How do you find motivation? How do you find motivation in a year like 2020? It’s challenging enough to Get Things Done, so how do you find motivation to learn new skills?
In Ultralearning, Scott Young advises us to answer the question, ‘Why?’
Why am I learning this?
Young divides projects into two types of motivation:
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Instrumental
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Intrinsic
According to Young, “Instrumental learning projects are those you’re learning with the purpose of achieving a different, nonlearning result”. These projects are primarily for the benefit of your career. This is in contrast to intrinsic projects where “you’re learning the subject for its own sake, not as a means to some other outcome.” He offers a word of advice:
If you’re pursuing a project for mostly instrumental reasons, it’s often a good idea to do an additional step of research: determining whether learning the skill or topic in question will actually help you achieve your goal.
I don’t know about you, but I find it challenging to maintain motivation for instrumental purposes.
Why?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi provides an answer in Flow:
There is no question that to survive, and especially to survive in a complex society, it is necessary to work for external goals and to postpone immediate gratifications. But a person does not have to be turned into a puppet jerked about by social controls. The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one’s own powers. This is not to say that we should abandon every goal endorsed by society; rather, it means that, in addition to or instead of the goals others use to bribe us with, we develop a set of our own.
Steve McConnell maps this to a real-world object (see what I did there) in Code Complete:
Your employer can’t force you to be a good programmer; a lot of times your employer isn’t even in a position to judge whether you’re good. If you want to be great, you’re responsible for making yourself great. It’s a matter of your personal character.
And Dave and Andy reiterate this point in The Pragmatic Programmer:
It’s your life. You own it. You run it. You create it.
They continue:
You are building the future, for yourselves and for your descendants. Your duty is to make it a future that we’d all want to inhabit. Recognize when you’re doing something against this ideal, and have the courage to say ‘no’! Envision the future we could have, and have the courage to create it. Build castles in the air every day.
How Do You Find Motivation?
In Drive, Daniel Pink defines two personas that characterize intrinsic and extrinsic behaviors:
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Type X, which is “…fueled more by extrinsic desires than intrinsic ones. It concerns itself less with the inherent satisfaction of an activity and more with the external rewards to which the activity leads.”
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Type I, which is “…fueled more by intrinsic desires than extrinsic ones. It concerns itself less with the external rewards to which an activity leads and more with the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself.”
Pink adds further distinctions:
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Type I behavior is made, not born.
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Type I’s almost always outperform Type X’s in the long run.
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Type I behavior does not disdain money or recognition.
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Type I behavior is a renewable resource.
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Type I behavior promotes greater physical and mental well-being.
How does one become a Type I?
According to Pink, there are three “nutrients” required for self-directed growth:
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Autonomy, or acting with choice.
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Mastery, or flow, where the activity itself is its own reward.
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Purpose, because “…the most deeply motivated people—not to mention those who are most productive and satisfied—hitch their desires to a cause larger than themselves.”
How Do We Stay Motivated?
In Ultralearning, Scott Young defines three problems that prevent us from focusing:
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Failing to start to focus (AKA procrastination)
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Failing to sustain focus (AKA getting distracted). Young identifies three sources that cause distractions:
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Your environment
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Your task
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Your mind
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Failing to create the right kind of focus
How Do We Start to Focus?
According to Barbara Oakley, “We procrastinate about things that make us feel uncomfortable.”
How do we overcome this discomfort?
In A Mind for Numbers, Oakley offers strategies for preventing procrastination. The first is to harness your willpower:
Unlike procrastination, which is easy to fall into, willpower is hard to come by because it uses a lot of neural resources. This means that the last thing you want to do in tackling procrastination is to go around spraying willpower on it like its cheap air freshers. You shouldn’t waste willpower on procrastination except when absolutely necessary!
We can harness our willpower by establishing a routine. If you are like most people and your willpower is strongest first thing in the morning, carve out time for study.
How Do We Sustain Focus?
A second strategy proposed by Oakley is to focus on process over product:
If you find yourself avoiding certain tasks because they make you uncomfortable, there is a great way to reframe things: Learn to focus on process, not product. The product is what triggers the pain that causes you to procrastinate. Instead, you need to focus on the process, the small chunks of time you need over days or weeks.
We can focus on process over product by establishing a routine. Build the habit of study.
How Do We Create the Right Kind of Focus?
In Drive, Pink outlines Nine Strategies for Awakening Your Motivation:
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Give Yourself a “Flow Test”: For a day, or a week, set random alarms on your phone to prompt you to assess your engagement in the activity at hand. Keep score and at the end of your testing period, ask yourself: “How might you increase the number of optimal experiences and reduce the moments when you felt disengaged or distracted?”
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First, Ask A Big Question…: That big question is, “What’s your sentence?” In one sentence, how would you summarize the legacy you want to leave? If you sentence runs on, you are spreading yourself too thin (i.e: distracted).
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… Then Keep Asking A Small Question: That smaller question is, “Was I better today than yesterday?” Look for incremental gains. Never stop improving!
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Take a Sagmeister: Stefan Sagmeister is a designer who takes a sabbatical every seven years to travel and pursue interests not directly related to his work. The break allows him to reset and return to work reinvigorated. You may not be able to take a year off every seven, but can you take one day per week?
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Give Yourself a Performance Review: The standard corporate performance review occurs every six months. The feedback delivered in these sessions is usually not useful by the time it is received. So give yourself a performance review on a more frequent schedule. Assess where you are succeeding and where you need to improve, then act on it.
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Get Unstuck by Going Oblique: Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt developed a deck of cards they used to unblock their creativity. When they felt stuck, they would draw a card and follow the instructions on it, such as “State the problem in words as clearly as possible.” and “Try faking it!”
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Move Five Steps Closer to Mastery: How do you gain expertise? Practice makes practice.
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Take a page from Webber and a Card From Your Pocket: Fast Company’s Alan Webber developed a strategy to help him focus. On a 3x5 card, answer the question, “What gets you up in the morning?” And on the back of the card, answer the question, “What keeps you up at night?” If the two answers are not in alignment, it’s a sign that you need to change something.
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Create Your Own Motivational Poster: Like the one at the top of this post!
In Code Complete, Steve McConnell offers a list of strategies for developers:
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Build your awareness of the development process: “If you’re not learning, you’re turning into a dinosaur!”
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Experiment: “One key to effective programming is learning to make mistakes quickly, learning from them each time. Making a mistake is no sin. Failing to learn from a mistake is.”
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Read about problem solving: “Problem solving is the core activity in building computer software.” Thanks for reading!
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Analyze and plan before you act
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Learn about successful projects: “…find code written by superior programmers and read it. Ask to look at the code of programmers you respect. Ask to look at the code of programmers you don’t. Compare their code, and compare their code to your own. What are the differences? Why are they different? Which way is better? Why?”
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Read!: RTFM! “Documentation contains the keys to the castle, and it’s worth spending time reading it.”
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Read other books and periodicals: “A little reading goes a long way toward professional advancement.”
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Affiliate with other professionals: “Find other people who care about sharpening their software-development skills. Attend a conference, join a local user group, or participate in an online discussion group.”
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Make a commitment to professional development: “Good programmers constantly look for ways to become better.”
Notice he recommends a lot of reading!
Finding Motivation to Learn New Skills
How do you find motivation to learn new skills? Ask yourself ‘Why?’ Does the answer lead to autonomy, mastery, and purpose?