practice, I find that these break down into 3 areas: finding new projects that I feel excited about, reframing tasks I need to do anyway into ones I feel excited about, and feeling excited about self-improvement—fixing a particular problem in my life.
Self-improvement is a particularly powerful use: I know that problems are for fixing, but it’s easy to just feel helpless on any particular problem. That it’s utterly intractable, and that there’s no way to change things. And, if I’m not actually convinced that I can solve the problem, and am just going through the motions, this is often true! And intuitively, it can often seem like the solution is either giving up, or trying really hard to force through. But this is pressing the Try Harder button. When things are hard, the solution is rarely to just try harder, you need to get creative. And if I can get excited about a solution, then often this will just work! A lot of problems are ultimately tied to my self-image, and with excitement comes the belief that this problem can actually be fixed.
The first step is to identify examples of things that have excited you in the past. Things that don’t feel like work, things that you did because you wanted to, things that give you a warm glow of achievement looking back. For me, many of the examples in my last post qualify—writing up intuition-focused notes, giving talks, teaching workshops, organising events. Self-improvement projects, like trying to form strong friendships, develop social skills, or become more adventurous. But these are just my examples. I recommend setting yourself a 5 minute timer now, and trying to generate a list of your own—different things will excite different people!
Next, you want to look at these tasks and extract out common trends, things that worked well. For me, these trends are:
Doing things because I wanted to, not because I had to. Knowing that there was nothing making me do it, and doing it anyway.
Something that helped people
The feeling of progress and growth—seeing myself improve, having tangible markers of skill, having skills in mind I was getting better at, eg becoming visibly better at giving talks
Tangible results—eg producing resources, and producing blog posts
Social excitement—something I could share with people, something I could get excited with friends about
Something that made me smile—a subtle blend of fun, silly, appealing to my sense of humour
Novelty—something new, unexpected, with a lot of room to learn
Learning—feeling like I was gaining knowledge and skills
Fixing things—noticing things that were broken, and nobody was doing anything about, eg the complete lack of information for Part II course choices
I’ve found these all excellent trends to look for in future projects—they helped me come up with the mini blog project, which I think satisfies all 9 of those to some degree, and is the most fun I’ve had in a while! It can be hard to look for projects with so many constraints, but I find it useful to see this as an opportunity. The space of all possible projects is large, and the true constraint is my time, and the probability of giving up on a project. Investing some extra time to find a project I find truly exciting and getting a higher chance of following through is absolutely worth it.
I find this process useful for finding traits to look for in new projects, but this is also excellently suited to reframing tasks I already need to be doing. I have less control over this, but a lot of excitement comes from my mindset and from the process, the narrative I tell myself about what I’m doing. And even if my end goal is fixed, I have a lot of control over the process. Here are my most powerful tools for doing this:
Having autonomy
I’ve heard the standard advice of “autonomy is a key component of job satisfaction” for a while, but I only realised what this means to me in practice recently. I define autonomy as doing something to my own standards, not somebody else’s.
I can be doing exactly the same task, in similar ways. But the question is—am I blindly doing what I’m told, doing things that seem meaningless and arbitrary, just because I’m told to? Or am I doing things my way?
Last year, I had to a series of notoriously dull computing coursework projects. And I found the first one pretty uninspiring, in part because I was trying to figure out what the markers wanted. I had way more fun with the second project, because I decided to scrap that and do it all to my own standards. To write elegant, well-structured code just because I could. To go down a rabbit hole of LaTeX table commands, in order to make things exactly as pretty as I wanted them to be. To write down what I thought mattered in the explanations, not what I thought the marker wanted.
Finding social connections
This can mean finding ways to help others—publishing resources you create, teaching the ideas you learn to somebody else, helping somebody working on a similar task, writing up a blog post detailing your experiences and what you learned
Or it can just be finding peers—people doing the same task. People to connect with, complain about to, joke about with.
Some people find that coworking with someone doing the same task can be extremely motivating, though this doesn’t do it as much for me
Make progress visceral
Gamify it: create tickboxes for yourself, track streaks, give yourself points
Some people swear by apps like Habitica
Track data, eg words typed per day, and try to get your speed as high as you can
Publish things, create a record of what you’ve done that you can look back on and feel pride
Make a physical representation of the task—you can go wild here! If you need to send 100 annoying emails, get 100 scraps of paper, and burn one after each email
Reframe the purpose
Make it about gaining a skill, like better writing, communication skills, focus
This can be super narrow! If you have a tedious text processing task, could this be a good excuse to learn how to use Regular Expressions.
Focus your effort on that skill, not the task—this will serve you better in the longterm
Try to gather data to track your abilities at that skill—qualitative if need be! Make the progress visceral.
Create tight feedback loops. Ask people for advice on how to improve. Notice problems, and the things holding you back, and iterate upon them
Make it about meta-skills! The ability to notice problems and correct them. The ability to hear feedback and take it well and learn from it. The ability to intentionally make yourself excited about a task.
A useful one: I am running this experiment to get better at running experiments, at actually acting on problems.
Focus on your self-image. The task is not the important part, the important part is how the decisions you make now affect your self-image and your future decisions. Does this task make you the kind of person who Actually Does Things? Does it make me the kind of person who’ll make other people’s lives better?
This can resolve issues with self-doubt and insecurity, because it’s no longer about whether the task is the right idea—you’re now answering a different question. Sometimes paralysing doubt can’t be solved directly, no matter how much you think about it.
This is awesome, because it can often completely short-circuit fear of failure—it’s no longer about the task, it’s about what you learn in the process
Couple it with a reward!
This is often framed as, eg, give yourself some chocolate when you do the task. I find this doesn’t work well on me, because it feels arbitrary
I find it more valuable to make the task intrinsically rewarding.
I’ve recently managed to build a good sleep ritual, and keep to a consistent bedtime. And this includes spending half an hour not looking at screens before bed. And this is something I’ve known would be a good idea for ages, but always felt high-cost.
My solution was to get some physical books I’d always meant to read, set my lights to slowly dim, and spend that half hour reading. And this is now something I feel excited about, because I’m making progress through my to read list for the first time in forever!
Looking for the clever hack, the efficient solution that everybody is missing
This is easier said than done, but these often do exist!
For example—you need to learn a complex topic. Can you find a friend, learn half each, and help each other learn the other half?
Alternately, continuing with the same task, but making efficiency the goal.
An excellent post making this point far more eloquently than I can
Creating tight feedback loops
Often a lack of excitement comes from insecurity, and paralysing uncertainty. Tight, regular feedback loops can help address this and reduce the insecurity, by giving it something to ground to
Ask for regular feedback! Run experiments! Make a minimum viable product!
Produce things in as small a unit as possible—if you’re writing a book, write and publish a page a day
I’ve mostly focused on tasks here, but much of these transfer to self-improvement too. But it’s harder, because you start with a problem, not a task. There, the goal is to be creative, try to find an experiment, solution idea, or way to make progress. It doesn’t have to be perfect, any kind of experiment or starting idea will do. This is now a task, and these techniques can be applied!
Next time you notice something unpleasant in your life: a task you’re putting off, a project you don’t want to start or an intractable problem, don’t just try harder at it. Take a step back, and ask yourself “how can I make this something I’d feel excited about”. This is hard, and will require actual effort and creativity. But is possible, and it is absolutely worth it.
I personally like the idea that you can create your own intrinsic motivation!
Perhaps a distillation is that you can build intrinsic motivation in three ways:
Choose more motivating tasks
Approach boring tasks in a more exciting way
Hype yourself up, especially by telling an exciting story about the task
My guess is that skepticism will come from a few caveats:
This seems inauthentic, or else it just shifts more burden on the individual to make intolerable situations feel tolerable. Not only do you have hoops to jump through, you have to like it.
Are you sure that the excitement you feel is as strong and lasting as you claim? Are you sure it’s deriving from the activities you’ve listed? Why do you think these activities would help other people?
Is it better to take time to optimize for excitement, or just to slog through as efficiently as possible and carve out more time to do thinks that you find exciting without having to artificially generate that emotion?
Are you sure that these practices aren’t just part of your normal workflow? Are you discovering something that is new and helpful to you, or just noticing an experience you’ve been having all along?
That’s a good distillation of half of the point I’m making. The other half is that, tasks are more or less intrinsically motivating because of traits they have. You can make guesses at these traits based on your understanding of yourself and past data, and then make future tasks be more like the good traits and less like the bad traits.
I think this is worth emphasising because “create your own intrinsic motivation” feels obviously reasonable to me, but doesn’t feel very actionable. So I was trying to also give a concrete starting point, with some prompts based on my personal experience (where I’d expect some to generalise, some to not)
I think it’s a stable equilibrium to feel like I have a burden to make intolerable situations tolerable, and a stable equilibrium to find it fun to make intolerable situations tolerable. The first equilibrium sucks, the second one is great. But they’re both stable equilibria that it’s hard to escape from. I find I can sometimes pull off jumping to the good one, but not always, and definitely agree that it sucks to end up in the bad one.
I think being in the good equilibrium often happens because I feel a spark of whimsy to make things better and run with it, and the bad equilibrium is when I don’t feel that spark of whimsy and it instead comes from a place of obligation. So I think part of the skill is to notice those whims and nurture them. But I don’t have a great model here.
I’m pretty confident? I find excitement one of the easier emotions to introspect on. And a good chunk of this comes from looking back on my life and thinking about things where I’m really satisfied that they happened, so it feels obviously tied to the activity.
I don’t think it’s at all obvious that these activities would help other people—they were intended more as prompts and to give the flavour of what I was talking about, and I trust people to see what sounds like them and what doesn’t. The important part is noticing the traits that are common in worthwhile activities and the traits that are not. Eg, I’m extraverted and get a lot of joy from meeting cool new people, but that obviously doesn’t generalise.
I feel a bit surprised at your framing of “artificially generate that emotion”. If I can successfully generate excitement, then it doesn’t matter that it’s artificial. If I can’t, then it’s not artificial, it’s just not there.
My logic is that, if I have to do the task anyway and it’ll take a fair amount of time, then it’s much nicer to feel excited when doing it. And, in practice, tasks I find fun often get done faster because I procrastinate less on them, even if I’m a bit less efficient. If you procrastinate less, that one doesn’t obviously generalise though.
I also think that “make the nonsense things you need to do anyway” into something fun is a skill—which is initially high effort, but can become much closer to a reflex (eg, make a checklist of what you need to get done, do it with a friend and joke about it the whole time, etc). And so you’re both investing time for short-term happiness and for long-term happiness, making it a much better trade
I’m a bit confused by this question—it feels like you’re pointing to a dichotomy between “did naturally” and “did artificially”, while I’m arguing more for “nudge yourself towards the things that you expect to work”. These are things I’ve tried over time, common trends I’ve noticed, and decided to double down on. Eg, I know from past experience that I find editing and being a massive perfectionist unpleasant, so for my month of daily blogging I had a rule of “publish a first draft ASAP, no editing”. This is a rule I might have come up with anyway without explicitly thinking through this process, but these thoughts nudged me towards it. And, in hindsight, it’s definitely made the project far better.
Thanks for all the questions, I found it interesting to think through answers!
My overall reaction to your post is that it’s obviously true once you’re in that good stable equilibrium, and that 90% of just about anybody’s challenge with akrasia is in getting there! Of course, probably the answer to the question of how to get to that good place is something like “don’t be depressed and anxious, do enough right things to maintain your emotional health, and have a life that has a manageable level of stress.” A notoriously hard problem...