The Motivation Machine: How to Get & Stay Motivated for Any Goal

Unlock the power of your mind and fuel your drive towards any goal. Discover the secrets of the Motivation Machine, a transformative approach to maintaining motivation. Learn to harness your inner energy and keep your ambitions alive, no matter the challenge.

Decreasing Your Reasons to Delay a Project

Decrease the Delay by making it seem like you’ll hit the goal sooner

• Reduce Impulsiveness so you don’t procrastinate
• Focus on decreasing how far off the potential end of the project seems, or framed positively, how we can make the project feel more urgent

Increasing the Value of Starting a Project

If your goals aren’t motivating, you may not have attached a sufficiently high value to them

• Focus on creating a value that is intrinsically meaningful to you
• The best way to increase Value is to have a specific project you want to work on
• “Learn programming” is not motivating, but “learn programming” will make you more motivated

Increasing Your Expectancy of Succeeding at a New Project

Increasing it requires pulling two levers: decreasing your learned helplessness and increasing the perceived ease of accomplishing it

• If you’ve ever taken on self-directed projects and failed before, or you’ve never been able to get yourself motivated to start them in the past, you may have developed a degree of “Learned Helplessness” around motivating yourself
• The only solution is to realize you’re not stuck and force yourself through the activity, or get someone else to help force you through it

Decreasing Reasons to Stop a Project

Delay – making yourself start the project now rather than later

• Impulsiveness – making sure you don’t get distracted by shiny objects or minutia instead of sticking to your goal
• Stop doing the “urgent unimportant” tasks instead of the “important non-urgent” ones you should be doing

Maintaining Your Sense of Value in the Project

Your value in the project comes from whatever greater goal the project is attached to

• The challenge is keeping that high-level goal in front of you while you’re working through the minutia and day to day of working to accomplish it
• Think of goals on three levels: quarterly, weekly, and daily
• Quarterly goals: finish a book draft, grow my business to > $30,000 MRR, dial in my productivity system
• Weekly goals: create weekly goals as well as monthly “check-in” goals to make sure you’re on track
• Daily goals: remind yourself of the higher level that the goals are feeding into and keeps them front and center in your mind

Increasing Urgency

Decrease the Delay since the smaller scope of the broken down project will have a nearer completion date.

• Set a deadline that’s just below how long it has taken you to do a similar task in the past, so that it’s motivating enough to make you start now and work efficiently while avoiding overexerting yourself.

Maintain Energy

If you develop a lifestyle that supports your efforts, you’ll have no difficulty keeping your motivation levels high

• Optimize your sleep
• Cut back on drinking
• Avoid sugar and excessive stimulants
• Walk and exercise daily
• Eat lots of plants, meats, fats

Use a Commitment Device

A commitment device is a means with which to lock yourself into a course of action that you might not otherwise choose but that produces a desired result.

• Commitment devices can fall into one of three categories: Physical, Public, or Financial
• Physical Commitment: Han Xin, a Chinese general, made soldiers fight with their backs to the river so they wouldn’t retreat and would be forced to fight for their lives
• Public commitment: Elon Musk did this with the first Tesla Master Plan
• Financial commitment: These are the “Stakes” that you need to accomplish your goals

What Is Motivation?

Motivation is your desire and willingness to do something and to keep doing something.

• Getting motivated requires you to do some combination of: increasing how likely you Expect you are to accomplish the goal, increasing the Value of achieving the goal to you, decreasing your Impulsiveness and distractibility, and decreasing the Delay by making the results of the goal more immediate.

Getting Motivated to Start a Project

When I talk about “getting motivated to start a project,” I mean actually starting it.

• Designing your motivation is a function of two variables
• Increasing your reasons to start
• Decreasing reasons to delay starting

“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”

Einstein

• The Dip is the long stretch between beginner’s luck and real accomplishment
• When you’re not motivated, no amount of SMART goals or Pomodoros or screaming affirmations in the shower will help you
• You can’t reach The Dip if you don’t get through The Start
• Most people quit during the dip
• If you can manage to not quit, you can make it to the end and reap the rewards

Build a Habit

The more of your ongoing projects that you can turn into habits, the easier it will be to keep a number of them going at the same time.

• If you can create habits around them following Charles Duhigg’s advice in The Power of Habit, you won’t have to think about doing the day-to-day parts of the goal anymore.

Set Clear Follow-on Goals

Lay out your follow-on goals from the start of the project.

• Writing out the first step will be helpful to make sure you take it, but if you only clearly define that first step, you might not continue past it.

Getting Motivated to Start a Project Recap

Core points to remember

• Increase the perceived value of the project by creating a robust, clearly defined eventual outcome you’re excited about
• Raise your belief in your success by starting with a small goal and identifying any symptoms of learned helplessness
• Reluctance to give up
• Create urgency by decreasing how far off you are from the first milestone

Staying Motivated During a Project

Maintain motivation

Increasing Your Reasons to Start a Project

Increasing the reasons to start a project deals with the top of the motivation equation: Expectancy and Value

• We have to create ways to dramatically increase the Value of starting the project now, as well as increase our Expectancy of succeeding

Building Your Motivation Machine

Determine if you need motivation to start or to continue

• Clearly define an exciting, high-level value to starting the project
• Set small, easily achievable goals for the project to start
• Create a deadline for the first goal that’s motivating without being overly ambitious
• Pre-commit yourself to accomplishing the goal using a commitment device
• Keep setting intermediate process goals that you know you can achieve
• Regularly remind yourself of the greater vision your daily goals are feeding into
• Build a habit around the goal so you keep working on it
• Find the sweet spot within the process that gets you into flow
• Define your follow-on goals

Increasing Your Reasons to Keep Going

To keep going, you’ll have to maintain the same or greater level of Expectancy and Value that you used to get yourself going

Maintaining Your Sense of Expectancy in the Project

Keep giving yourself small wins to reaffirm your ability to succeed

• Teresa Amabile calls this the “progress principle”: “Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run. Whether they are trying to solve a major scientific mystery or simply produce a high-quality product or service, everyday progress can make all the difference in how they feel and perform.”

Find Flow

The easiest way to reduce impulsiveness while hacking away at your project is to get yourself into a state of flow

• Flow is the experience of complete and total immersion, of being in “the zone” where you’re completely absorbed in the task and effortlessly flowing through it
• You need clear goals, immediate feedback, and an ideal balance between challenge and using the full extent of your abilities

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