Work Isn't the Problem: 4 Habits Killing Your Motivation

is Richard Layman and he loved physics between 1918 and 1988 he developed quantum mechanics won the Nobel Prize and was the best known scientist in the world what's less well known about him however is despite his obvious intellect and passion and drive there were times where in his own words he said physics disgust me a little bit now but I used to really enjoy doing it and even the likes of Richard Freeman can become unmotivated about their one true passion in life what hope do people like me have to stay motivated and want to consistently do things when I'm not even 100 sure they're My One True passion or the thing that I continuously want to do somewhat controversially on this channel I've mentioned in the past that I Rely mostly on my motivation in order to get things done so today I've compiled the things that people like Richard Clayman evidence-based science and my own personal experience have taught me about the little mistakes that I've accidentally been doing in the past that end up lowering my motivation and make it in the long term harder for me to do things and enjoy doing them so here's how to stay motivated passionate and driven about the things that we want let's get straight into it now I'm going to jump straightened with the controversial mistakes but I'm just going to try and explain this properly basically the first mistake that I think used to trash my motivation was that I rewarded myself for doing things and I think the solution to this is to never give myself rewards for doing activities please please let me explain this is based both on a lot of kind of evidence-based studies but also my own personal experience but basically what I used to do in the past is that for example throughout the year if I knew that I needed a phone upgrade if I needed a new pair of shoes or a new coat or to go on a holiday or to do something nice for myself what I would do is that I would kind of schedule these in either as a birthday gift or as a Christmas gift or for example after an exam I'm going to be allowed to buy this book that I really really wanted or I'm going to upgrade my phone if I finish this project or if I finally start this YouTube channel now I no longer do this because I find that in the long term this ends up destroying my intrinsic motivation for getting those tasks done so I'm going to start with the studies themselves but there's basically a huge body of evidence that shows that when children are rewarded for doing certain things they end up enjoying those tasks a lot less and stopping them sooner in one particular study two groups of children were made to perform puzzles and only half of those children so one group were given rewards for doing the puzzle these are the children that ended up enjoying the puzzles less and stopped doing them sooner than the other group that were never rewarded and just meant to do the thing now this might sound like forced action but the way that these studies interpret this and the way that I see it too is that when I am not giving myself an external reward for a specific action I end up being much more likely trying to find intrinsic pleasure in doing the task itself and I also find this in my own childhood where there are activities for which I was not given any specific reward for completing like painting or reading and these are activities that I still very much enjoy as an adult because of the intrinsic pleasure in the activity itself rather than other things that I was kind of encouraged or motivated or stimulated to do externally I think I really internalize this parental role where I used to have a parent in the past tell me to do something and then reward me or only allow me to play computer games for example when I am done doing this task and I think I never learned to actually trust myself and to do things because I wanted to do them or when I wanted to do them without This Promise of a reward so I kind of internalized this parent and always in the past I used to put Rewards or put things in the end of doing tasks because I in my mind thought I would never do them if I didn't do this and also that I would be more encouraged to do things this in my personal experience just doesn't work another personal reason if you are similar to me where this reward for an activity ruins my motivation is because rewards spaced in time just don't work for me if I promise myself that I'm going to give myself a gift in a month that doesn't mean that I'm going to look forward to it more it just means that I am going to look forward to it less and not even want the gift I'm very much an immediate reward kind of person I can be very impatient so spacing out my rewards just makes me frustrated in the meantime rather than looking forward to Something in the future I know this would be different if you're not an impatient person so this might not work for you but I think this realization also made me think that actually there's no point in waiting for things and I can get them as soon as I want them so if you also feel that to some extent you treat yourself like a child or you mistrust what you would naturally want to do maybe that's because you've never naturally let yourself do the things that you want motivation itself is an intrinsic drive or desire and if you're always cutting it off by stopping yourself doing things by redirecting your attention by trying to redirect your motivation then you never trust that you can do things yourself and you never Flex or exercise this muscle so I would really really recommend just giving yourself rewards which can be very very small things whenever you want them upgrading your phone when you need it buying something new when you need it watching the movie when you want to rather than forcing yourself to do it as soon as you're done with an activity which might lead you you to resent the activity itself in the long term and to find that you are actually never building motivation for doing tasks but you're just trying to negotiate with yourself for the rest of your life with bigger and unsustainable Rewards or rewards for even basic things in order to get things done so this is what I would recommend the second way that damages my motivation seems to perhaps on the surface contradict the first one but there's one very very subtle and very important difference that I want to get across the second thing is under paying myself for tasks that I am doing very importantly this doesn't mean an extra gift or reward at the end of the task but this is the specific payment or payoff either emotional or physical for getting something done basically this is connected to the Richard feyman story so the thing I first mentioned was that even though feyman absolutely loved physics he ended up resenting it when you had to give some lectures on Aeronautics in Buffalo and in his book sure you're joking Mr feyman which is an absolute excellent read would strongly recommend it actually I'm going to check if there is a short form kind of summary that I would link below if you would like to see it there basically what happened to Feynman was that he was given extra money to travel to this town and give a physics lecture every weekend and he would go there he would give the lecture he would stay the weekend and he would come back and he ended up being completely burnt out and hating the whole experience and his realization at some point was that he had a very poor person mentality and all the extra money that he was given for this inconvenience he was just saving because he'd come from a poor background and he wasn't used to spending lots of luxuries on himself but his realization was that he was being paid this extra money to do a painful experience of traveling and being away from home and so he decided that he was going to spend all the extra bits of the money in order to enjoy himself there and suddenly The Experience became fun now if you're healthy this might sound completely obvious but in my case I've in the past been the sort of person who expects myself to perform the same every single day for example I'm due to work through three hours on a project if it's a Monday if it's a Sunday if I had a terrible day if I'd just been crying if a friend just opened up with something tragic to me I expect myself to be able to perform the same every single time and I never realized that sometimes I'm working overnight or I need extra pay in the same way that for example if you do a night shift as a dog show you get paid extra money if you don't end up kind of giving yourself a longer break or if you don't end up spending a bit more money on yourself you're going to end up resenting the task because it was done at a ridiculous expectation so when I'm working an unpaid job which is basically studying and everything that I need to do with myself I will often ask myself if I'm doing overtime hours if I'm working extra shift if I'm working on a sick day if I'm working when I'm unwell or sad or going through a difficult time I will realize that this is kind of overtime and for that reason I deserve later perhaps a longer break or I deserve a small reward something like guessing my favorite juice at the shops or just get getting my favorite lunch for example and very small things like this aren't necessarily huge gifts or rewards but they're the fair pay for the work that I have done and kind of realizing that I should not expect myself to perform the same in every single case and some jobs just require extra pay and using that pay on myself that means that I can maintain my motivation for a longer period just like Feynman and not end up burnt out and resenting what I'm doing because I'm working in a ridiculous State now the third way that I can burn through my motivation is timing and this is something that I am very interested in and super passionate about basically my friends joke that I live in another space-time because I have in general a very poor concept of what time is my estimations of five minutes or 30 minutes or a day or an hour are just absolutely ridiculous but that is beyond the point I think the reason that I can stay more motivated than others sometimes for things has to do with my very poor concept of time because not actually I don't tend to think of activities in terms of how long they take but I think of them as an activity itself and very interesting I was reading a book called 4 000 weeks where it was explaining how people in the past for example in the village they never would think of time as being one hour or two hours they would describe the time it took things in terms of activities it took medieval people for example would say that a task took a miser rare while I think that's how it's pronounced which is approximately the time that I took to recite Psalm 50 or for example they said there would be back in the time that it took to bake bread so this is how they would conceptualize things and I think in the present day of course because we are very often paid by ours or we're expected to do things in hours when it comes to self-work I will also tell myself I'm going to do an hour's worth of studying or revision and this just works very very badly for me mostly because I feel that I am stuck in a chair having to do something for let's say an hour and if I'm doing studying for example in the beginning I'm kind of going to be bored art I know I can't do anything else because I forced myself to do it and I will just do a pitiful amount of work in the end try to make it through the hour maybe at some point become motivated then the hour's done I'm excited I can leave and this whole activity has just been miserable unmotivated and just completely pointless most of the time now what I do is I break tasks into this medieval way of thinking where I go oh I'm going to revise the cardiac valves and this is the task that I'm going to do and I know that I'm happy just doing this in a whole day for example so even if it takes me five minutes or five hours very often I'm just happy doing it because I'm doing a task so if you also find that being forced to do work leads to very low amounts of motivation on your end perhaps just this subtle shift of thinking that you're going to complete a task and let that take however long it must put a timer on if you must stop and start something else so if you're expected to be somewhere but I wouldn't kind of do arbitrary work which is why also I don't use the Pomodoro method and I have a whole video on why I hate it but this is the exact same reason I don't like doing forced work based on time but I like doing specific tasks based on what I want to learn or what I want to accomplish which I find to be much more fun have much higher levels of motivation and also it's almost like the difference between getting paid for a task and getting paid per hour people are notorious saying that when people are paid per hour they just do very unmotivated and unproductive work but when people are paid to do a specific task they're in and out of your house fixing your boiler in 15 minutes because that's just the time that it needs to get something done so I also pay Myself by the task that I do rather than buy the hour and this ends up ending oh my God that sounded very weird um rewarding myself for the task but I've been rewarding Myself by the hour and getting something done anyway moving on swiftly now the next mistake that I used to make about my motivation is what I call digging into the trowel and this is again a reference to physics so you can blame Richard feyman for this but basically I don't see my motivation for tasks to be separate from My overall life motivation and everything else that is happening in my life so basically the way that I picture it is that everything that is happening for example my University my body image my relationships my friendships my connections with my family the tasks that I'm doing my job my University my exams all of these have some sort of sine wave pattern where I'm happy and I'm sad and I'm happy and I'm sad and this is just natural these different sine waves will have different sort of frequencies and different sort of wavelengths but basically the overall states that I am in my life is kind of a combination and a summary of all of these waves and very often this might be baseline or slightly above Baseline when I'm lucky but there will be times just because of pure unfortunate circumstances that a lot of these waves a lot of the trials of these waves were super important pose and leave to this very deep pit of despair and this is where sometimes for no reason I don't know why I'm just miserable I'm just really really sad and that might be because for whatever reason for a few hours or a few days everything in my life might just not be going too well or might be a bit wobbly and when I am in this case I realize that my overall motivation which is kind of the sum of all of these waves my mood and motivation tend to be kind of very similar and very close to one another is in the pits of hell it says nowhere it's gone it's trashed and I think if then I'm trying to force myself to do something especially if this is something arbitrary I am digging into the trial deeper and I'm just digging myself deeper into a hole where I am kind of stealing from future motivation and I'm forcing myself to do something it's miserable it's sad I'm going to prolong this pain and not get out of it faster so so basically what I tend to do at the moment and it might sound very wishy-washy but when I can't afford to and this is with self different tasks I before I do something or before I sit down to do something or plan to do something I just take a second to check in on how I feel and where these waves lie and am I intrinsically motivated and am I intrinsically happy and sometimes especially if I have a very very big task to do for example kind of scripting conceptualizing filming editing after editing and posting videos is a huge huge task and to do this I get a lot more out of just spending 10 minutes or five minutes calling a friend or just sitting down with myself and writing why I'm feeling bad or why I'm not feeling well rather than trying to push through and dig myself deeper into that trial and do unmotivated work which will just prolong my misery and make me sadder especially because I haven't invested in making myself feel better and my work is probably going to be mediocre so whenever I can't afford it I tend to measure my levels of mood try to invest in those rather than digging and pushing into my motivation further and further and also realizing that even though my overall levels of motivation or mood might be quite low there's always going to be a wave in there somewhere and that may wave might just be my love for art or my love for music which is usually very very high all the time and I can kind of rely on those things and pick out those waves themselves and do something enjoyable in order to invest in my motivation rather than kind of ignoring this whole thing and pretending or forcing myself to work just no matter what at every single case which I find to be very very unsustainable lastly I want to give the biggest acts to the most appropriate sponsor ever for this video which are brilliant Bridget is both a mobile app and an online platform that plays a huge role in maintaining fueling and replenishing my motivation for studying Sciences through doing different exercises you can re-teach yourself what learning should be like as an adult and also you can re-energize and give yourself the motivation and the confidence in reapproaching things such as mathematics and logic which have so many far reaching applications in our own personal lives love the way that brilliant me almost relive The Sciences and learning in the way that I wish it could have been done to me in the past in school but also mathematics and logic I would really really recommend if you are an adult in any sort of stem subject or doing any sort of Science and also for fun I do like to do the physics but admittedly that has less applications in my professional and academic life so if you also want to check brilliant out and see what I Rave about quite a lot on this channel there will be a link in my description which will give you I think 20 off or just the chance to kind of check it out and have a little trial and play around with the exercises and see what you can teach yourself and how you can re-motivate yourself to learn things in general but on that note thank you so much for spending this time with me if you did I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day be kind yourself and others and don't believe everything you think thanks bye

Channel: Elizabeth Filips

Views: 479,111

Keywords: exam tips, study tips, exam tips for students, how to study, how to write essays, essay exams, how to study for exams, ali abdaal, thomas frank, how i ranked 1st at cambridge, university, spaced repetition, active recall, cambridge medicine, ali, study with me, how to study faster, how to learn difficult things, study, how i ranked first, self studying, atomic habits, james clear, atomic habits audiobook, atomic habits james clear, creating habits, routines and habits

Id: fBwlncaF9zs

Length: 17min 2sec (1022 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2022