I’ve got this idea that intrinsic motivation is the key to both enjoyment of activity and high performance, to personal fulfillment and ‘results’, however I choose to define that.
I’m convinced that stoke kicks willpowers ass any day of the week. So I’ve been focused on how to amplify, cultivate, nurture, etc my stoke, by boosting intrinsic motivation and deemphasizing extrinsic motivation. I’ve been working on this for a while.
The first phase was subtractive. I simplified my life, took out as many elements of it as weren’t entirely necessary. This took a while. My life had a lot of clutter in it.
The next phase was rejuvenative. I healed, did yoga, did internal self-reflective work, slept as much as I wanted, and spent lots of time outdoors. I had a lot to unlearn.
After that I became inquisitive about my ‘natural’ relationship with stoke and intrinsic motivation. I had a long list of projects and activities that I theoretically wanted to do, but I didn’t force myself to do them. If I felt like doing them, I did them. If I didn’t feel like doing them, I didn’t. I didn’t get a whole lot done during this phase, but I did learn to sense what authentic ‘wanting’ felt like. It felt like surfing.
I’m not a surfer, but I used to go on walks along the surf spots in Santa Cruz all the time and watch the surfers. You know what surfers mostly spend their time doing? Floating. They just float there, sitting on their boards, waiting for a wave. Every once in a while a wave comes, and they see and feel it coming, so then they get in position and paddle furiously and catch the wave and ride it and woohoo and then… they float more.
The floating is important though. If they were busily paddling around in circles or playing games splashing each other or maybe bopping a beach ball around while waiting for a wave to come in, they’d probably miss it because they weren’t paying attention and even if they did notice it, they’d probably be too tuckered out to catch it. So intentional floating is an important part of surfing, it seems.
That’s what that phase was like for me. I had to mostly do nothing except sit around waiting for a stoke wave to come along. If I spent a lot of time watching Netflix or doomscrolling or something, I wouldn’t notice the stoke wave, so I had to mostly do very little. When a surge of stoke did come along, I’d be ready for it, and I’d go put my tool belt on or open the PV calc model I was building and get after it.
In a few hours the stokewave would subside and I’d stop what I was doing and go back to doing mostly nothing. This sounds boring, and it is. At least I wasn’t shivering in the Pacific like those surfers.
What I learned was very valuable though. I learned what it felt like to do something because I wanted to do it, and not because of some external reward. I was learning - relearning, rather - what intrinsic motivation feels like. It’d been so long since I’d done anything for my own purely internal and arbitrary reasons that I honestly couldn’t remember what it felt like.
In the past I’d done things for all kinds of reasons: for a paycheck, for a boss, for a partner, for The Movement, for the Good of the Planet (or so I thought). Those things filled up my life and I didn’t have time to do things I wanted to do for myself, so I forgot what it was like. I was very rusty.
After proving to myself that I was indeed still capable of doing things for intrinsic reasons, I turned my attention to the next logical question: could I generate my own stokewaves? Is it possible to spend less time just floating around waiting for internal desire to strike? Where do those stokewaves come from, anyway? Can I produce them ex nihilo, on command?
From what I was reading I suspected it was possible. I suspected it was a skill, actually, and that if I could learn the methods I’d be able to spend much more time under a state of stoke. I read about flow, the dopamine system, workflow design, and the neuroscience of intrinsic motivation.
Workflow Process Design
I have a lot left to learn, but I thought I’d explain where I’m at with this. At the moment, I’m focused on what Ahrens calls workflow design. It’s the idea that if you create a well designed structure, you can create a positive feedback loop between pleasurable experience and performance.
In other words, with the right structure, you can create an enjoyable experience. Humans tend to perform better when they’re enjoying what they’re doing (rather than, say, feeling coerced into doing it), so they do a good job. It feels good to do a good job, so you spend more time doing the thing. The more time you spend doing the thing, the better you get. The better you get, the funner it is. It becomes a positive feedback loop.
If it’s difficult to go along with the idea that structure can have such an effect, consider a couple tanks of rocket fuel. Imagine the tanks of liquid oxygen and hydrogen just sort of overflow into a puddle, and then someone lights it on fire. It’ll go fffwuuump, or, I don’t know, maybe it’ll go kerblooie, but either way nothing recognizably useful is going to happen.
Now imagine there’s a nozzle (which is a structure!), and the liquid O2 and H spill together inside a chamber where the only exit is through the nozzle and then get lit on fire. Result: low earth orbit, or Mars, or wherever you want to go.
Well designed structures are powerful, is the point.
Everyone has inside of them an incredible amount of potential, but without well designed (or luckily stumbled upon and adopted) structures that direct and concentrate that potential, it’ll go ffwump. Or, worse, kerblooie. I want my personal energy to go sssssssshhhheeeoooooowwwwww. Y’know?
I’ve experimented with a few different structures and am converging on the following structure. Five days a week, my days go like this:
A 90-minute session for writing first thing in the morning.
A 90-minute session for focused work on anything on The List* in the middle of the day.
A 90-minute session for study in the evening.
*The List can only have three things on it. At the moment The List has my two PV Design Projects and the seismic retrofit stuff for my Studio.
You might be thinking that that’s a pretty underwhelming structure. Where’s the hustle, man?! Where’s the part where I make ferocious faces at myself in a mirror while hyperventilating? And what the hell, that’s only like 4.5 hours of stuff! What do you do with the other 11.5 hours you’re awake, you lazy bum!
Well, one thing this structure does is it ensures that I’m spending energy on what I currently consider to be my ‘big rocks’, the kinds of activities that I care the most about.
For my own reasons, I want to be writing every day.
Because I believe in the power of continuous self-education, and because it’s fun, I want to be studying every day.
And I have a whole wad of projects that aren’t going to do themselves, so the middle session is to make sure I don’t fall behind on that stuff.
Anthony Trollope wrote that “A small daily task, if it be truly daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” I love this quote. I tried to teach myself 3d art for years, mostly unsuccessfully. The most impactful thing I did to improve my skills was to take an hour every morning to make a 3d ‘sketch’. That one practice boosted my skills more than any other thing I ever did. It didn’t take any monumental effort. It just took showing up every day.
The other reason I don’t have my schedule totally packed is because I want to have plenty of ‘wandering’ time. This is an important element of the art of leisure. You can’t madly rush around all the time and expect interesting ideas to come to you, and I’ve found it ineffective to plan out all of my projects. I have my structured time that gives me clear direction on what to do, and then I have my wander time, where I let my intuition and curiosity take over.
I’ve found there’s a link between the structured time and the wander time. The structured time gives a sort of momentum to my daily energy. When I finish one of my focus sessions, I tend to be energized and in a fairly high state of stoke or mental arousal. It’s like the sessions are an energy booster. So when I cruise into wander time, I typically find myself seizing the opportunity and diving in to some other project or activity I feel like doing.
…Unless I feel lousy or tired that day, in which case I take a nap or just lounge around and read some sci-fi. Which is also a reason the structure is as slack as it is: I want the space to be able to rest when I need rest without feeling guilty about faffing off.
Jedi Mind Tricks
Well designed structure, I’m finding, is necessary but not sufficient to maximize time spent in a state of stoke. I also have to trick myself into wanting to do what I want to do.
What? Yes. We all want to do things, but when it comes time to actually do the thing, all of a sudden we’d rather fart around on Instagram or wash our hair or something. Apparently there are things we want to do that we don’t want to do, but it’s not because we don’t actually want to do them, it’s because we aren’t in total control of our brains and our brains like to mess with us.
I’m not going to try to explain these mechanisms because, frankly, I don’t understand them well enough yet to do it justice. I’d probably get something wrong. I’ll just explain what is working for me, so far, to control my brain. Here it is:
I tell myself I enjoy the thing I want to enjoy doing.
Impressed? It’s sophisticated, I know. I had to read a whole stack of peer reviewed journals to come up with that.
All right, there’s a little more to it, but not much.
It’s all about intrinsic motivation, right? I’m trying to avoid allowing external ‘rewards’ to influence my experience of activities. So I use really simple mindfulness techniques to keep my attention on the presentness of the activity itself, and not on whatever result I want it to manifest in my life.
Before I gather my tools to go install the PV racking system on the well shed roof, I tell myself, “Aw, I’m really psyched for this. I get to work with tools and build things and stuff.”
While I’m working on the PV racking system on the well shed roof, I tell myself “This is great. I love working and building things. This is the sort of thing I live for.”
After I finish working on the PV racking system on the well shed roof, I tell myself “That was great. I really enjoyed that.” And I reminisce about what it felt like to be swinging the hammer, cutting the metal, snapping the chalk line, etc.
If, in the course of the activity, it starts to suck, I focus on enjoying the pain or the effort. If I have to carry a heavy ladder that’s digging into my shoulder, I say “This hurts, and I love that. I love the challenge of it. This is the sort of thing I get out of bed for.”
If it’s cold and windy, I say to myself “How awesome is it that I get to challenge myself by building something cool while being in adverse conditions. How lucky I am that it’s cold and I can barely feel my fingers right now.”
When, not if, I notice my attention straying to the completion of the project, the paycheck, the result of the work, I do my best to notice the thought and just bring my attention to the presentness of the effort, the pursuit, the flow of what I’m doing. I don’t beat myself up for thinking about the future, I just… redirect my attention back to what I’m doing, and remind myself of how much I’m enjoying it.
Some people will find it easier than others to ‘fool’ themselves into feeling a certain way about their circumstances. I find it relatively easy. I’m eager to believe good things about my experiences, and I’ve always enjoyed challenging circumstances. My self-suggestibility is high. That gets me into trouble sometimes, but it’s useful when I’m the person trying to trick myself for my own good.
Results
So far this system is working well. Three ‘focus’ sessions a day, and some mindfulness stuff to stay focused on the intrinsic experience of activity.
I tried four sessions for a week. It was too much. I didn’t have enough time to wander, I felt rushed, and it became very difficult to trick myself into being present-focused. Counterintuitively, I got less stuff done that week, and enjoyed it less, than when I dropped back down to three focus sessions.