Your Best Year Ever, Chapter 11: You Can Master Your Own Motivation

0:01Hey there. Hope you enjoyed these first chapters from my newly revised book, Your Best Year Ever. if the content resonated with you, chances are it will with someone you know too. So would you just take a couple of seconds and share this episode with a friend, maybe a family member or a colleague? I want you and the people that you love and care about to have their best year ever. And the best way to do that is by sharing this episode with them. It would seriously mean the world to me. And I bet it would be a lot to them too. So take a second, hit the share button, send it to someone you know who deserves to have their best year ever.

0:36Thanks. Chapter 11. You Can Master Your Own Motivation. With ordinary talent and extraordinary perseverance, all things are attainable. Thomas Thowell Buxton. If you're not passionate enough from the start, you'll never stick it out. Steve Jobs. My parents had me start piano lessons when I was five. I really didn't enjoy playing very much until about the ninth grade. Suddenly, I wasn't just a piano player. I was a budding rock and roll keyboardist. That made all the difference in terms of my motivation. About the same time, I took up guitar. I started with classical guitar and then, of course, began playing electric guitar.

1:16I started a band with some high school friends. I had a good feel for the instrument, but I had scales and chords to learn, songs to memorize, and a tone to mesh with other musicians. At first, we achieved a sound reminiscent of brawling alley cats, But we got better. I loved Crosby, Stills, Nash, and sometimes Young, so I also kept playing acoustic guitar. Then I joined the stage band when I went to college and learned to play bass. During all of this, I experienced moments of real frustration. Sometimes I wanted to quit and find something easier. I'm glad I didn't. Not only did I develop my skills, but sticking with it taught me something essential about achievement.

1:53At first, I held on to my hope of becoming a rock god. Then playing became meaningful all by itself. I still play today. We've all seen talented, smart, and well-trained people bottom out and quit on their dreams. It takes something more to achieve our goals. Call it perseverance, persistence, or grit. It's the willingness to keep going even when the odds are bad and our enthusiasm has waned. Think of the developers of virtual reality technology, tablet computers, or e-books. After initial spikes of interest, all of these innovations faded as failures. Yet today, they are all ongoing concerns, including virtual reality, because people kept working, tinkering, and improving them.

2:35The lines of preparation and opportunity finally merged, and that can happen for us too if we stay in the game. Next to finding your why, mastering your motivation is key for developing the necessary persistence to make it through the messy middle. I want to share four key ways to do so, finding the right reward, being realistic about the commitment, gamifying the process, and measuring your gains. Internalize the reward. In the last chapter, I talked about the superiority of intrinsic motivators. External motivators can work, but they're usually less effective in the long run, especially if we lose interest in the reward, get demotivated, and slack off before we're even aware.

3:16Worse, if those external rewards are someone else's idea, say a spouse or a boss, we can become resentful of the reward if we're not careful. Intrinsic rewards help us avoid the danger because we connect personally and emotionally with them. You might say they're self-justifying. They become an end in and of themselves, even part of our identity. I want to push that thought further by exploring how we can harness their self-perpetuating power. Studies by Caitlin Woolley and Eilat Fischbach at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business show that we tend to value and experience more when we're in the middle of doing it than when we're anticipating it on the front end or remembering it after the fact.

3:58Think about challenging activities like exercising, writing, or practicing a musical instrument. The joy comes from doing them. These findings are important because action itself can be its own reward, and the gains begin when we begin. Over time, we can train ourselves to anticipate the rewards as we internalize the benefits. If we start with a suitable intrinsic reward, such as the way our new behavior makes us feel, we will naturally begin looking forward to it. This moves the reward from mere incentive to a potent source of energy and drive. I experience this with running. I feel better once I've run.

4:34When I first started running, that was enough to get me going. But having run for so long, I now look forward to that feeling. I anticipate it, and that gets me fired up before I lace up. Mastery of an action, like my guitar playing, eventually makes it self-perpetuating. Studies of expert performers tell us that once you have practiced for a while and can see the results, explain Florida State University psychologist Anders Ericsson and science writer Robert Poole, the skill itself can become part of your motivation. You take pride in what you do. You get pleasure from your friend's compliments and your sense of identity changes.

5:09The activity is fully internalized and has become its own reward. You're now a guitarist, a runner, or whatever, and maintaining the activity begins to feel more like an investment than an expense. It's worth it, but depending on the difficulty of the goal-related activity, it might take a while. Be realistic about the commitment. For as long as I can remember, I've heard it takes 21 days to form a new habit, 30 days at the most. If you can just marshal your willpower for three or four weeks, bingo, you've got it made. But that sure wasn't true for my running. It took far more than 21 days. I'm sure anyone struggling to form a new habit can identify.

5:50We all know there's got to be more to the story. Well, it turns out the 21-day rule is a myth with practically no scientific basis. If we're trying to do something simple and easy, it might work. But complex or challenging habits take a bit longer. Researchers at University College London tracked people attending to form different types of new habits. Instead of three or four weeks, they found it took an average of 66 days for new habits to become automatic, more than three times the popular duration. And some activities, they say, would be more like 250 days. Well, it's easy to lose your why when a goal runs into overtime.

6:32It might take an additional effort to get over the hump with your habit goals. Thankfully, there are a couple of effective workarounds. For instance, we can leverage the motivation of an achievement goal to keep us going on a difficult habit goal by matching relevant achievements and habits. Running six days a week might not be your thing, but if you're emotionally connected to an achievement goal of, say, losing 20 pounds by August 1st, you can leverage that motivation to help you get up early and hit the pavement. If it helps, think of habits not as ends unto themselves, but as serving larger achievements.

7:06The habit essentially serves as the next step in reaching your achievement goal. It's easier to maintain the effort over time because your eye is on the bigger prize. Chains and Games Another trick is tracking streaks. I've included a tool to do that in the sample goal templates at the back of the print edition of the book. But this could be as simple as a checkmark on your calendar. Jerry Seinfeld famously used this system to build his writing habit. The idea is to write a joke every day and mark the calendar every day you write. After a few days, you'll have a chain, he explained. Just keep at it, and the chain will grow longer every day.

7:43You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain. You can use your journal or set a recurring task in your task management system to accomplish the same thing. Our full-focus planners also have space to track these habit goals in a calendar chain. However you track the streak, the chain system can work for just about any habit. You can set the chain to any target. Miles run per day, sales calls per week, date nights with your spouse per month. Writers often use daily word count targets. The humorist, Fran Lebowitz, was once window shopping at Sotheby's.

8:20She was there to see furniture, but someone who knew her asked if she'd like to see an original Mark Twain manuscript. What writer wouldn't? As they looked over the pages, the man pointed out a curiosity. Twain had written little numbers in the margins. We just don't know what those are, the man admitted. As a writer, Leibovitz did. I happen not to be a Twain scholar, but I happen to be a scholar of little numbers written all over the place, she said. He was counting the words. That's ridiculous, the man said. I bet you anything Leibovitz said, count. So they did. And she was right. Twain must have been paid by the word, the man guessed.

8:56but Leibowitz didn't think so. It may have nothing to do with being paid by the words, she said. Twain might have told himself he had to write this many words each day, and he would wonder, am I there yet? Like a little kid in the back of a car. Are we there yet? It's easy to think of works like Tom Sawyer and Hunkleberry Finn in their entirety, but they too started out as big, daunting dreams that became reality one day of writing after another and keeping track along the way. Another version of tracking is gamifying the activity. In her book, Get It Done, Ayelet Fischbach describes how Pokemon Go helped the daughter of a friend get more exercise as a diabetic.

9:32Her daily habit of walking two miles was becoming stale and boring. She stopped her streak and wasn't getting any exercise at all. Her parents and doctors would soon need to intervene with a health plan to keep her diabetes under control. After downloading Pokemon Go on a whim, the daughter was re-engaged with her daily walking goal. She even increased her exercise motivation because the game was so enjoyable. This story isn't unusual. Estimates peg Pokemon Go's impact on extra steps taken across the U.S. at$144 billion during the game's peak in the summer of 2016. A couple years ago, I wanted to build the habit of regular hydration throughout the day.

10:11I used an iPhone app called Plant Nanny. I was entrusted with a digital plant. And every time I drank a glass of water and logged it in the app, the plant responded as if it had been watered. But if I failed to drink and log my water on schedule, the plant would get sick and eventually die. That sounds silly, but I was intent on keeping my plant alive. The game made it fun to keep a 90-day streak going. Now the habit's internalized, and staying hydrated is its own reward. I have more energy. My thinking is better. My focus sharper. Gamifying the activity made it fun and helped me maintain the streak long enough to install the habit.

10:48Gamifying a goal works because it heightens our intrinsic motivation to achieve. Adding an element like Pokemon Go or the Plant Nanny app plays to the make it fun strategy. And the great news is, gamifying a goal can be accomplished simply by noticing the fun already around us. The daughter didn't need to invent the game to get herself up and out the door for walks. I didn't need to develop an app to pretend to keep a digital plan alive so I would drink more water. Fischbach, among many other researchers, encourages us not to reinvent the wheel when it comes to finding a way to re-engage with a goal that may be going stagnant.

11:25Hey there! Are you enjoying the book so far? Well, it means so much to me that you've made it this far and hung with me. Did you know that our brains can encode information in multiple ways thanks to something called the dual coding theory. So by both reading and listening, you're providing a double dose to your brain, visually and audibly. And this approach caters to various learning styles, it enhances retention and engagement, and to truly internalize the strategies for a transformative year, I want you to consider reading the book along with listening to it here. When you pair the book with the audio podcast, you'll have a much more comprehensive experience.

12:06It's about living the principles, not just listening. And because of this, I want to encourage you to go buy a physical book from Amazon or wherever books are sold. And when you buy the book before December the 31st, 2023, I'll give you a free ticket to our biggest virtual live event ever. Your best year ever live. Now we've done this every year since the book came out, but we're doing it this year and expect the biggest audience we've ever had. It's happening on January the 5th, 2024. It's totally virtual, so you can attend no matter where you are in the world, and normally the tickets to this event sell for$197, but they're free to you when you buy the book by the end of 2023.

12:52So just go buy the book, save your order number, and enter it in at yourbestyeureverbook.com. We'll then send you your free ticket to the Best Year Ever live event. So here's to your best year ever. Again, head to yourbestyevereverbook.com. Measure the game. When we set big, challenging goals, it's easy to see how far we have to go and lose enthusiasm. We start criticizing ourselves and get dispirited. If your goal is to write a book, pay off your mortgage, bill up your retirement or whatever, it can be daunting to look up and realize how far you still have to go. That's the gap. Something I learned from Dan Sullivan has helped me rethink this problem.

13:34Dan talks about measuring the gain, not the gap. So take a minute and look at the gain. See how far you've already come and let your progress inspire your perseverance. This is one reason setting milestones is helpful. Not only do they break up the big goal into manageable chunks, they give us something to measure, forward or backward. By measuring the gains, we'll not only cultivate persistence, but also get a sense of our momentum. Ayelet Fischbach offers a complementary concept she calls the small area principle. We can feel motivating looking forward or backward during goal progress, depending on how much progress we've already made.

14:11According to the small area principle, she says, to sustain motivation, we need to compare our next action to whatever is smaller, the progress we've already made, or the progress we still need to make to meet the goal. At the beginning of pursuing a goal, we should look back at our completed actions. Beyond the midpoint, we should look ahead at what's still missing. If you're working, for instance, on a habit goal of 10 ,000 steps a day, don't dwell on the 10K as you start the day. Notice instead how your count keeps climbing. You've already made 2 ,500 steps. But as you edge past 5 ,000 steps, you're better off focusing on closing the gap, especially the closer you get to your goal.

14:49Or think of a financial goal. Let's say you're trying to bring your emergency fund up to$50 ,000. Early on, you'll focus on how far you've come. $5 ,000,$10 ,000,$15 ,000, and so on. But the closer you get to your goal, the more motivated you'll be to close the gap. $40 ,000 is a lot, but you won't slow down once you reach it if you've only got$10 ,000 to go. The initial$10 ,000 might have seemed big, but the final$10 ,000 is relatively easy by comparison and also exciting because of the progress you've already made. One way to sustain our momentum is to measure the gain in real time. How? In the four disciplines of execution, authors Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Hewling differentiate lead and lag measures.

15:34Lag measures look backward to determine whether you've met a goal. Think deadlines, finish lines, or targets. For instance, did you turn in your graduate thesis on schedule or not? Did you complete the 10K or not? Did you reach your sales goal or not? Lag measures are an excellent way to measure achievement goals because they're tied to end points. But they're one-offs, and they're usually a long way off. It's hard to gain a sense of momentum that way. Lead measures work differently. Instead of looking backward, they look forward. They measure the activity that influences whether you will hit your target.

16:08For instance, if hitting your sales goal is your lag measure, then making a certain number of sales calls each week would be your lead measure. Why? Because those activities enable you to achieve your sales goal. By focusing on the right measurements, we can maintain and even accelerate our progress toward our goals. Incremental wins. Success is about incremental change. But we live in an instant gratification culture where we just don't want to wait. When we take control of our motivation, however, we can stay in the game long enough to see how that incremental change adds up to major achievements.

16:41and we can do ourselves yet another favor when we pair up with our peers to achieve our goals. I'll cover that next.

16:52Hey, hope you enjoyed this chapter from your best year ever. My hope is that it's added a ton of value to you and that it's inspired you to go out and accomplish your dreams. But before you go, I'd so appreciate it if you would take just a couple of minutes and go review the book. That would really, really help us. You can do that on Amazon or Audible. And if you're anything like me, you probably always look at the reviews before you buy something. That's why they're so important. So leaving a review helps other people just like you know whether they should buy the book or not. So just go to Amazon or Audible, search for your best year ever, and leave your, hopefully, five-star review.

17:32Thanks so much.