Lately I’ve become interested in trying to understand my behavior. It takes a good deal of patience and skill (and luck) to be able to introspect on the fly and think through why I reacted the way I did. For one, it’s a fascinating way to understand things about myself–my strengths, my weaknesses–but also it’s a great way to get to the root of some of the phenomena I’ve observed, and possibly learn to take advantage of them.

One specific thing I noticed today is that I seem to swing wildly between being incredibly motivated and shockingly unmotivated for no apparent reason. One moment I’d be all pumped up, excited about getting stuff done, and only two hours later I’d lose all incentive. Nothing obvious comes to mind (it’s not like I’m getting tired, or get disappointed at initial failures, or get hung up on something). What is it? Where is motivation coming from?

To be honest, I don’t know the answer. There are elements of the answer that I believe I have, though. For one, changes in motivation seem natural and inevitable, almost like the need to sleep. The majority of the things I do in the day are self-imposed (for example, working out, reading a book, replying to emails, cleaning up my room, etc.) and as such, they are not governed by simple incentive rules. In fact, I think that when I need to convince myself to do something, my mind creates a model (an incentive structure) that’s highly volatile and unsubstantiated (after all, why should I read that book or clean up that room? There is no direct link to a particular incentive). This model is sensitive to small changes in my desires and preferences: it’s a chaotic system; a small change in what I want (for example, I may be only slightly more tired than I was five minutes ago) causes a possibly massive change in how motivated I am.

I used to think that I can cheat by providing rigid frameworks. I’d give myself points if I achieved a certain task. Such tricks would often be short-lived, precisely because, being artificial, they created a fragile incentive structure and even the slightest doubt would make it fall apart. This is why nowadays I prefer to simply think harder about why I want to do something rather than just trick my brain to doing it. Hopefully this will help me internalize the principle better, and ultimately lead to a more permanent motivation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 01:49 and is filed under discovery, retrospective, whatis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.