Don't Trust Motivation: Learning The Right Way

Introduction

There’s a tendency to think that successful people have easy time dedicating themselves to the work they do. Their enthusiasm makes one think that they love what they do all the way through, which is far from truth. No doubt, they love their work. They might sometimes be motivated for extended periods, but they too face same problems as any of us: they get lazy, demotivated, and uninspired. What carries them through those problems if not motivation? Discipline and goal-setting. Motivation is just there to give you occasional boosts and make things fun. Moreover, motivation is not just the excitement and cheerfulness, it can vary greatly. In this article I will discuss, based on personal experience and a bit of insight from my background in psychology, why we should stop relying on motivation and make motivation come to us instead.

What Even Is Motivation?

Motivation is generally described as a driving force that compels an individual to do certain actions. That is the part of its definition that is most widely accepted, the rest varies (sometimes greatly) from one field of psychology to another. Since it is a driving force, it is often referred to as drive. What’s important to realize is that motivation is intrinsic in a sense that it derives from the individual. An outer force doesn’t drive you towards action on its own. It can, however, in combination with other factors, influence your motivation – that is, the inner state – so that you are more driven towards a certain behavior while less driven to others.

One key factor of drive or motivation is that it is unconscious. It is not conceived consciously nor is it operating consciously. Often when we engage in activities we are motivated to do, the “why” of what we are doing is not consciously present all the time, usually it comes in hindsight.

Since motivation is not conceived consciously, and it comes into being, is if it were, on its own, consciously and deliberately controlling your motivation might not be the solution when it comes to learning something new that does not give you immediate results to strengthen your motivation.

You Can’t Just Motivate Yourself

Imagine if you could just tell yourself that what you are about to go through will be fun and worth-wile and immediately start believing in it. If we could give ourselves a strong conviction that wouldn’t be shattered by even the toughest adversities, then every person in this world would be successful, wealthy and fit. “New year’s resolution” would not have become a running joke in gyms, which gets crowded in January and gets empty by the end of the same month. You might convince yourself to start something, but not many can follow through after constant challenges that force them out of their comfort zone. In fact, being able to follow your decisions through, especially in the long term, is a virtue of its own. Ask any athlete what’s going through their mind before the end of their toughest workouts, and you’ll realize most of them want to just collapse on the spot. They are not thrilled about the fact that there’s a massive barbell on their back that could crush them if they fail to make the last squat.

The popular pieces of advice about how to motivate yourself are just as useful as the mental health advice for depression and anxiety: “just don’t worry about it!”. Can you just tell yourself not to worry and make it work? Anxiety and depression are unconscious processes. Often we are not even aware why we are anxious or depressed, and it takes a professional to help us sort it out. In this sense, motivation is no different – it is unconscious. You can’t just tell yourself to be motivated and expect it to work. That’s why the famous phrase holds true: trust the process.

Motivation Comes With The Results

It’s when you push through and start seeing results that motivation can finally come. Learning to play a musical instrument is a good example. When picking up an electric guitar, you are not immediately going to play like Marty Friedman on Megadeth’s records. What helps you get through the pain in your fingers and frustration from mistakes? Mostly persistence. This persistence in turn is rewarded by small gradual results and that’s when you get motivated to do more. Your chords sound clearer, a bit more consistent and on tempo and this starts to feel exciting. You are getting rewarded for your hard work and now that you see it’s more or less achievable, you are willing to try harder. A basic operant conditioning in action: You are rewarded for taking a certain action, and now it is associated with the pleasant outcome – a reward of playing the guitar well! And now you are actively striving to play it more, to keep improving yourself and enjoying it even more. This, however, is not a consistent cycle. It breaks when you encounter bigger challenges. “Sure, I can play some licks, but how can I ever play the solo from Tornado of Souls?”. What carries you through those challenges? Just like it did when you first started out, without clear results at the initial stages, it’s the trust in the process and persistence.

There were times in my career as a web developer (and I am sure there will be more in the future) when I have said to myself and my family that I hate programming and hate my job. Now, I was perfectly aware that I didn’t hate programming when I worked on my own fun projects, but at work and especially in difficult situations I have thought that maybe this work is not for me. Fast-forward a few months, and I’ve been repeatedly saying to friends and strangers how much I love my job, because this time I found even better opportunities and engaging challenges. This wouldn’t be the case had I given up when things got too difficult and unpleasant.

My point is, that sometimes the results refuse to show themselves and if it is the biggest part of what motivates us, then the best thing we can do, is to force them into being by persevering. The great thing about this is that once we do overcome the challenge, we are ready to go through even greater trials. It’s not just rainbows and butterflies when it comes to motivation.

Motivation Is Not Just Excitement

Motivation is usually associated with positive feelings, but its not just positive feelings that drive you towards certain actions. When you are scared of an aggressive dog, you are not motivated by the excitement and love for running, when you try to get away from it: it’s the fear (the motivation to avoid danger) that drives you. Even two people doing the same thing can have different motivations. Not only that, a single individual’s motivation towards certain actions can also change in time.

Gordon Allport has formulated an interesting notion called “Functional Autonomy”.

A general principle of motivation stating that during the performance of purposeful, goal-oriented behavior, various derivative drives emerge as independent units from the original drive that inspired the behavior. For example, studying motivated by the desire to obtain high grades may be gradually replaced by the desire for (and therefore pursuit of) knowledge for its own sake.

In other words, at one point a student might be motivated to study because of the dread of failing exams, but at some point in the future he might be motivated to study (with great joy, even) not because he wants to get good grades, but because he has thirst for knowledge – studying itself becomes the reward.

Here we see two different forms of motivation. It’s not just you are excited to get something done, but you might be motivated because you are scared. On the other hand, you might be motivated to do the exact same thing because you just love doing it.

What drives you towards your goal doesn’t just have to be love and excitement. Within reason, any kind of motivation is valid, sometimes even spite. When I was a student majoring in psychology, I read Dimitri Uznadze’s (the great Georgian psychologist) critique of Sigmund Freud (who to this day I admire greatly) and his notion of the unconscious. This fired me up so much that I wanted to get to know Uznadze’s work just so I could “discredit” it and prove the superiority of psychoanalysis. After working through his major books and papers (at times with great pain), by my lonesome or with help from my professors and peers, I found out that his work was rather interesting and convincing. My spite for Uznadze slowly started to turn into amazement and soon into admiration. By that time I had already worked though the major part of his research and theory. Not only that, I have also taken time to write a (more or less) extensive article about his theory of Set and even publish a video essay based on the same article. All this to actively promote this great field of experimental psychology that now I think deserves far more attention. So from learning Uznadze’s work out of spite, to now learning it out of interest and excitement.

My personal example is just another case of “functional autonomy” at work. The point is, that what motivates you can change, so just relying on feeling excited when doing something is certainly not the key to success.

We established that telling yourself to get motivated and excited is often a lost cause, so here I propose a better approach: take a leap of faith, be patient and persistent for a while, because at some point the “why” for what you are doing might change for the better, but it will not happen if you let the challenges stop you.

Leap of Faith and Discipline

The underlying idea of this article at this point is obvious, and can be summed up well by Nike’s extremely poor cliché: “Just do it!”, although I would add to this: “And keep doing it!”, because it’s easy to start, but virtuous to keep going. This is an incredibly human feat. No animal in their right mind would conduct a behavior that brings no reward, or at least doesn’t avert them from danger. But humans have an ability to see their act as means to a long-term end. So instead of seeking immediate gratification, they work for the “greater good”. Dimitri Uznadze (which I have already mentioned) has distinguished “labour” and “consumption” as two different forms of behavior. The latter serves immediate gratification: You are hungry - you seek food, you are scared - you flee. The former implies the behavior that brings no immediate results, but something valuable in the long term, not just for the individual, but perhaps even the whole collective. This is also referred to as “deliberate behavior”, which is a function of the higher level of psychic activity.

In conclusion, be deliberate when learning something new and don’t rely on uncontrollable unconscious processes, instead just let them help you when they are of help, but when they are not – use discipline. Discipline itself could use a whole article to explain, but its general idea is enough to get the point across. Discipline is an ability to do repetitive tasks without the need for motivation and gratification. You simply get things done. Once you can do that, motivation and joy become great bonuses.