Summer break has ended for many of us and you are back at work or at school and have many goals you want to accomplish. This might be a time of motivational struggle. You find yourself having trouble doing your work, exercising and eating healthily, so you blame yourself for not having more willpower or for procrastinating too much.
According to behavioral science, you can stop worrying about your willpower and quit calling yourself “procrastinator.” To stay motivated, you need to change your circumstances and outlook, not your personality.
I'm Ayelet Fishback, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago. I've been studying what it takes to be successful in goal pursuit for over 20 years as an academic, a parent and an immigrant. I've also struggled with motivation myself. Let me offer a few interventions that can increase your productivity at work, school and beyond.
When monitoring progress, looking back is often the way to move forward. For any goal, you can look back at what you have achieved, as well as forward at what is still left to do. When Minjung Koo and I surveyed people standing in a long line for an amusement park ride in South Korea, we found that when they looked back and saw how far they'd come, they were more motivated to wait. Back at the University of Chicago, when uncommitted students look back at the materials that they have already covered for a final exam, their motivation to keep studying increased. Beware of long middles. We call it the middle problem. We are highly motivated at the beginning, we want to reach our goal and we want to do it right. Over time, our motivation declines as we lose steam. To the extent that our goal has a clear end point, as in the case of graduating with a diploma, our motivation will pick up again toward the end.
In one experiment, Rima Touré-Tillery and I found that people literally cut corners in the middle of a project. We handed our participants a pair of scissors and asked them to cut out several identical shapes with many corners. They cut through more corners in the middle of the task. This solution? Keep middles short. A weekly healthy eating goal is better than a monthly eating healthy goal as it offers fewer days to cheat on your diet.
It's hard to learn from feedback, especially negative one. Emotionally, failure bruises the ego. We tune out, missing the information feedback offers. Cognitively, people also struggle. The information in negative feedback is less direct than the information in positive feedback. Whereas success points us to a winning strategy, from failure, people need to infer what not to do. To increase learning from negative feedback, try giving advice to others who might be struggling with a similar problem. Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Angela Duckworth and I found that when students, job seekers and overweight individuals gave others advice on how to succeed in studying, finding a job and eating healthily, they were more motivated to follow through.
Support intrinsic motivation. You're intrinsically motivated when you pursue an activity that feels like an end in itself. You do something for the sake of doing it. If you wish you had a few more minutes to finish your walk by the end of the day, you're intrinsically motivated. If you can't wait to go home, you aren't. To increase intrinsic motivation, start with selecting activities that you enjoy pursuing. A workout that you actually enjoy is more likely to become part of your routine. Often people choose the wrong activity. In an experiment, Kaitlin Woolley and I asked people to choose between listening to the song “Hey Jude” by the Beatles and listening to a loud alarm. Seems like an obvious choice, right? But the majority of the people chose the alarm because it paid more. Later, these people regretted their choice.
Whether you look back, cut the middle, give advice, support intrinsic motivation, keep in mind, success does not require changing yourself. To stop procrastinating, modify your situation and outlook.
Whitney Pennington Rodgers: Thank you so much, that was wonderful. And I'd love to get into some of the pieces that you suggested. I think maybe one place to really start is this idea of intrinsic motivation. So could you talk a little bit about intrinsic motivation? What is it and why is it so important?
AF: Yes, intrinsic motivation is critical for success, because intrinsic motivation is the things that we are getting from doing the activity. An activity is purely intrinsically motivating when it's an end in itself, when it doesn't even make sense to ask, "Why do I do it?" I do it because I like doing it. Well, when we try to motivate ourselves, usually we have some goals that are not purely intrinsically motivating. Like, I need to finish this project at work, or I need to study for this class. But still, there is some level of intrinsic motivation. It might be interesting, OK? It might be fun. It might be energizing. And the more I feel like doing this thing is an end in itself, the more motivated people are going to be.
Now, let me also add that this is not intuitive for people. I've mentioned that when we ask people to choose between two activities, they went for the activity that paid more and not for the one that they were more likely to enjoy and actually stick at that job later. We see that there are two mispredictions. People think that other people don't care about intrinsic motivation as much as they do, and they think that they themselves will not care about intrinsic motivation as much as they end up caring. And that can explain a lot of the professional choices that we make that are not ideal, choosing the wrong workout regimen, the wrong healthy diet for ourselves because we don't quite appreciate how important it is to choose something that is not only a means to an end, but also feels like the end by itself.
WPR: Since we're talking about some of the things you shared in the talk, I'd love to also go back to another piece you mentioned there, which is just about negative feedback. And you said that it's hard for people to learn from negative feedback. So could you talk a little bit more about that and what sort of feedback, how we can lean more into this, the positive feedback as you describe?
AF: Absolutely. So let me first say that I don't say that there is not much in negative feedback. There is. There are important lessons in negative feedback. However, it's hard to learn those lessons. And it's hard, first, because emotionally, negative feedback feels bad. So we disengage, we tune out. In one of the studies that we ran, we found that people don't remember the feedback and don't even remember their answer when it's negative. They just disengage with a task, they don't learn. The other reason that it's harder to learn from negative feedback is much more cognitive. It's not what we expected to hear. And so, you know, if you did something, expecting something to happen and then it happened, like, you kind of had a prediction that was supported with what later happened, and you remember it. When you get negative feedback, it's often not what you expected. And that can be a very confusing experience for people. And so they just don't learn. It is cognitively a harder task to learn from what's not. It's learning by elimination.
So negative feedback is important. There are often unique lessons in negative feedback, not to mention that if we don't learn from negative feedback, we're probably missing just a lot of the information that is out there. And so we need to be able to do that. And I mentioned giving advice, like, one of the strategies that we can use to learn from negative feedback. We also need to realize that it is so much easier to learn from positive feedback. So, you know, whenever we can teach someone through positive feedback, they are probably going to be more attentive and better able to learn.
WPR: And you talk about that in the way of giving advice and that sort of, puts you in the space of thinking positively towards someone and maybe potentially receiving more positive feedback yourself.
AF: Yes, and not only it puts you in a position of power and doing something useful for the feedback, helping another person, it also forces you to think about what you have learned, OK? I know when we ask people to give advice, in particular people that are struggling, their immediate response is like, "What do I know?" "Why would you ask me? I'm unemployed." Well, not me, but the person we are asking. "I'm unemployed, Why would you ask me about how to get a job?" And you kind of need to remind them, "Well, you know how to get a job because you've been doing that, because you've been struggling." And that forces the person to think about what they have learned. And so we're kind of tackling both the emotional barrier to learning and the cognitive barrier to learning.
WPR: We have a question here from TED Member Mariam. They ask, "How do we find perseverance and grit for the dreams and goals that take time?" So how do we redefine the timelines and bring that into our life?
AF: Oh, Mariam, that’s a real problem, right? Because ... Because of the middle problem, right? Because we are excited when we start on something, we are excited when we are about to achieve an important milestone or the ultimate goal. And in the middle, we lose steam. We lose our motivation. And what I would say is, break your goal into sub-goals.
Saving for retirement is, you know, my ultimate example. Saving for retirement is really a hard goal because you need to start working on this goal when you are so far from completing the goal, OK? When it seems like it's going to be a different person, that they don't really know that you would benefit from pursuing this goal. But you can think about your annual savings, how much did you save this year for retirement, not how much you're going to save in total. Exercising goal. People talk about a weekly exercising goal. Now, clearly you do not just want to exercise this week. You will have that goal again next week. Well, you set the weekly exercise goal so it has a beginning and an end and very short middle. School is an interesting one because it is actually easier in higher education where we break the year more clearly into terms which are relatively short. So there is not much of a middle. And for kids, they have the long year, which is kind of hard, like, you start in September so maybe you are excited on the first week and then you will be again excited in June when the school year is about to end. But there's such a long middle. Break it into a weekly goal, a monthly goal, something that has a short middle and that is not long-term. People are not good at pursuing something where the benefits are very far.
WPR: I mean, in your research, have you found that people of different backgrounds, you know, by age or gender or race, that they experience motivation differently or that there are certain strategies that are more helpful?
AF: There is a lot of research on developmental effects. You brought up several other variables that just get me thinking in like, ten different directions right now. So let me focus on the age. There are some really interesting developmental effects. Self-control develops with age, so the ability to put aside something because there is something more important that you want to do, that's something that develops into your 20s and that suggests that maybe there is another reason why we should stop calling our teenagers “procrastinators” and blaming them for lack of self-control. They are still developing it. At a later age, we see that as people's resources, our physical resources are on the decline, then there are new challenges. And I briefly touch the idea that you often need to find a compromise between several goals, and you need to think about how you pursue several goals at the same time. In research, we often look at this in terms of finding activities and we refer to them as multi-final. They achieve more than one goal.
It's like, my example is bringing lunch from home to your office. This is healthier and saves you time and it's often better food, at least for me, OK? So you achieve several goals at the same time. With older age, often you need to give more thought into how to choose activities that allow you to interact with other people while also getting your daily exercise, while also maybe enjoying the fresh air outside, just bringing more to the same activity because maybe there's just less resources.
We also see that you need to drop some goals in your life. And you know, we always drop goals when they are no longer useful for us. So maybe you used to run and at one point that didn't feel right for your body, you were able to do it and you had to switch to a different exercise. And people often have crises when they need to switch from one goal to another, but goals need to be dropped.
WPR: Well, TED Member Ron asks a question about progress. They want to know, “What do you do if you look back over the last week or month, and you're disappointed in the progress you've made. How do you move forward from that feeling?"
AF: So you can choose whether to look back or to look forward, Ron, right? At any point, it's completely up to you. You can look at what you achieved. You can look at what is still missing. And you can kind of try to see what’s motivating for you. If you are disappointed with the progress that you have made, now you have the choice how to frame your disappointment. Is it lack of commitment or lack of progress? Now let's think about it. If it's lack of progress, then, you know, your disappointment is healthy, OK? That suggests that you should do more. You have not made progress, so let's just double the effort, let's work harder. If your interpretation is lack of commitment, well, that's not great, because now you assume that you did not make progress because probably you cannot make progress and will never make progress. And we can see how that kind of thinking is not very healthy.
And so what we find in studies is that when people frame past failures, or some setbacks as lack of progress, that increases motivation. "I did not exercise yesterday, I should definitely exercise today." When they think about this lack of commitment, this is where we see problem. "I did not exercise yesterday. I might not have it in me. Maybe I will never be able to be the person that I wanted to be." It's up to you. The framing is something that you can choose.
WPR: Well, one member asks about procrastinating for fear of failing. Do you have any tips for dealing with that?
AF: Yes, there is some literature on what we call “self-handicapping.” And self-handicapping is an interesting phenomenon. It's like the student that purposely did not sleep the night before the exam so that if she doesn't do well, she can blame the circumstances. She can say, "Well, I was too tired to do well." And we see that sometimes people do that because they're afraid to try because they are afraid about what failure might mean for who they are. I think that as a society, we should probably just have healthier relationships with setbacks. There is a lot of work in motivation science about how to learn from failure, how to learn from a setback. Probably the basic thing is to understand that there are lessons in there, OK? That that was not a wasted experience. That made me the person that I am, that enriched me somehow. Think about it. If you try to cook something, and you burn the dish, well, you don't have dinner, but you learned something about cooking, OK? And think about what you have learned.
WPR: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure we have a lot of people on who are part of teams or, you know, working in groups and TED Member Colm, they ask about how you can motivate and unstick a group of people, a team. They lead multiple medium-sized teams and sometimes can sense that they're feeling a lack of motivation among the team members.
AF: Yeah, well, the larger the team, the larger the problem with motivation. Basically, this is what we call “social loafing.” When there are many people that can do the work, then we all tend to leave the work to someone else. And we see these effects really increasing very rapidly with the size of the team. So there will be less social loafing in a team of two people and much more when it's a team of ten. We know that since basically Ringelmann, a French engineer, ran studies, so in some studies with men pulling a rope at the beginning of the 20th century, as you can imagine, when several men pull a rope together, they invest less effort, than when they do it by themselves. And we see it in studies all the time. The simplest solution: make sure that you can identify people's contributions. That it's not one pile of contribution. We know how much each person did. We can say that, Whitney, this is how much you did, and Ayelet, this is how much you did.
We even see this with donation. So, you know, sometimes you give money to charity and it all goes into some like, large bucket, and your 10-dollar contribution feels like a drop in the ocean. Other times, some organizations and charity campaigns, they make sure that they list each donation. So you can see that Whitney gave 10 dollars, and this is much more motivating and likely takes care of the problem with having a large group of people working together toward the goal.
WPR: I think sort of, in the same bucket of thinking about positive and negative ways to motivate in groups, TED Member Hahnsol asks, from an individual perspective, about the difference between positive and negative motivation. You know, "I want to do this" versus "I need to do this to avoid trouble." Is there one that's better than the other in terms of keeping a person motivated?
AF: I would say that yes. "Do" goals are better than "do not" goals. Approach goals are better than avoidance goals. What do I mean by that? When you invite people to bring more positive thoughts to their lives, this is much easier than when you tell them not to think about something negative. Push away negative thoughts. When you invite people to bring more healthy foods to their their diet, that's easier than removing foods from their diet.
"Do not" goals are problematic, in particular when we think about the long run, when we think about doing things more than today and this week. There are two reasons. One reason is that this approach, these "to do" goals, tend to just bring to mind what you need to do, whereas the "do not" goals tend to bring to mind what you should not do. So if you think that you should stop doing something or stop thinking about something, how do you know if you are successful? You ask yourself, "Do I still have this forbidding thought?" Well, by asking, you bring it to mind, OK? The other reason is just reactive, OK? When I tell you that you should not eat something, this is exactly the thing that you want to eat. Like, don't look to the right. Well, everybody's now looking to the right, right?
Let me also say that the one big advantage of avoidance goals, of "do not" goals, is that they seem urgent. If I tell you that you should stop eating red meat, then it seems more urgent than let's say, eat more green vegetables. And so avoidance goals have their place in our life, they seem urgent.
Now, the question was also about like, needs vs. wants, which somewhat overlap with the approach/avoidance, but not totally. There are things that we feel like we're absolutely required to do like, we might feel that a high school degree is like, "I need to do it. This is absolutely a must." Whereas, a higher education, "I want to do that." Like, that might be an extra bonus. That might be a wonderful thing to do. And then we find that there are different emotions that are associated with these different goals. So, you know, whereas success on a need, successfully pursuing a need is more likely to be associated with feeling relieved and "Oh, I did this." Success on a "want" goal, an aspiration, is more likely to make us proud and make us feel that we have done more than we should have done.
WPR: TED Member Jo-Neal is just curious about sticking to a schedule and how important that is to reaching a goal and tips for doing that.
AF: Yeah, thanks for asking about schedule. Many people like to have a "to do" list and kind of, going by the "to do" list. Just a personal anecdote. When I was debating the many covers for my book, one of them has a "to do" list that was proposed by the publisher. And I said, “Well, I can’t have a ‘to do’ list on the cover because I don’t recommend ‘to do’ lists, and I don’t write about ‘to do’ lists.” And so you kind of know how I feel about sticking to your "to do" list and the schedule. It's good to write down what you want to do. And I actually suggest drawing your goal system so your different goals and relationship between them, whether they help or suppress each other, just that you understand your priorities. But then the idea about goals, the beauty about goals, is that they get you going. They they give you purpose, they make you intrinsically motivated, they make you engage, you get to connect to other people over goals. You get to feel good. Whether you have actually reached all these goals on your "to do" list? Often, who cares, OK? It doesn't really matter. It matters that you made progress. So I'm not a fan of strictly making sure that you checked everything on the list.
WPR: We’re wrapping up here, and actually there was just one question as a follow up from before, which was just about, if not "to do" list, what's sort of an alternative to that approach?
AF: A goal system. Now a goal system is basically you writing down the main goals that you currently want to pursue, OK? So it doesn't need to be in your entire life, but in this time, in the year, like what are the things that are important for me? And it could be like, in terms of my social relationship, work, projects at home, what are the things that you want to achieve, OK? And then what are the activities that serve any of these goals and understand the relationship between these goals, between these activities, being particular on the look for activities that help you achieve several goals simultaneously. These are the things that you want to do.
WPR: And just as we're wrapping up here, if there's one thing for folks to take away from this conversation, what do you feel like is the big piece of advice that everyone should apply to their lives?
AF: You motivate yourself by changing the situation and the framing of the situation. It's not about fantasizing that you will be a different person. It's really about changing what surrounds you and how you see that, how you find your outlook of what's around you.
This is basically the lesson, by the way, from the social sciences, so this is not just for motivation, this is how we explain people's behavior in terms of the situation that they are responding to. And it's very applicable to staying motivated.
WPR: Thank you so much, Ayelet, for joining us today.
AF: Thanks, everyone, for having me.
Thank you, Whitney, for all these wonderful questions.
[Want to support TED?]
[Become a TED Member!]
[Learn more at ted.com/membership]
