The Three Components of Motivation
What do you hear people say about motivation? I often hear something along the lines of, “Oh, I’ll get to that if I feel more motivated.” Motivation is much more than a feeling that may come along tomorrow. Motivation is yours to manage and optimize, not something that comes and goes like the weather.
Decide now to take responsibility for your own motivation and read on to learn how to increase it. Flip Uncle Ben’s advice to Spiderman and think: with great responsibility comes great power. And as Brendon Burchard shares in his amazing Motivation Manifesto, “The mother of motivation is choice.” Now is your opportunity to make the choice to be more motivated. It is also the time to make a choice to do the things you’ve been putting off until you feel motivated.
Brendon goes on to explain that motivation is the interplay of three major factors: ambition, expectancy, and hard work. First, ambition is required. With an aspiration to achieve something, a vision, you can aim at something. Second, you must expect that you can achieve your vision. Believing in your ability to achieve makes the difference between being motivated to make something happen or just hoping that it works out. When expectancy fades and doubt creeps in, motivation will wither. This is why it helps to break large goals down to small, manageable tasks that you believe you can accomplish. Then, add motivation’s secret sauce — hard work. It’s ironic that we believe that we will do hard work when we feel motivated, because doing hard work actually increases motivation.
The relationship between hard work and motivation has a lot to do with brain chemistry and flow. In The Rise of Superman, Steven Kotler tells us that experiences of hard work are rewarded with dopamine that entices you to go out and work again. When you are in the zone or having a flow inducing experience, the sensations are even more rewarding. It’s called an autotelic experience, the purpose of getting in flow is to get back to that experience. Work that induces flow naturally drives you to want more of that experience itself.
“The mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” -David Allen
Productivity guru, David Allen, has been teaching something similar for years through his consulting and best-seller, Getting Things Done. Allen’s philosophy is that people fail to get things done because they lack a clear vision of the end goal. In other words, they lack ambition. We often have an ambiguous list of stuff to do, e.g. milk, Mom, card. If we do have a clear vision of the end goal, many still lack an action plan for the next achievable step. So, they lack expectancy because the end goal seems too great to achieve. If a person has an end goal and an achievable next step, they may try to hold it in their memory. Allen demands that people get these things stored outside of their memory, usually in a calendar or notebook. This frees up mental space for actually doing the work and untangles the self-conscious knots that inhibit flow. In Allen’s own words, “The mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”
To put it all together, you can think of motivation as a simple formula. Motivation equals ambition plus expectancy multiplied by hard work. Alter these variables and you will alter your motivation.
Finally, there is a great threat to motivation — distraction. The threat is everywhere. Look around next time you are out in a populated area and you will see distracted people. They go from work to their phone to play in cycles of a few seconds. In The Four-Hour Work-Week, Tim Ferriss describes a process to enhance your experience of life and dramatically increase productivity. Step one is to decide, because choice is the mother of motivation, and step two is to eliminate distractions. Taking just those two steps will radically enhance your motivation. Resist the temptation to follow the distracted herd. You are motivated to do the great thing you were meant to do.