Motivating Yourself

The Lazy Person's Way Of Motivating Yourself To Be Successful

If you've been alive for any length of time, you may have run into the notion that "success takes discipline." You have to "motivate yourself" to do your best. If you want to get that corner office and succeed, you have to take on unbelievably stressful hours. You have to "sacrifice." Your parents may have told you this in one form or another, then your teachers, and then finally the books you read or the friends you talk to.

Mark is a 34 year old who's heard this. So he dutifully takes on more at the office, sometimes working 80-hour work weeks. He barely has time to see his wife and daughter at home, and when he does, he's usually responding to office emails via his Blackberry. It feels long and grinding. On top of this, Mark really doesn't even enjoy what he's doing all that much. So he just focuses on how everything will work out once he gets that corner office. It takes a rigorous amount of discipline to keep motivating yourself to do this. So let's do something really, really helpful for him.

 

Let's tell Mark that there's a better way of motivating yourself, a lazier way, if you will.

This lazy way is simply trying to succeed at an activity that you're naturally motivated to do, something you really enjoy. I know you're probably thinking "but don't you need discipline to really succeed"? After all, you'll often hear successful entrepreneurs tell you about the long hours they worked. It seems like you'd need a certain amount of discipline to do that. And you do.

Yet, these same success stories will tell you how naturally motivated they felt to do what they did. There was no "grind". There was no sense of "sacrifice", in the sense that you had to put off something that made you happy and do something that made you unhappy for a while. Yes, these folks were completely engaged in what they were doing. If you're a bit of a skeptic like I can be sometimes, you might be saying "oh really?"

 

So let's see what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has to say.

Now Mihaly has been studying something called flow. Flow is "completely focused motivation." You can think of it as a feeling that is nearly the opposite of depression and anxiety. From his studies, Mihaly found that being in a state of flow had the following characteristics:

• complete involvement or focus in what one was doing
• a sense of being outside everyday reality (ecstasy)
• knowing what needs to be done and how well one is doing (inner clarity)
• knowing we have the skill to perform the activity
• no worries about oneself (serenity)
• hours seem to pass by in minutes (timelessness)
• the activity itself is its own reward (intrinsic motivation)

Have you ever felt like that? Maybe you have a favorite hobby like skiing or fishing. Perhaps it's painting or chess. Did you feel like you needed "discipline" to motivate yourself to do those activities? You may have needed discipline to get up early and go skiing in the morning, but unlike Mark at the office, I doubt you needed to keep motivating yourself to ski the way Mark has to force (I mean, "discipline") himself to keep working 80-hour workweeks. And it's because you experienced flow in those activities. That's why I think of flow as a "lazy" way of motivating yourself, though certainly you're not just lying around on a beach.

 

But can achieving flow as a natural way of motivating yourself translate into real-world success?

Case Study #1: Diane Warren

You may not have heard of Diane Warren. But I'll bet you've heard some famous songs written by her. She's written more than 75 top ten hits. Her credits include I Don't Want to Miss a Thing (sung by Aerosmith on the Armageddon soundtrack), Unbreak My Heart (sung by Toni Braxton), Because You Loved Me (sung by Celine Dion), If I Could Turn Back Time (sung by Cher), How Do I Live (a hit for both Leann Rimes and Trisha Yearwood), and How Can We Be Lovers (sung by Michael Bolton). Her company, Realsongs, brings in millions of dollars per year. And what does Diane have to say about what she does for a living?

"It's not a business. It’s my love and my life.  It's like breathing, you know.  I'm still as enthusiastic as I ever was.  I haven’t lost the enthusiasm.  I just keep doing it, keep writing songs."¹

It sounds like she's achieved a state of flow.

 

Case Study #2: J.K. Rowling

You've probably heard of J.K. Rowling, the author of the worldwide best-selling Harry Potter novels. In her own words, "I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now."² Ms. Rowling got the idea for Harry Potter in 1990 and spent the next 17 years working on it while holding down various jobs and being on welfare³. That's the kind of intrinsic motivation that is characteristic of flow.

 

 

Case Study #3: Sergey Brin and Larry Page

Google was started by two gifted Stanford graduate students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The algorithm which underlies Google's enormous success as a search engine, PageRank, didn't come about because Page wanted to start a technology company. The idea came about because of Larry's fascination of the world wide web's mathematical characteristics, and applying the principles of a field of study called graph theory to it. Together with his friend Sergey Brin, they invented the PageRank algorithm (named after Larry), the backbone of the Google search engine that enabled it to return more relevant search results than its competitors⁴. While I haven't personally talked to Sergey and Larry about this breakthrough, everything I've read suggests it was their interest in what they were studying that led to the PageRank algorithm and the foundation of Google. It sounds like flow to me.

 

Is there a place for discipline in motivating yourself?

Of course. It takes a certain amount of discipline to get up in the morning and begin writing songs, novels, or creating a search engine algorithm. It's a basic part of learning how to motivate yourself. But if the activity itself produces a state of flow, you won't feel like you're forcing yourself to do it. Unlike Mark, you'll naturally want to do it. And that's the lazy person's way of motivating yourself to be successful.

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