By the time you reach adulthood, you’ve usually learned a trick or two for getting things done when you don’t feel like doing them. These are good survival skills for sure, but what happens when you can’t outsmart your own brain any longer?
What happens when you say, “I don’t get to eat those cookies until I go to the gym?” and then your brain replies, “I do what I want, asshole,” and eats the cookies but skips the gym? Mutiny!
Or what happens if, instead of the gym, it’s getting our words down each day? What happens when we open the in-progress manuscript and feel the overwhelming urge to do anything else? Motivation has betrayed us!
Welcome back to this series where we explore what motivates us and how we might build a life that works with our creative impulses rather than against them. To read the previous entry, go here: www.ffs.media/story-tips/category/Motivation+series
It’s important to note that there are two kinds of motivation—internal and external. When we are tapped into strong internal motivation, the thing we want to do usually gets done. The world may throw obstacles our way, but we are able to dig down deep and say, “I’m going to get this done regardless because it matters so much to me.”
Can you remember a time when you felt that motivated and got it done? Everyone I know has experienced this in some capacity, and it feels incredible. It teaches you something about yourself.
But it may have been a while since you last felt that.
These can be inspiring stories, the mothers who write novels during their time waiting in the car at their children’s soccer practices, the authors who find loose change in couch cushions and eat ramen for weeks to afford the book cover they know their story deserves.
To be honest, though, stories of that magnitude feel relatively foreign to me. I can’t think of a time my creativity faced that steep of an incline and I hooved my way up and out of the gorge on sheer will and against all odds like that. Good for those people who do, but I don’t know if I’ve ever accomplished anything that cool and improbable. Yet I’ve accomplished quite a bit and pretty much live the life I dreamed about when I was young (it’s conspicuously missing an animal rescue for baby goats, but there’s still time).
So, let us not resort to the extreme cases of internally motivated people. All my respect for digging deep like that. We love to see it. But if that’s not you like it’s not me, don’t worry.
Internal motivation is the key to everything. It’s not terrible to rely on external motivation from time to time, after all, we’re human and sometimes our body chemistry isn’t conducive to wanting anything other than hibernation, Lindor truffles, and to stream 30 hours straight of The Office.
When that’s the case, when our internal motivation isn’t urging us to sit and write the manuscript, we have two choices, don’t we? We can listen to it and rest (or do whatever else you want to do), or we can find a big juicy carrot to dangle in front of us.
Sometimes that carrot is money. Sometimes it’s spending time with friends. Sometimes it’s food. It can be anything that you’d enjoy more than you enjoy writing in that moment. Something better on the other side.
Or, if you’re more of the masochist, you can pick the stick. The stick is punishment, something you want to avoid. I have a friend who made an agreement with his ex-wife that he had to pay for her a large sum of money if he failed to hit his weekly goal. This is an extreme stick. And it worked for him.
The analogy of the stick and carrot is just a way of saying “fear” and “desire,” the two motivating forces. We move toward the carrot, something we desire, and away from the stick, something we fear.
These are easy things to set up for ourselves as adults who have control over our time and finances, and we become experts at them.
But deep down, we know that it’s all a game, one we could choose to stop playing whenever we want.
And so it is that external motivators inevitably fail us or run thin.
I’m not saying to never use external motivation, and external structure in one’s rituals and environments is essential to a productive creative life. Definitely set up your workspace so it’s distraction free and so forth. Clear out all the obstacles you can.
It’s your choice how heavily you rely on external motivation over internal.
If you’re two days from finishing a project and out of gas but up against a deadline, sure, go for it. Get it done. Bribe yourself with the promise of a nice dinner or binge watching a show once you’ve passed the finish line. Then plan on resting once you hit your goal, because you’ll be at a deficit.
Internal motivation and external motivation can’t exist at the same time. Daniel Pink’s book When: the Science of Perfect Timing discusses this in depth, so if you want to learn more about that, check it out. The point is, you’re using one or the other, not both.
So, if dangling a carrot or threatening with a stick has become your standard practice, watch out! There’s a good chance you haven’t glimpsed your internal motivation in weeks.
Is internal motivation better than external motivation then? You might be wondering this. My answer is a resounding yes. It is always better, but sometimes it’s not always socially or occupationally beneficial. That’s because it’s more cyclical than we may prefer.
Our internal motivation for a particular project, purpose, or activity ebbs and flows, it has seasons like anything else in nature, and when it’s in one of those lower points, when it needs time to rest and renew, our schedules and deadlines might not be aligned. Not wanting to let ourselves and others down, we close our eyes and say, “External motivation, take the wheel!”
And sometimes external motivation forgets to give the wheel back.
Have you ever seen a child bite onto a topic? Some light turns on in their brain and suddenly they want to spend the next three months devouring everything they can about astronomy or fungi or American pioneers. If you let them, they’ll go, go, go. Without disruption and with the necessary support of an adult who can drive them places and has purchasing power, they can become freaking encyclopedias on their chosen subject.
Now, take another child who has not clicked with that subject and see if you can get them to learn and master the content to the same degree. You’ll find yourself begging and bribing, maybe even threatening, within the first 5 minutes, and you’ll still fail in your attempt. No amount of external motivation (rewards, bribes, punishment, etc.) will ever equal the energetic momentum of internal motivation.
I was homeschooled until I was 11 (it explains a lot, I know). I refused to practice handwriting. I was a perfectionist, and I had practically no fine motor skills. Not a great combo. My mother could not threaten me with enough punishment or bribe me with enough toys to make me complete the writing exercises. Eventually, she gave up.
Then, when I was 10, I learned about calligraphy. I begged for the proper pens and paper. Suddenly, all I did was practice calligraphy. For months and months. Handwriting was no longer a problem. I mean, it was a problem for people who didn’t want to read my calligraphy.
Over time I absorbed my new knowledge of the art into my existing knowledge about regular shapes and came up with a unique style of legible handwriting that makes writing ransom notes an incredibly bad idea for me.
And then I proceeded to fill up notebook after notebook with my handwritten stories.
The same thing happened with reading. I didn’t read a book on my own until I was 8, when I got sick of waiting around for someone else to read to me. I started and never stopped. I think it’s safe to say that having the space to do both of those things only once I developed the internal motivation was not a life setback, as I’ve now published 34 books and written countless more that I’ll never publish.
But I didn’t work on the socially acceptable timeline for reading and writing. And that’s not unusual for internal motivation.
I’d bet you have a similar example from your youth. Tap into that passion. Remember the curiosity, that thrilling feeling of being totally engrossed in something and not wishing to be doing anything else.
That is the beauty of internal motivation.
And it’s not hard to see how virtually everything in modern society is built contrary to that.
So, if you’re going to value, respect, and encourage your internal motivation to come forth, you’ll have to be a rebel. Seeing as how you’re an indie author, I have no doubt that’s within your repertoire.
Everyone has internal motivation. And if you’ve followed any of my other work, you might know where this is going.
There are nine types of core motivations that explain why we are motivated to do the things we do. We all write, sure, but what we’re hoping to gain from that can look incredibly different based on which of the nine types we fall into.
By identifying the one that is strongest in us, we’re able to take control of our internal motivation and fight back against all the “shoulds” of adulthood. We can’t do it all, so what do we chase? What will fill us up and what will leave us feeling empty?
Why not let your core motivation be your criteria for how to live your life? Something has to be. With so many ways to live in this modern world, why not pick the way that allows that passion, that internal motivation, to flourish?
And next week, I’ll tell you more about those nine types, how you can figure out which is yours, and how to leverage it once you know.
If you don’t want to miss any installments of this series on motivation, be sure to whitelist contact@ffs.media by adding it as a contact. And if you know of someone who might enjoy this series (alternate motive: you’ll have someone to discuss it with), they can sign up to my list and skip the onboarding sequence by going to www.ffs.media/readnow.
In the meantime, here’s a little homework: take 5 minutes and think of a time when you were younger that you latched onto a topic and couldn’t let go. Channel that obsession. Indulge in it. Think of how you would have nurtured that in your younger self as the adult you are today.