00:00 Summer break has ended for many of us and you are back at work or at school and have many goals you want to accomplish. This might be a time of motivational struggle. You find yourself having trouble doing your work, exercising and eating healthily, so you blame yourself for not having more willpower or for procrastinating too much.
00:22 According to behavioral science, you can stop worrying about your willpower and quit calling yourself “procrastinator.” To stay motivated, you need to change your circumstances and outlook, not your personality.
00:36 I'm Ayelet Fishback, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago. I've been studying what it takes to be successful in goal pursuit for over 20 years as an academic, a parent and an immigrant. I've also struggled with motivation myself. Let me offer a few interventions that can increase your productivity at work, school and beyond.
01:00 When monitoring progress, looking back is often the way to move forward. For any goal, you can look back at what you have achieved, as well as forward at what is still left to do. When Minjung Koo and I surveyed people standing in a long line for an amusement park ride in South Korea, we found that when they looked back and saw how far they'd come, they were more motivated to wait. Back at the University of Chicago, when uncommitted students look back at the materials that they have already covered for a final exam, their motivation to keep studying increased. Beware of long middles. We call it the middle problem. We are highly motivated at the beginning, we want to reach our goal and we want to do it right. Over time, our motivation declines as we lose steam. To the extent that our goal has a clear end point, as in the case of graduating with a diploma, our motivation will pick up again toward the end.
02:01 In one experiment, Rima Touré-Tillery and I found that people literally cut corners in the middle of a project. We handed our participants a pair of scissors and asked them to cut out several identical shapes with many corners. They cut through more corners in the middle of the task. This solution? Keep middles short. A weekly healthy eating goal is better than a monthly eating healthy goal as it offers fewer days to cheat on your diet.
02:34 It's hard to learn from feedback, especially negative one. Emotionally, failure bruises the ego. We tune out, missing the information feedback offers. Cognitively, people also struggle. The information in negative feedback is less direct than the information in positive feedback. Whereas success points us to a winning strategy, from failure, people need to infer what not to do. To increase learning from negative feedback, try giving advice to others who might be struggling with a similar problem. Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Angela Duckworth and I found that when students, job seekers and overweight individuals gave others advice on how to succeed in studying, finding a job and eating healthily, they were more motivated to follow through.
03:27 Support intrinsic motivation. You're intrinsically motivated when you pursue an activity that feels like an end in itself. You do something for the sake of doing it. If you wish you had a few more minutes to finish your walk by the end of the day, you're intrinsically motivated. If you can't wait to go home, you aren't. To increase intrinsic motivation, start with selecting activities that you enjoy pursuing. A workout that you actually enjoy is more likely to become part of your routine. Often people choose the wrong activity. In an experiment, Kaitlin Woolley and I asked people to choose between listening to the song “Hey Jude” by the Beatles and listening to a loud alarm. Seems like an obvious choice, right? But the majority of the people chose the alarm because it paid more. Later, these people regretted their choice.
04:26 Whether you look back, cut the middle, give advice, support intrinsic motivation, keep in mind, success does not require changing yourself. To stop procrastinating, modify your situation and outlook.
WARNING! The inspiration in this document may be contagious. I hope you caught it.