Stop Waiting for Motivation

Epistemic status: Leaning heavily on the law of equal and opposite advice and flagrantly committing the Typical Mind Fallacy.

There’s a popular idea that getting things done is what happens when you’re sufficiently motivated to get things done. You can see glimmers of it in aphorisms like “Believe you can and you’re halfway there”. Similarly, I often hear from friends who have grand aspirations, but, well they just don’t have the energy they used to, they don’t leap out of their bed in the morning read to tackle their problems, or they no longer have that dawg in them. And so, they seek to remediate the apparent motivation issue: perhaps I’m not getting enough sleep? maybe I’m depressed? might I be eating too much junk food? are my priorities jumbled up? All of these things may be true, but I think they’re often not the core issue.

The issue is that that feeling we call “motivation” is caused by doing stuff. If you hold off on getting started and wait around for the feeling of motivation to strike you, you might find yourself waiting for a very long time. At least for me, I notice myself feeling motivated when:

• The thing I’m working on first starts showing signs of working.
• I get positive feedback from people I admire.
• My work is sufficiently developed that I can make a demo of it and then show it off to my friends and colleagues.
• I run into a challenging sub-problem, and sense that some solutions are better than others.
• I have a prioritized list of useful tasks I can execute. The tasks… they speak to me, they call my name.

Notice that all of these causes of motivation require being in the midst of some effort. The folks in my community love to be very thoughtful about their purpose. What am I fighting for? Why am I fighting for it? Is the way that I’m fighting for it optimal? How could I do better? It can be quite appealing to burn lots of cycles thinking about these questions. Don’t let yourself get stuck in analysis paralysis here. Recall that you are a complex system with known failure modes, and design around them. Accept that there are settings where your in-the-moment self will predictably deviate from what your reflective self wants, and engineer the situation such that you more often end up in the setting where your wants are in alignment. Think carefully about your purpose, but don’t wait for an answer before taking action. Pick up the pen, open your laptop, put your shoes on.