How To Stay Motivated When Life Gets Hard

How To Stay Motivated When Life Gets Hard

the Holy Grail of motivation and drive which is when effort starts to become the reward itself in other words when friction becomes the reward - AH

Dopamine has 2 elements. First, there's the 'baseline'. It's the steady dopamine you have in regular day-to-day. Second, you have 'spikes'. This happens when you engage in a behavior that excites you and makes you feel rewarded, ex. playing video games, graduating from college, or making a lot of money.

These activities are usually what you get in the end. So, you study hard for an exam then get a good grade. This sounds good but it can be counter-intuitive. Acc. to experiments, when you do an activity and always get a reward for it, after a while, you only get spikes from the reward - not from the activity. Which means, when we remove the reward, you will stop working optimally.

So what do you do when all your efforts aren't working out? (i.e. you're not getting any positive reinforcement) Usually, you quit, you procrastinate, you work on something else, or you wait for another reward. To avoid this, you need to attach reward to effort itself.

When you lack motivation or feel like giving up, don't go look for dopamine spikes elsewhere. Learn to get it from this particular activity. Your brain eventually gives you dopamine for doing things you don't want to do i.e. making effort the reward.

So for today, and the weekend, fall in love with the effort. Shift your entire perspective. Change "ughhh this is hard, I need to stop" to "this is hard, but I like the pain". It could even be "I enjoy this because it is hard". Won't get too philosophical though :).

Here is Andrew's explanation (6 minutes).

I really enjoy this concept. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!