After creating the diagram of my last post, it was a trivial matter to snap in the elements I had lying around already, like so:
The path straight down the blue boxes is very intellectual and linear; each level follows from the previous and it all makes clear sense. Honestly, the blue boxes describe my GTD system pretty well. After a decade of tuning and tweaking, my execution system is habituated, organized, and efficient, so there’s nothing terribly new there.
The new thing, to me, is that bit on the left - the arrows linking Purpose to Intrinsic Motivation to Action, the story of what stoke Is. I think that intrinsic motivation is potentially much more powerful than willpower and discipline, because it taps deep into basic human drives for autonomy, competence, and purpose. Willpower has more to do with one’s ability to endure suffering, which is certainly useful, but it’s limited. Willpower is one’s capacity to hammer away at something without quitting, even though quitting sounds real nice. Intrinsic motivation is one’s fount of curiosity, sense of exploration and play, and desire. When powered by intrinsic motivation, the thought of quitting sounds terrible. You don’t want to quit.
I’ve spent a lot of time in my life doing things that made intellectual sense, and I’ve exerted a lot of willpower. I’ve done things because I thought I should; because I thought it would make other people happy (and if I made other people happy then maybe they’d love me); because the money was good; because I’d already started, and I had Loss Aversion to admitting I should back out; because I’d unconsciously bought in to a whole load of narratives that I was too proud to admit that I’d been suckered by; and, finally because that’s what the latest diagram I drew up said I should do.
I’m not very practiced at doing things because I actually, truly, purely want to. I resist it. I talk myself out of doing things I want to do because it'd be selfish, or it’s Not on The Diagram. Now that I have the free time to explore my actual desires (due to my FU Lifestyle Design), I’m learning that shifting my motivations from extrinsic to intrinsic isn’t trivial. There is unlearning to do.
I suspect that people have something like grooves, and if they can find those grooves and stay in them, a lot of friction goes away and they can go far. Going far still requires work, but the effort is joyful and you’ll go further in a groove than out of a groove for any given amount of energy expended.
The grooves are subtle, though, and they can seem like just another bump in the road if you’re traveling crosswise and aren’t paying attention. At the moment, I’m not very good at looking for my grooves. I’m not attuned to my own sense of stoke. I’m detached from my own genuine desires. Finding my grooves, hearing the voice of my desires, is a very different form of knowing than the linear intellectuality I’m used to and pretty good at. My work, right now, is learning to become good at finding and staying in my grooves.
