11
You Can Master Your Own Motivation

If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.

STEVE JOBS

My parents had me start piano lessons when I was five. I really didn’t enjoy playing very much until about the ninth grade. Suddenly I wasn’t just a piano player. I was a budding rock-and-roll keyboardist. That made all the difference in terms of my motivation.

About this same time I took up guitar. I started with classical guitar and then, of course, began playing electric guitar. I started a band with some high school friends. I had a good feel for the instrument, but I had scales and chords to learn, songs to memorize, and a tone to mesh with other musicians. At first we achieved a sound reminiscent of brawling alley cats. But we got better. I loved Crosby, Stills, Nash, and (sometimes) Young, so I also kept playing acoustic guitar. Then I joined the stage band when I went to college and learned to play bass.

During all of this I experienced moments of real frustration. Sometimes I wanted to quit and find something easier. I’m glad I didn’t. Not only did I develop my skills, but sticking with it taught me something essential about achievement. At first I held on to my hope of becoming a rock god. Then playing became meaningful all by itself. I still play today.

We’ve all seen talented, smart, and well-trained people bottom out and quit on their dreams. It takes something more to achieve our goals. Call it perseverance, persistence, or grit—it’s the willingness to keep going even when the odds are bad and our enthusiasm has waned. Think of the developers of virtual reality technology, tablet computers, or ebooks. After initial spikes of interest, all of these innovations faded as failures. Yet today they are all going concerns—including virtual reality—because people kept working, tinkering, and improving them. The lines of preparation and opportunity finally merged, and that can happen for us too if we stay in the game.

Next to finding your why, mastering your motivation is key for developing the necessary persistence to make it through the messy middle. I want to share four key ways to do so: finding the right reward, being realistic about the commitment, gamifying the process, and measuring your gains.

Internalize the Reward

In the last chapter I talked about the superiority of intrinsic motivators. External motivators can work, but they’re usually less effective in the long run, especially if we lose interest in the reward, get demotivated, and slack off before we’re even aware. Worse, if those external rewards are someone else’s idea—say, a spouse or a boss—we can become resentful of the reward if we’re not careful.

Intrinsic rewards help us avoid that danger because we connect personally and emotionally with them. You might say they’re self-justifying. They become an end in and of themselves, even part of our identity. I want to push that thought further by exploring how we can harness their self-perpetuating power.

Studies by Ayelet Fishbach and Kaitlin Woolley of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business show that we tend to value an experience more when we’re in the middle of doing it than when we’re anticipating it on the front end or remembering it after the fact. Think about challenging activities like exercising, writing, or practicing a musical instrument. The joy comes from doing them. These findings are important, because action itself can be its own reward, and the gains begin when we begin.1

Over time, we can train ourselves to anticipate the rewards as we internalize the benefits. If we start with a suitable intrinsic reward, such as the way our new behavior makes us feel, we will naturally begin looking forward to it. This moves the reward from mere incentive to a potent source of energy and drive.2 It’s like the difference between take your medicine and have another scoop of your favorite ice cream. I experience this with running. I feel better once I’ve run. When I first started running that was enough to get me going. But having run for so long, I now look forward to that feeling. I anticipate it, and that gets me fired up before I lace up.

Mastery of an action, like my guitar playing, eventually makes it self-perpetuating. “Studies of expert performers tell us that once you have practiced for a while and can see the results,” explain Florida State University psychologist Anders Ericsson and science writer Robert Pool, “the skill itself can become part of your motivation. You take pride in what you do, you get pleasure from your friends’ compliments, and your sense of identity changes.” The activity is fully internalized and has become its own reward. You’re now a guitarist, a runner, or whatever, and maintaining the activity begins to “feel more like an investment than an expense.”3

It’s worth it, but depending on the difficulty of the goal-related activity, it might take awhile.

Be Realistic about the Commitment

Running is automatic for me these days. I hardly have to think about doing it. But that wasn’t always the case. It used to require a lot of grit and determination. For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard it takes twenty-one days to form a new habit, thirty days at the most. If you can just marshal your willpower for three or four weeks, bingo! You’ve got it made. But that sure wasn’t true for my running. It took far more than twenty-one days. I’m sure anyone struggling to form a new habit can identify. We all know there’s got to be more to the story.

It turns out the twenty-one day “rule” is a myth with practically no scientific basis. If we’re trying to do something simple and easy, it might work. But complex or challenging habits take a lot longer. Researchers at University College London tracked people attempting to form different types of new habits. Instead of three or four weeks, they found it took an average of sixty-six days for new habits to become automatic—more than three times the popular duration. And some activities, they said, would be more like 250 days!4

It’s easy to lose your why when a goal runs into overtime. It might take an additional effort to get over the hump with your habit goals. Thankfully, there are a couple effective workarounds. For instance, we can leverage the motivation of an achievement goal to keep us going on a difficult habit goal by matching relevant achievements and habits. Running six days a week might not be your thing. But if you’re emotionally connected to an achievement goal of, say, losing twenty pounds by August 1, you can leverage that motivation to help you get up early and hit the pavement. If it helps, think of habits, not as ends unto themselves, but as serving larger achievements. The habit essentially serves as the next step in reaching your achievement goal. It’s easier to maintain the effort over time because your eye is on the bigger prize.

Chains and Games

Another trick is tracking streaks. I’ve included a tool to do that in the sample goal templates at the back. But this could be as simple as a check mark on your calendar. Jerry Seinfeld famously used this system to build his writing habit. The idea was to write a joke every day and mark the calendar every day you write. “After a few days you’ll have a chain,” he explained. “Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”5 You can use your journal or set a recurring task in your task-management system to accomplish the same thing. However you track the streak, the chain system can work for just about any habit.

Building a habit takes time, and it’s probably longer than you assume. Maintaining a calendar chain can help you sustain the effort until the habit is firmly installed.

You can set the chain to any target: miles run per day, sales calls per week, date nights with your spouse per month. Writers often use daily word-count targets. The humorist Fran Lebowitz was once window shopping at Sotheby’s. She was there to see furniture, but someone who knew her asked if she’d like to see an original Mark Twain manuscript. What writer wouldn’t? As they looked over the pages, the man pointed out a curiosity. Twain had written little numbers in the margins. “We just don’t know what those are,” the man admitted. As a writer, Lebowitz did. “I happen not to be a Twain scholar, but I happen to be a scholar of little numbers written all over the place,” she said. “He was counting the words.”

“That’s ridiculous!” the man said.

“I bet you anything,” Lebowitz said. “Count.” So they did—and she was right.

“Twain must’ve been paid by the word,” the man guessed, but Lebowitz didn’t think so.

“It may have nothing to do with being paid by the word,” she said. “Twain might have told himself he had to write this many words each day and he would wonder, Am I there yet? Like a little kid in the back of a car—are we there yet?”6 It’s easy to think of works like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in their entirety. But they started out as big, daunting dreams that became reality one day of writing after another and keeping track along the way.

Another version of tracking is gamifying the activity. A couple years ago I wanted to build the habit of regular hydration throughout the day. I used an iPhone app called Plant Nanny. I was entrusted with a digital plant, and every time I drank a glass of water and logged it in the app, the plant responded as if it had been watered. But if I failed to drink and log my water on schedule, the plant would get sick and eventually die. It sounds silly, but I was intent on keeping my plant alive. The game made it fun to keep a ninety-day streak going. Now the habit is internalized and staying hydrated is its own reward. I have more energy. My thinking is better, my focus sharper. Gamifying the activity made it fun and helped me maintain the streak long enough to install the habit.

Measure the Gain

When we set big, challenging goals, it’s easy to see how far we have to go and lose enthusiasm. We can start criticizing ourselves and get dispirited. If your goal is to write a book, pay off your mortgage, build up your retirement, whatever, it can be daunting to look up and realize how far you still have to go. That’s The Gap™. Something I learned from Dan Sullivan has helped me rethink this problem. Dan talks about measuring the gain, not the gap.

So take a minute and look at the gain. See how far you’ve already come and let your progress inspire your perseverance. This is another reason setting milestones is helpful. Not only do they help break up the big goal into manageable chunks, they give us something to measure—forward or backward. By measuring the gains we’ll not only cultivate persistence, we’ll also get a sense of our momentum.

One way to sustain that momentum is to measure the gain in real time. How? In The 4 Disciplines of Execution, authors Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling differentiate lead and lag measures.7 Lag measures look backward to determine whether you’ve met a goal. Think deadlines, finish lines, or targets. For instance, did you turn in your graduate thesis on schedule or not? Did you complete the 10K or not? Did you reach your sales goal or not? Lag measures are an excellent way to measure achievement goals because they’re tied to endpoints. But they’re one-offs—and they’re usually a long way off. It’s hard to gain a sense of momentum that way.

Lead measures work differently. Instead of looking backward, they look forward. They measure the activity that influences whether you will hit your target. For instance, if hitting your sales goal is your lag measure, then making a certain number of sales calls each week could be the lead measure. Why? Because those activities enable you to achieve your sales goal. By focusing on the right measurements, we can maintain and even accelerate our progress toward our goals.

Incremental Wins

Success is about incremental change, but we live in an instant-gratification culture where we just don’t want to wait. When we take control of our motivation, however, we can stay in the game long enough to see how that incremental change adds up to major achievements. And we can do ourselves yet another favor when we pair up with our peers to achieve our goals. I’ll cover that next.