My ERE friends and I were discussing the difference between motivation and willpower, and it snowballed into this diagram relating Purpose, Beliefs, motivation, stoke, telicity, action, goals, and a few other things. It’s a bit of a mashup of John Boyd, David Allen, and James Clear, although you have to quint a bit to see it. The diagram is timely for my current project of articulating what I want to do with my life.
My worldview, which is composed of beliefs, values, and truths, informs my sense of Purpose or Identity, my Vision for my life.
Intellectually, Purpose informs my decision-making about what specifically I want to do in life - my Desired Outcomes, which is just another word for Goal or Project. Having defined my Desired Outcomes, the necessary Actions become clear and I can execute them.
It gets interesting when we think about motivation, which bears directly on actions. Where does motivation come from? In my experience, and per this diagram, I’m saying that Purpose Identity and Vision are the fuel for Intrinsic Motivation. There is a direct and strong link.
Willpower is not linked to Purpose or Vision, and it is not connected to as strong a source of energy as intrinsic motivation. In other words, while I believe willpower can be improved and can be useful from time to time, I think it can never be as strong and pure as intrinsic motivation. A life fueled by pure, clean Intrinsic Motivation will go further, longer, than one dependent on willpower.
Most of the time, people don’t think about what they’re doing in terms of a top-down strategic framework. It can be cumbersome to “derive” one’s to-do list every day from Values and Purpose and all the rest - you just want to get on with things. While I think it’s important to take a top-down view occasionally, most of the time running “checks” on my actions is a great way to tune and tweak my system as it runs.
The Telicity Check is an intellectual check - it’s asking “does this action make sense, based on my goals and purpose?” Telos means “object” or “ultimate aim”, so a Telicity Check is just asking if we’re still on target.
The Stoke Check is an emotional check. It’s asking “am I stoked to do this? Am I running on high-octane intrinsic motivation, or am I using willpower to whiteknuckle through something that kind of sucks?” This is a very important check, because it can reveal a lot. If I recognize that I’m struggling to execute something, it could mean a variety of things:
I’m not well connected to my Purpose, my Identity. The action might be well aligned, I’m just not holding that Purpose clearly in my mind. Contemplating the big picture again and getting excited about my Vision for my life might help reinvigorate my actions.
The action isn’t well aligned with my Purpose, actually, even though it intellectually looks like it is. If my gut says “no” even though my brain is cool with it, my brain probably missed something. I need to re-examine the project and either reformulate or drop it.
It’s possible that even though I lack intrinsic motivation for something, I still decide I need to do it. In that case, I’ll intentionally engage willpower to pull it off.
Using this framework I can begin to assemble all these pieces I’ve been writing about and relate them to one another in a cohesive way. That junk drawer of mental models I emptied on to the table a few weeks ago? This diagram will help me click them together like lego blocks.