PR Newswire posted an article yesterday called “Research Shows Temptation More Powerful Than Individuals Realize; Personal Restraints Often Overpowered by Impulse” about recent psychological research by Loran Nordgren. That research makes a very useful point: on average, we tend to overestimate how much self-control we have, so we tend to put ourselves in tempting situations more often than is ideal for us. This is an example of an effect Daniel Gilbert describes in his book Stumbling on Happiness, that when we are in one mood, it’s very difficult for us to imagine how we would make decisions in a different mood–and that we generally don’t recognize this is so. When we’re sad, it feels as though everything will suck forever, for instance. In the same way, Nordgren’s experiments support the idea that when we’re calm, we don’t do a good job of predicting how we’ll act if things get crazy (for instance, if someone introduces a big slice of chocolate cake into the picture).

Unfortunately, this piece makes the same mistake that is often made when people talk about running out of willpower: they assume that we should avoid all tempting situations no matter what. In reality, if we always avoid temptation, we miss our opportunities to exercise and strengthen our willpower. We just don’t want to go in the other direction either, and overwhelm ourselves past the point where we still have willpower left.

I’ve been delving recently into how people make life changes in many different spheres, for instance in diet, work habits, organizational habits, relationships … and so I’ve begun listening to an audiobook called Stop Clutter From Stealing Your Life by a man named Mike Nelson. I’m not sure I can recommend it unreservedly (even apart from having not finished it), because some of it sounds a lot like an infomercial, but Nelson really does seem to get to some very meaningful information.

The most interesting thing Nelson, formerly a terrible clutterer himself, has brought to my attention so far is the difference between attacking the problem of clutter organizationally versus attacking it emotionally. As he describes it, clutterers will learn new organizational techniques and yet make no progress with their clutter because they’re running into emotional obstacles that have to be dealt with first. If a person is too afraid to tackle their clutter problem, it doesn’t really matter how many great techniques they have for cleaning out their closets.

So it can be useful, when we look at things that we’re not doing but want to be doing, to figure out whether our obstacles are emotional ones (like being afraid of what will happen if we start the task, or ashamed that we haven’t done it already), mental (like telling ourselves we’re doomed to failure without even trying), organizational (like not knowing where the time will come from to get the job done), or some mixture.

This is not to say that there aren’t external obstacles too, like not having the resources needed or having others who oppose us, but in terms of self-motivation, generally speaking all obstacles wind up being emotional, mental, or organizational.

And in an important sense, all three kinds of self-motivation obstacles are really mental obstacles, in that they can be tackled using cognitive approaches–that is, by changing our thinking. But that’s a topic for another time. For today, it’s worth just asking ourselves: what’s really standing in my way? To get past this obstacle, do I need support from a friend? Help working out fear or anger or guilt? More confidence? A better way to think about things? Time? Better planning? Once we know what kinds of obstacles we face, we can understand better how to overcome them.

Photo by code poet

Writing–especially writing and trying to sell large projects, like novels–is a clear-cut example of an area where self-motivation is essential. While this post is written especially for writers, the techniques I’ll talk about can be applied to practically any kind of project where self-motivation is needed.

Motivating ourselves to write can be hard: blank pages stare at us implacably, or we get 75,000 words into a novel and then realize there’s a basic flaw that will require a huge rewrite, or we’ll get dozens of rejection letters for every acceptance.

Writers generally need enthusiasm for a story to do a really good job of writing it, need to sustain their involvement in a project for months or often years, and need to be able to face rejection after rejection without giving up. Even very good writers typically see many rejections before they sell their work (Stephen King, when he started his career, put a big nail in his wall and spiked each of his rejection letters on there as he went. Fortunately, it turned out well for him in the end, although he collected hundreds of rejection letters before he really got off the ground). Self-motivation is tough in this kind of environment. Here are some tools for maximizing it. These notes can be useful to any writer, but they’re mainly written with fiction in mind.

Pick Your Project Very Carefully
A certain kind of writer tends to write whatever they’re most passionate about, regardless of length, genre, marketability, and so on. Another kind of writer tends to write whatever seems to be the most salable, whatever the market seems to be crying out for. A third kind of writer tends to follow some particular pattern dictated by their writing practices, being propelled neither by passion nor by saleability but by process. All of these approaches have their good points, and each can have real drawbacks under certain circumstances. The approach I would suggest is different from all of these: it’s to put extra effort into brainstorming, then making a careful selection from the possibilities.

What I mean by this is that when it’s time to start a new project–say the last project is finished, or has been scrapped, or needs to sit in a drawer for a while before you can get any perspective on it, or this is your first novel–instead of looking for an idea for a new project, you look for a lot of ideas for new projects, using a variety of methods to come up with them. Review ideas you’ve jotted down or the ones that have been in your head. Look at some of your favorite books and see what you like most about them. Sit down and brainstorm at least two or three ideas out of the blue.

But why go to all this trouble when you have an idea you already know you’re burning to write, or that you think will sell well? Because our first ideas are often not our best ones, and a little time spent picking the right goal can save a huge amount of time working on the wrong one. It’s well worth slaving away at this brainstorming phase for a few hours even if at the end of it you opt for the idea you were interested in in the first place, if for no other reason than to understand deeply and clearly exactly why that idea is the best one for you to work on. And many times careful consideration of possibilities will yield a much better idea than anything that would have come up on its own.

Then comes the choosing. Passion counts for a lot: it’s very difficult to make a reader passionate about a book that the writer wasn’t passionate about when it was written. But other factors should probably figure in too, unless you’re only writing for yourself. Marketability? If you really want to sell your work, it would be ill-advised to ignore this unless you’re of the opinion that it’s impossible to tell what will sell. So writing a vampire novel because you love writing about vampires isn’t a bad idea, and writing a vampire novel because they’re in demand (let’s suppose) can work out well, but by far the best reason to write a vampire novel is that you’re passionate about it and someone’s clamoring to buy that kind of thing.

This applies to any decision: we often try to make choices based on one overwhelming factor, like buying something because it’s the cheapest or because we’re enchanted with it. But any of our priorities we put aside when making an important decision will come back to haunt us later. If the cheapest item breaks long before the more expensive version would have, or if the thing we’re enchanted costs so much that we end up short on the rent …

But what does choosing well have to do with self-motivation? There are two key things: first, it’s not that helpful to motivate ourselves toward a goal we don’t actually want to reach. While even working toward a wrong goal can be educational, the same can be said of working toward the right goal, and the right goal has the additional benefit of paying off, which is an educational experience in itself.

Second, if we are working toward a wrong goal, sooner or later we will realize it isn’t something we really want to achieve (or we’ll achieve it, and the expected payoff will never materialize), and then we’ll be back to zero, with the sense that work gets us nowhere.

Always Keep In Mind What Excites You
Whatever gets you excited about writing a book is worth thinking about regularly. If you find your writing has turned into drudgery and you’re just trying to slog through until the end, you’ll have a lot of trouble motivating yourself and may not produce particularly great writing either (though there can be exceptions to that last part). If you hit this point, one approach that can propel you forward is to ask yourself “What would really get me excited about this project right now that I’m not already doing?” Kill an important supporting character, cause a disaster, give the protagonist what they’ve been striving for and see them realize that it isn’t their real goal at all, add a new character who churns things up … this is another case where more excitement for the writer tends to mean more excitement for the reader. All of this has to be kept in balance with your vision for the story, but if you can’t think of anything that keeps you excited about the writing and is consistent with your vision, maybe it’s time to rethink the vision.

The exception I know of in which drudgery can yield good writing is when you know your story much better than your reader, and so what feels like old hat to you is new and fresh for the reader.

If You Stop Feeling Motivated, Retrace Your Steps
Here’s a question that can be handy in projects that seem to have lost their drive: where was my motivation when I last saw it? Sometimes feeling like you’ve lost your enthusiasm means that you took a wrong turn somewhere. Maybe your interest in the story was being kept up by a minor character who according to your outline (if you use outlines) needed to leave the story a little while ago, but the story hasn’t interested you as much since. If so, it might be worth rethinking that decision. Maybe a character did something that violates who you were hoping for them to be, or made a choice to serve the plot instead of doing what they would really want to do if left to their own devices. Maybe you’re writing a section of the book that isn’t really needed.

Regardless, always be ready to take advantage of this great advantage of writing, that you can make a complete mess of something, but then go back and do it better and get full credit as though you had written it perfectly the first time. There’s a post on this subject on my writing blog: Avoiding Your Story

Use Support, Encouragement, and Deadlines
One of the best motivators for a project is to have a real deadline, with a real person is waiting to see your results. This can be accomplished through joining an active writer’s group, blogging about your writing and including planned deadlines, getting one or more writing buddies and reading each others’ work, signing up for a writer’s workshop for which you’ll need something to be completed by a given date, working on a project for a contest or market that has a firm deadline, or getting truly interested friends or family members to read your writing as you go. It’s powerfully motivating to realize that someone is waiting breathlessly for the next chapter of your book.

If you use this last approach, by the way, you may want to ask the person to write down any feedback they have, but only to give that feedback to you right away if it’s absolutely crucial. The rest can be collected at the end so you can consider it for the second draft. Getting constant feedback can cause constantly reworking what you have, which … well, let’s just make that subject a section to itself.

Don’t Spend All Your Time Reworking
Yes, often writing can be improved by editing or rewriting, but only to a certain point. After a while, more work on the same project will begin to suck the life out of it. Make your story as good as you can make it at the moment, then send it out without spelling errors or major problems. You can set it aside and revisit it once you have perspective, or rewrite it after a rejection if you have a major new insight about it, but don’t just keep fiddling with it it’s perfect: nothing ever is, to the best of my knowledge.

Writer’s Block Is Just Fear of Writing Something That Isn’t Good Enough
On my writing blog I have a lengthy post about writer’s block, which I’ll summarize here as it applies to motivation: it’s always possible to write something, even if that something turns out to be meandering gibberish. So writer’s block doesn’t prevent a person from writing: it makes them hesitant because they might write something bad. Since everyone writes something bad sometimes, this isn’t as dire a situation as it may feel like at the time. Screwing up is an appropriate thing to worry about with surgery or disarming bombs, but it usually just gets in the way to fret about it with something like writing. Remember, you can always fix it in the next pass, and sometimes bad writing ends up being an exploratory draft (a great term I first heard from Orson Scott Card) that will reveal exactly what you need to do to write the really great draft you’re going to put together next.

Don’t Get Too Attached
It’s hard sometimes to look at something you’ve put a lot of work into and decide to scrap it, whether it’s plans for a new business venture that isn’t going to work out, a relationship that turns out to be between the wrong two people, or a brilliant passage in a novel that doesn’t belong there. When you’re faced with these problems, take a step back and ask yourself what will really give you the best result in the long run, then keep the thing or remove it based on that choice (and if applicable, whatever responsibilities you may have taken on).

This doesn’t quite add up to “kill your darlings,” as writers are often urged to do, or as Samuel Johnson put it “wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” That’s overstating it. Some things you do that you love will just not fit in the project you’re working on, and it’s important to focus on making that project as good as it can be instead of on justifying all the great things you did along the way. Doing great things is its own justification, and it tends to be instructive as well, whether or not they work out in the end. Fortunately, contrary to Johnson’s point, sometimes great passages are doing exactly what they’re supposed to and ought to be left in.

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There’s more I could say on this subject, but I’ve covered the main recommendations I set out to cover, and future posts will have more. In the meantime, how do these recommendations work for you? And writers, what particular self-motivation issues do you run into in your writing?

Writers group photo by ShellyS.
Writing desk photo byBright Meadow

I came across an interesting post today on a blog by Ross Hudgens, which talks about managing his immediate environment to aid his willpower in losing weight: for instance, he takes only a set amount of cash with him when he goes out to bars, leaving his ATM and credit cards at home, making it very difficult to go out and binge eat. He also keeps his cupboards bare of junk food so that unhealthy snacking requires a separate trip to the store. (There are other interesting posts on Hudgens’ blog, although I can’t recommend all of them. While Hudgens turns up a number of good ideas, I think some are more useful than others.)

Modifying our immediate environment can be a useful tactic: it not only helps support good decisions in the moment, but helps foster habits and expectations of good decision-making. However, I think Hudgens goes too far in referring to these strategies as willpower itself: it seems to me that unlike “self-control,” “willpower” refers solely to our decision-making mindset, not to the limitations of our environments (even if we set up those limitations ourselves). In other words, not having the opportunity to easily do something you’d rather not do is not the same as deciding to do it despite having the opportunity.

And I think there are costs to this kind of approach, just as there are costs to any kind of external approach to self-motivation: depending on external factors can cause our success in moving toward our goals to vary wildly when externals change–for example, someone interested in weight loss who is depending on not having junk food available may have little or no self-control in a situation like a party where junk food has been set out. And just as successes can add up and boost mood and confidence (one of the benefits of setting up our environments), failures of the kind I just described can quickly erode confidence and enthusiasm.

Fortunately, some kinds of external modifications can help both with immediate behavior and with long-term attitude, for instance when a person helps encourage progress on a project by making the work environment for that project more inviting. Over time, this can lead to more pleasant and attractive ideas about working on that project and about applying oneself in general. In short, controlling the external environment can be a positive factor and is usually worth some effort, but depending on that over other approaches sidestesp the real issue, that of changing our mindset.

Photo by smallestbones.

Not everyone has an elephant lurking in the downstairs closet, a brachiosaurus in the garage … but a lot of us do. And by this I of course don’t actually mean elephants or dinosaurs, but projects. Big projects. Big, ugly, scary projects that are disturbing to even think about because they’re so big and we haven’t even started on them (or have left them sitting around for much too long). It might be a major house repair that needs to be done so that the roof won’t start leaking, or a long overdue class assignment, or a book project that got tricky and has been sitting there on the hard drive, mocking you, for months now. Regardless of exactly what your beast is, there’s a simple, immediate way to take the first step toward vanquishing it. Unimpressively enough, it’s called “Do any little part of it … right now.”

Don’t take “right now” too literally: “right now” could be this weekend, or later today, or for two hours on Thursday. But don’t mess around with “right now” too much, either. As big as some projects are, there are very few that couldn’t benefit from a little attention very soon, even if it’s late at night and you’re tired and the project is unmentionably huge.

“Do any little part of it right now” may sound simple, and it is very easy to act on, but it has impact far beyond the effort required for it. Consider this joke:

Q: How do you eat an elephant?
A: One bite at a time.

It’s true. Humans are designed to eat things in bites, so the size of the what you’re eating doesn’t matter. To put it another way, you never, ever have to do a huge task: you only have to do small steps that over time add up to a huge task. That may sound like just playing with words, but it’s much more substantial than that: all large projects are accomplished through small steps, so the only way to do a large project is to do one small step. Then do another. Then another.

And honestly, the first small step breaks the whole thing wide open. Instead of having to say “I haven’t worked on my book in four months,” you can say “I worked on my book last night, even though it was only for 20 minutes.” Instead of saying “Someday I have to clean out that junk room,” you can say “I spent 45 minutes this morning gathering up all the spare linens I had in the junk room, and now the ones we need are in the linen closet and the rest are in the car, ready to go to the Salvation Army.” Zero small steps is a dead stop. One small step is being right in the midst of getting the job done.

Sometimes it may be hard to see what the small steps are, either because there’s so much to do that it’s all a huge tangle or because the big project consists of just doing one thing for a long, long time. In either case, there are ways to proceed. If you have no idea where to start, then the first step is figuring out what your next few steps are going to be. It’s organization, cataloging the problem. For instance, if your project is making a garden, make a list of things you need to do to be able to break ground: plan the size of the garden, choose what you’ll plant, look up the planting schedules, buy the seeds, etc. Making that list is itself the first step, and by the time you’re done, you’ll know what the second and third steps are already. If at any point you don’t know what to do next, that means that what you need to do next is figure out where you are in the project and what action needs to come next in the sequence.

And if the project is just a whole lot of one thing, then your steps are just pieces of that thing, of any size. Writers face this issue all the time, when the goal is to write a novel of, say, 100,000 words. While there might be (depending on the writer) a lot of preparatory work to do (or none at all), at a certain point the job is to sit down and churn out a lot of words. While you do that, you can count chapters, pages, words, hours at the keyboard, plot points completed, or anything else that gets you through the night, but if the project is daunting, figure out how much of some measure you need to do, then start doing that thing–and counting it.

Of course, after that first step there is always a second, and so on, and this discussion doesn’t delve much into the question of how to keep on track. On the other hand, keeping on track is much easier than getting on track in the first place, so if you have a big project you know you need to tackle, try starting in on any constructive piece of it, and if you don’t find yourself plowing ahead naturally, come back here for more ideas on how to keep the engine moving. After all, I’ve got a lot more I’ll need to post on this site over the course of years, and the only way for me to do it is one post at a time.

Elephant picture by Omar Junior.
Blank screen picture by Simon Scott.

Use these individually or in combination. You’ll find more details about every one of these subjects in past and future Willpower Engine posts.

1. Write down exactly what you want to accomplish and why
2. Figure out where the time is going to come from to work on your goal (don’t wait until you “have free time”!)
3. Make a list of the things you’ll need to know to succeed
4. Find one way to make the environment in which you work on your goal more enticing or comfortable
5. Picture yourself having achieved your goal and getting the rewards (even for just a minute or two) as often as possible until you’re actually there
6. Whenever you’re doing something that furthers your goal, find at least one thing to enjoy about that effort
7. When you start feeling fearful or avoidant, ask yourself what you’re scared of or avoiding and whether it’s really that terrible
8. Make yourself accountable to someone: find a buddy, blog about your intentions, join a group, etc.
9. Keep a journal of your progress
10. Whenever you start feeling resentful of the things you have to do, remind yourself that you personally are taking full responsibility for seeing it through
11. Take the first step, however small, within 24 hours of the moment you read this
12. Figure out what your biggest motivation problem is and talk about it with someone–or post it as a question right now in the comments box!

Photo by Darcy McCarty

At first, I was just going to write a short post about how to get a song out of your head, even though I knew it wasn’t really on topic for this site, because I thought it might be useful. As it turns out, though, it is on-topic. But first, the advice.

Recently I’ve had trouble with songs sticking in my head, most recently and horrifically “I’ve Never Been to Me” (from watching the beginning of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert–is that really you, Elrond???). Fortunately, by experimenting I found two ways I can successfully banish them. The first way is to listen to a very different kind of music for maybe half an hour or so. The second, which for me works even better, is to improvise a song in “la la la” fashion, taking care not to sing predictably. That might be more useful for musicians than for other people, but I suspect it’s worth trying regardless of your musical background.

If neither of those work for you, there are some very good additional suggestions at http://www.wisegeek.com/how-can-i-get-a-song-out-of-my-head.htm and http://www.wikihow.com/Get-a-Song-Out-of-Your-Head .

But what does getting a song out of your head have to do with self-motivation? Only this: it makes the point that we have much more control over our mental environment than we might at first believe. Over the past fifteen years or so, I’ve gradually come to realize how much more is possible for an individual human being to do than we generally recognize. Le Ton Beau de Marot, a huge, strange book in English about the translation of a single Medieval French poem, demonstrated to me how much more could be done with language than I suspected; learning about Non-Violent Communication and Formal Consensus demonstrated to me how very much more often people with different points of view can find a peaceful accommodation than we generally believe; and my self-motivation research has demonstrated to me how much influence we can have over our own moods, perspectives, and habits than I would have imagined–everything from feeling happier by fake-smiling (try it: our brains are wired such that it actually works) to idea repair, to changing our attitudes with our body language (which is well-described in The Definitive Book of Body Language).

I’m trying not to be too Panglossian or inspirational, but there is a meaningful fact here: it appears most people are unaware of how much power they can bring to bear in influencing their own moods, ideas, and habits. It may be worthwhile to sometimes ask ourselves what kinds of assumptions we’re making about our own minds, and whether some of those assumptions would be better off banished to the limbo where I sent “I’ve Never Been to Me.”

Photo by Cayusa

For the past two and a half years, my son and I have been studying Taekwondo. At a class a few days ago, some of us were practicing a difficult kick, and a newer student was finding she had to go through the kick very slowly.

“It took me about two years to learn that kick,” said a third student we were working with, by way of encouragement.

That surprised me at first. It’s just one kick! Admittedly, it wasn’t nearly the only thing we had been practicing, and it was a kick that involved spinning in mid-air, but two years seemed like a very long time. Yet when I thought about it, I realized it had taken me a year and a half or two years too, and that was with taking extra time after class some days specifically to practice it.

Becoming excellent at something really does take a long time. What’s more interesting is that, in a manner of speaking, that’s all it takes. In other words, that old saw “You can do anything you set your mind to” appears to have a lot of truth to it, truth backed by fistfuls of scientific studies.

“What about talent?” you might ask. My response to that would have to be: “It doesn’t seem to exist.”

“But Mozart … Tiger Woods!” you say.

“Both were taught intensively in their fields by their fathers practically from infancy,” I’d tell you, “and both their fathers were teachers with exceptional credentials. By the time each was five years old, they were so far ahead of their peers, the world was their oyster.” Practice may not make perfect, but it does make darn good.

Skeptical? László Polgár knew a lot of people who were skeptical when he claimed that you could raise children who were prodigies at almost anything, if you cared to go about it the right way. To prove it, he married a woman willing to do the experiment with him, fathered three daughters, and brought them all up to be world-class chess masters. Two of the girls stuck with chess long enough to become grandmasters and (at different times) world champions. László himself is an unexceptional chess player, but he has studied chess thoroughly enough to have been a very effective teacher for his daughters.

All of this about talent that I’m casually summing up in a pretend conversation comes from the arguments found (among other places) in two recent, very well-written books. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers does a lot to explain how the very best people in every field–music, chess, sports, business, and so on–all seem to have gotten their skills by working very hard for a long time. In fact, Gladwell will tell you how long that period of time is: 10,000 hours. It takes about 10,000 hours of practice in practically anything to become world-class at it.

In his book Talent is Overrated, Geoff Colvin dives into the subject further, and points out that the quality of practice makes a huge difference as well. The very best violinists in the world now are much better than the very best violinists in the world 200 years ago, and it’s not just because there are more people playing the violin: it’s also that today’s violinists have better learning methods, recordings, and other resources contemporaries of Mozart or Beethoven never had.

But again, what about talent? There are just people who are really good at things from a young age, naturally, so what about them?

Actually, such people don’t seem to exist. Find anyone who’s exceptional at practically anything, dig into their past, and you’ll find a whole lot of practice–much more practice than people who aren’t as good as they are.

Not to say that genetics count for nothing. Genetics determine a lot about a person’s body, which can influence which athletic activities, for instance, they might be good at. Genetics also seems to determine a range of potential intelligence, and in turn intelligence has some influence over what a person can get good at–but only in that a person seems to need a certain minimal level of intelligence to be able to do well at certain activities, with more intelligence not corresponding to more success. For instance, a decades-long study that began by identifying a number of child geniuses found that these children didn’t fare any better than the average graduate student in life. Intelligence certainly counts for something, but it doesn’t make for automatic success.

I can understand if you don’t believe this, or if you have big reservations. If so, it might be worthwhile reading Colvin’s or Gladwell’s book and seeing if the evidence they present there doesn’t make a better case than I can in this short blog entry. The idea that people are born with special talents is a very strong one in our culture, and when we see someone who does well at something, we tend to assume automatically that it’s because of inborn talent, then take that success as proof that inborn talent exists.

And what does all this have to do with self-motivation? Well, it is a bit of a tangent, but it does relate to two key elements of self-motivation: goals and belief that you can accomplish them.

In terms of goals, it may help to realize that if you have a goal of being very, very good at something, it’s almost certainly possible to reach that goal–but it will take a lot of time and effort, so you had better enjoy whatever it is you plan to be doing. In some cases, others may have an enormous head start on you. For instance, if you start playing violin at age 30, it’s not likely that you’ll ever catch up with 30-year-olds who have been playing violin day in and day out since age 5–so you can become an excellent violinist even starting at age 30, but there’s little possibility you’ll become one of the best in the world.

In terms of belief, it can be discouraging sometimes to slowly move through a kick that feels awkward and clumsy to you when other people are spinning through the air and delivering it seemingly without effort. What Gladwell and Colvin and the researchers on whose work they’ve based their books have to tell us is that in time, that kick will come. Practically anyone can fly through the air, spinning, if they’re willing to put in the time.

Takeaways:

• Only a few inborn traits, like intelligence and body size, affect what we can or can’t become great at
• Almost all exceptional skill comes from many, many hours of practice
• No, seriously: it’s true

Pictures above: Wolfgang Mozart, Judit Polgár

Here’s an issue Merrie Haskell, a writer, mentions in a comment to an earlier post: “I’ve noticed that I go through periodic surges of willpower. (I guess that’s what I mean.) I will be in a rut for months, and really feel stuck; then wake up one morning, and like a switch has been thrown, go into hyperdrive.”

Merrie’s hyperdrive clearly works for her: she’s sold well over a dozen short stories, including sales to two of the most demanding science fiction and fantasy markets, Asimov’s Science Fiction and Strange Horizons. Clearly doing something well isn’t the same as feeling motivated to do it all the time. So what’s happening?

The short answer is that self-motivation–whether for writing or for any other project–is complex, and there are a number of factors that can influence it. The longer answer names some of those factors, and as we name them, we can begin to see that they influence each other, so that one advantage can turn into a lot of advantages, and one obstacle can turn into a lot of obstacles.

We won’t be able to look at all of the elements of motivation in this one post, or go into any in depth, but we can see some of the more prominent pieces and how they fit together.

Motivating ourselves has some basic requirements. For instance, we usually need to believe what we are trying to do will provide the result we want, to care about the result, and to believe we’re capable of achieving it. In addition to those basic requirements, there are some pieces that can really support and enhance self-motivation, like the support of others, feedback loops, and recognition. Lastly, to consciously pursue a goal, we need to take certain steps, like clarify what the goal is, gather the information we’ll need to make good choices, and figure out where the time will come from to achieve our goal.

If any of these pieces falters, the others can be disrupted, or at least slowed down. For instance, if I’m in the middle of writing a novel and lose faith that anyone will ever be interested in reading it, my enthusiasm is likely to crash. This is a crisis of believing that the goal will achieve its purpose, one of those prerequisites I mentioned.

What makes this worse is that even if I regain that confidence soon after, it has already had a chance to influence other elements. For instance, losing confidence that the novel will be read makes me stop writing, and when I can’t get up the enthusiasm to write, I could lose the belief that I can finish the thing at all. Losing these beliefs can cause me to stop feeling enthusiastic about the goal I picture myself achieving. I stop having writing to show to friends and downplay the importance of the project, which could cause the friends to decide I’m not interested in it any more and withdraw their support for it, which deprives me of the feedback I’d been getting that helped keep the project going. And so on.

So what do we do about these insidious slides? Tackle them one piece at a time. Fortunately, we have an advantage in getting back on track, which is that just as the failure of one element tends to lead to the failure of others, getting one element working encourages the others to work, too. For instance, seeking out someone who’s been enthusiastic about pieces of my novel that they’ve read so far can help rekindle my enthusiasm for the project and my belief that it’s worthwhile, at the same time that it brings in the support of others and provides me with feedback. Clarifying my goal for the book (say, a novel in a given genre of a given length, finished by a given date) and making a plan to meet that goal can get me writing regardless of whether I feel enthusiastic or not, which moves me closer to the goal, which tends to make me more enthusiastic.

This process may sound familiar: it has a lot in common with mood congruity, which I discuss in another post. In either case, the solution is the same: if you break out of the pattern you’re in to do one positive thing, you’ll be going in the right direction.

Takeaways:

• Strong self-motivation means a number of elements are working together to move the project forward.
• Problems with one element of self-motivation can cause problems with other elements.
• If you find yourself losing momentum on a project, find one motivating thing you can concentrate on and focus on doing that, regardless of whether you feel enthusiastic about it at the moment or not.

Photograph by V’ron