Blogger and marketer Christina Quick put up an interesting and pithy post recently, “How to Be a Master at Anything,” building on information from Geoff Colvin’s great book Talent is Overrated, and on other sources. It echoes some of the things I wrote about in my post “Do You Have Enough Talent to Be Great at It?” but has more to say as well, and expresses its points originally enough that it’s worth reading even if you know something about the subject already. It also includes a nice real-life example.

In case you don’t have time to read the whole thing, the short version is: Practice Your Butt Off And You Can Get Really Good at Almost Anything.

Thanks to Leo Babuta of Zen Habits for his tweet about the post.

What would it feel like to be perfectly motivated, even if just for a little while? You would become really involved with what you were doing, even fascinated with it, so that you’d stop noticing distractions. You’d be excited, working hard but not wearing yourself out. You’d know exactly what you were doing and exactly what you were trying to accomplish and exactly how well it was going. Things would just flow.

As you might already know (or have quickly guessed), this state of mind does exist, and it’s not even exceptionally rare. Probably you’ve experienced it yourself at least once or twice–maybe many times. When it works, it feels magical, because you’re working at about the highest level of difficulty you can manage, yet everything feels profoundly easy.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “chick SENT me high,” as in “This guru chick sent me high into Himalayas to find myself, but she didn’t bring me there”) has a word for this state, which he’s studied now for decades. He calls it “flow,” because when you’re in this state, you feel like you’re being carried along, as though by a river.

It’s a little misleading for me to talk about flow meaning being perfectly motivated, because while it’s true in a sense, flow only applies to short-term experiences. You can get into flow when writing a chapter of a book or giving a musical performance or playing a game of baseball or even fixing a lawnmower, but you can’t get into a single experience of flow over the course of days or weeks or months. Flow also only applies to things we’re already pretty good at: if you’re just learning something, then you need to teach your brain about each of the pieces before you can put them all together into a complex whole.

So if it doesn’t last long, and if most large, important goals take a commitment of weeks or months or years, what good is flow? Well, that long-term commitment breaks down into individual sessions of doing something: exercising, writing, cooking, talking, studying, practicing–whatever it may be. And in those individual sessions, if we get good at what we’re doing, we can strive for flow. Flow is addictive, I can tell you from experience (mostly with writing and music). It’s also pleasurable. It’s also hellaciously efficient. Even if it only comes along now and then, a little flow can turn a long-term project into a long-term source of satisfaction and thrills.

So what are the components of flow, and how do you get into it? A full discussion of that takes much more space than we have here, so I’ll summarize what flow is and follow up with more posts on the subject in the future. If you’d like to learn about flow in detail, read Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Interestingly, flow has several things in common with good self-motivation techniques in general:

• Clear goals
• A strong focus on what you’re doing (in the case of flow, so much focus that everything else is blocked out)
• Feedback as you go (in the case of flow, this needs to be immediate feedback, like a comedian gets in front of an audience or a musician gets from hearing the sounds coming out of the instrument)
• The task being challenging, but within your abilities

In addition to those prerequisites, Csikszentmihalyi describes some important signs that one is in flow:

• Your consciousness of yourself fades, and your awareness is pretty much entirely on just what you’re doing
• Your sense of time distorts: an entire afternoon may feel like half an hour
• You’re enjoying what you do, so that it doesn’t feel effortful
• You feel powerfully in control of what you’re doing.

Flow can happen on its own when the conditions are right, but with an understanding of the process, practice, and some determination, we can get better at making flow happen on purpose. Flow isn’t the main component of long-term motivation, or even a strictly necessary one, but as components of motivation go, a hellaciously efficient and deeply enjoyable state is a welcome addition to the mix.

In a follow-up article, I talk about how to get into a state of flow.

Photo by Haags Uitburo.

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.

There are all kinds of levels of challenge when it comes to changing our habits. If I’m trying to get along with people better, for instance, there may be times when I’m well-rested, don’t need to be anywhere, and run into someone I genuinely like on a sunny day. Under these circumstances, being a little kinder than usual should be a walk in the part.

But at other times I might be running late for work, having only gotten five hours of sleep because the neighbor’s cat is in heat and was yowling all night, preoccupied with a weird sound my car just started making, and facing an inattentive Downwind Donuts worker who just tried to serve me (and charge me for) a decaf Chococinno Frothy instead of my regular morning cup of high-test. Under the circumstances, maybe a person could be forgiven for being gruff.

But in terms of really changing my habits, that second situation is a far better opportunity–even if I try and fail.

When we change habits, we’re both acquiring new knowledge and reinforcing behaviors. Acquiring new knowledge is just making realizations about how to do a task better, getting information that helps us make better decisions, like: “Hey, if I just take a few deep breaths instead of talking right away, I can usually be pretty civil even when things suck,” and “Maybe I shouldn’t try to smile when I’m really angry, considering how bad that looked in the reflection of myself I caught just now.”

Reinforcing behavior means strengthening neural pathways in the brain that support one particular course of action instead of another. If you find yourself automatically reaching for gum a few weeks after you stopped smoking instead of thinking about a cigarette, or reflexively pulling out class materials as soon as you get home because you’ve been cultivating new study habits, these are examples of having reinforced behaviors to the point of doing them without thinking. Automatically doing things the way we want to see ourselves doing them is the real victory in the course of changing habits: when a behavior has been rehearsed enough, in enough situations, we find that we don’t need any “willpower” per se any more. We’re just making good choices automatically. The harder we work at willpower, the less effort it takes to get good results.

Which brings us back to the worker at Downwind Donuts: of course this guy is much harder to be kind to than the friend we meet on the street. But that also means that we’re having to be more resourceful to act civilly toward him, and having to be more resourceful means we’re forced to try out new things, learn more, and work harder. In other words, changing our behavior when it’s difficult to do so requires more effort for us and therefore pays off more quickly and more powerfully. In the same way that lifting a heavy weight ten times builds muscles faster than lifting something light ten times, rising to challenges does a better job of building desirable habits.

To look at it from a different perspective, getting really good at anything means practicing it well and often, and practicing well means doing stuff that’s hard. Just doing something easy over and over does little to improve our skills.

Besides, what better way to confound inattentive coffee servers than to be friendly with them when they make mistakes? Sometimes disruption is its own reward.

Photo by Brayhan Hawryliszyn

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

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

One of the most encouraging pieces of information I’ve turned up lately about self-motivation is that willpower can be strengthened by practice. However, the exact kind of practice is important if you want good results.

Photo of a parrot exercising admirable restraint by Maria Gonzalez

Some articles I’ve read liken willpower to a muscle, and suggest that all you have to do to strengthen willpower is to exercise that muscle. A New York Times blog entry makes the recommendation as an example that you try strengthening willpower by making yourself brush your teeth on the wrong side.

The problem with this kind of view is that it assumes willpower is the same thing as self-control, ignoring the other pieces of the puzzle.

Willpower usually involves overcoming ingrained habits we don’t like (like staying up watching television too late every night) or developing new habits that we do like (like taking ten minutes to straighten up at the end of every work day). And while building or breaking habits can be done with self-control to some extent, trying to increase your self-control in general in order to build or break a particular habit is like trying to build a brick wall by lifting weights: sure, you’ll get a stronger over time, and be able to lift the bricks a little more easily. But why not concentrate on the wall? You’ll build up muscles that way anyway.

Concentrating on building the wall means

• having clear goals
• understanding what kinds of decisions are going to help get us to those goals
• recognizing the times when we have such a decision to make, and
• making the right call at those times.

General self-control only helps with that last piece, and it’s not the only tool we can bring to bear even for that.

The other pieces have a lot to do with self-awareness (mindfulness) and self-understanding, and there are some good techniques to help those things along that I’ll discuss in other posts.

For now, here are some simple guidelines for practices that help build willpower and get you some immediate results at the same time:

1. Begin by choosing one area of your life where you want to make progress
2. Figure out what kinds of decisions you want to see yourself making in that area
3. Put special effort into noticing when those decisions come up
4. Pay attention to your mood and what’s influencing it. Are you more likely to make bad decisions when something’s bugging you? What kinds of distractions keep you from paying close enough attention to your decisions?

The more aware you become of your own mental processes, the more automatically you recognize the chance to make good decisions and can take advantage of them.

There’s a particular technique I’ve been experimenting with called “decision logging” that seems to be very promising in terms of building up willpower and clearing away mental obstacles; I’ll take the opportunity to blog about that in the near future.

Takeaways:

• Exercising willpower can help make willpower stronger
• To make good decisions, we have to first figure out what kinds of decisions we want to make
• Good decisions come in part from understanding ourselves and being aware of our moods and reactions