Motivation: Solved?

Oct 23, 2008 8:00pm

If you don't know anything about me, I'll give you brief history. At the age of 21 I gave college the finger, getting a job the other finger, and have been sitting in an attic looking at my computer screen ever since.

Trying to work for yourself is difficult. You need to figure out a way to get somebody else to give you money. But I don't think that's the hardest part. The hardest part is getting yourself to do something other than loiter around the internet all day. Repeat for a day, a week, a month, a year. I don't know if I've made it past the day phase.

The key here is motivation, the most elusive noun in the English language. Suffice to say, I don't have it. The closest I have to motivation is the thrill of starting something new. Of course, all that's gotten me is a myriad of unfinished projects. I've tried setting goals: eventually I stop setting them or stop reaching them. I've tried working with other people: as soon as one person gets demotivated, so do the others. I've tried getting other people to keep tabs on my progress: they stop paying attention faster than I stop working.

Clearly, if I want to get anything done, I need a more reliable system. I tried looking on the internet. I kept thinking, "This must be pretty common problem. Somebody must have solved it." As usual it was like searching for a needle in a haystack that may or may not contain a needle. Yet again, it was up to me to figure it out.

I asked myself, "What motivates me?". For a long time I couldn't think of anything at all. I knew what excited me. I knew what made me do some amount of work in the past. But I couldn't think of a single thing that motivated me. Then I realized I was viewing the question too narrowly. I was answering "What motivates me to do work?". The more general question "What motivates me?" has several easy answers: hunger, thirst, sleepiness. Everyone is motivated by these things, because their survival depends on it. For 22 years I've been motivated enough by hunger to eat the food necessary to stay alive. That is a lot of motivation.

After this realization, all that was left was to figure out a way to exploit my biological motivations to get me to do the things that I want done. It only took one simple rule: I'm not allowed to eat until after I work. That changed "hunger motivates me to eat" to "hunger motivates me to work, which allows me to eat".

I came up with a system for enforcing this that I'm pretty pleased with. I keep a food balance, in kilograms. The weight of the food balance is the weight of food that I'm allowed to eat. The food balance is increased by doing work and is decreased by eating. The balance is cleared daily, after breakfast, so that I can eat as soon as I wake up.

These are my current rules that add to the balance:
+ 1 kg/hour: working on my dungeon crawler flash game, my personal website, or my toastmasters speech
+ 1 kg/hour: exercising, maximum of 0.5 kg per day

The glorious thing about this is that the rules can be changed. If I want myself to get more work done, I decrease the kg/hour I get. If I want myself to focus on a specific project, I give it a better rate than the other projects. If I want myself to start doing something new, I just add it to the list.

There are a few key aspects of this method of motivation that I hope will make it successful over a long period of time:

There are some small downsides though:

I'm quite eager to find out how this works. Because motivation is such a serious topic, the outlandishness of this concept amuses me. It's clearly designed by someone who has failed so many times that all they have left to do is flail about in absurdity.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I hunger for greatness.