How to SCIENTIFICALLY hack motivation and be unstoppable

motivation is split up into two different types intrinsic and extrinsic motivation extrinsic motivation comes from external sources for example your parents yelling at you societal expectations there's videos that you see on YouTube that are trying to motivate you and of course rewards for example if I pay you to do something intrinsic motivation comes from within it comes from your goals and Ambitions and it comes from the beliefs that you have about yourself it also comes from the stuff that you care about and have a vested interest in part of training to be a teacher involves something called critical motivation Theory essentially how to motivate students in order to do what you need to do after all it's very hard to teach students that aren't motivated so part of this involves research and the theory itself which supports the claim that extrinsic motivation is actually quite poor for long-term results as an example let's say you are trying to study and you watch a motivational video in order to get you to study now that works right it works the first time and then tomorrow you watch the same video to try and study does it have as big an impact what about the third day what about a week after what about a month of watching that video Even if you change the video it shows that there's an exponential decrease in the amount of motivation you can get from the same type of reward it's the same thing as if you went to class let's say your teacher paid you to be quiet or paid you to learn the content that would have diminishing returns over time instead we cannot rely a solely on extrinsic means because if you think about it studying learning a new skill going to the gym Etc are long-term goals so we cannot rely solely on these extrinsic means Studies have also linked intrinsic motivation to success the students getting the top grades the people building those Fortune 500 companies the people that are millionaires the people that are have long-term healthy habits are all intrinsically motivated people but what exactly is intrinsic motivation in a 1985 study done by the University of Rochester psychologist Richard Ryan and Edward Dei a theory called self-determination theory was developed and established three psychological needs that motivate people from within number one autonomy the idea that you're in control of your life and you can control what you do now let me give you a scenario have you ever been willing to go and wash the dishes for example and then your mom tells you to do it and then suddenly you don't want to do it anymore you're experiencing the loss of autonomy you see you're motivated to go clean your house or clean your room or do whatever it is until someone else is telling you to do it so in order to kind of develop this intrinsic motivation you need to have an sense of autonomy a sense of control about what you are doing number two competence people like doing stuff they're good at now of course this is a bit self-defeating right because how are you meant to get good at something without being good at it in the first place if that's part of motivation and we will get on to that in a minute but it involves something called a growth mindset point three relatedness the idea that what you're doing Direct ly links to your goals and Ambitions in the future but it also gives you a place within society that it's helping out your family and your friends makes you part of a community but again it it is related to your goals and Ambitions for the future intrinsic motivation is maximized when all three of these needs are met it's not good enough just to have one or two ideally to have the most amount of motivation you need to have all three okay so how exactly do I become intrinsically motivated well the first thing you need to do is reframe your mindset don't study or work or exercise because you have to instead do it because you enjoy learning new things you enjoy doing new things or you enjoy the healthy habits that you're developing you also need to kind of cultivate an enjoyment of actually making progress and accomplishing things instead of regretting or disliking the work that you have to do instead think of the reward and the accomplishment at the end this way you can really reframe your mindset to involve relatedness and also cultivate an enjoyment of actually being productive another thing you could do is trying to make the work fun now I know this might seem impossible at times but here are some suggestions that I found for a few different types of things you might want to do for exercising try and get a gym buddy or try and do some kind of sports or games a lot of the stuff online tells you that you need to exercise you need to be doing weightlifting you need to be doing cardio and stuff like that instead exercising realistically you can benefit from just doing sports right or playing some kind of related game with it any kind of physical activity and again having a group of friends go with you also helps for revising don't just endlessly answer questions in a textbook or from a past paper and or just take notes Instead try and explain topics to different people create a poster or video to make the work work more engaging and even explain it to other people if you're learning a new language try and switch up the kind of input that you're getting instead of just going on like du lingo or reading a textbook again try and watch TV shows and YouTube videos even if you're not understanding earning 100% of it it at least makes the work more fun and you're gaining some amount of benefit which will keep you motivated to actually do the more boring tasks and that's the key thing here you can still do the boring work however if you mix in some fun stuff it will motivate you to do the boring work for example there are people especially that do rugby or American football for example who don't really like exercising but when they get into the sport they're motivated to exercise so they can get stronger and get better at the sport same with mixed martial arts or boxing people that do boxing they may not like exercising but they like being good at boxing but how can they get good at boxing by exercising so you can see you get that motivation for both things it's the same thing if you were to make videos on revising well you can only do that once you're good at revising when you know the topic the next thing is to challenge Yourself by setting realistic achievable goals now I talk to students a hell of a lot and as you can imagine I hear a lot of unrealistic expectations for for example we may have a test in a month and they may say oh it's fine I'll study on the Saturday before I'll cover all of the content or they'll say oh it's okay well I need to get my head down I need to start studying I'm going to do six chapters over the weekend I'm going to do four on Saturday and two on Sunday and they get really excited about all of this the problem with that is it's not exactly realistic now what's the problem with not having a realistic goal I mean instead of doing six chapters what if I still do four isn't that a good thing well yes but the problem is is the psychological damage you're doing to yourself You' failed that is not a positive thing and it will make you demotivated instead if you achieve the goal then you feel good and you're more motivated to do it again so here's what I suggest is start small let's say you're not very good at studying or maybe do one sub chapter a day or one sub chapter a week and then next week you do two or maybe you do a full chapter and you build it up over time that way you're still consistently challenging yourself whilst achieving goals I like to use the gym as an example let's say you go to the gym you can't just load up 100 kilos on the bench press and start trying to lift the weight you'll kill yourself instead if you start with a low weight and build up you will eventually be able to lift 100 kilos and you would have had the motivation from hitting 10 kilos 20 kilos 30 kilos all the way up to 100 it allows you to build up a sense of enjoyment of achieving things and again that links back to the original psychological need that we're talking about you have autonomy competence and relatedness and you built up a sense of enjoyment give your work meaning really think about why you're doing what you're doing so again why are you exercising what is the end goal why are you studying what is the actual end goal now take this a step further don't say to get healthier or maybe to get a good job that pays me money why do you want more money well maybe it's to help out your family right so that means your parents can retire maybe it's so that you can have a family of your own one day and you know they may not have to worry or struggle at all this will allow you to build up a greater sense of motivation because it involves other people and that way you don't really want to let other people down and again maybe you want to earn more money to help out your community and help out everyone on the planet at the end of the day anytime individuals do better it does help all of society so we need to kind of reframe exactly why we want to do things if you want to become a doctor why do you want to become a doctor oh so you can earn more money okay but think of some other reasons maybe you like being a doctor because you like helping people good so society would be better if you became a doctor right why' you want to be an engineer to build stuff well society would be better then wouldn't it your family would be better your parents Etc build up this kind of idea of who benefits other than you as well really build up this idea even with exercising okay sure you'll be healthier why is being healthier a good thing so your future kids can have like an active parent so you don't die young which will make your friends and family sad you know any of these things can kind of add into it to it and I know it seems a bit extreme but it really does help put things into perspective at the end of the day the better you do the better it is for everyone in your life and everyone in society and lastly but definitely not least help others human beings are very social creatures everyone feels good when they help other people and again this could be with anything invite your friend to the gym for the first time and take them through a training regime explain the topic to another person help them out with another question that's a big reason why a big part of my Discord has a big help section for maths and also for all other subjects it's because then all of you guys including myself can help each other which means we all get more motivated because we can help each other okay again human beings are social it really does provide a lot of motivation if you are able to help other people now I mentioned earlier something called a growth mindset and realistically we cannot have a conversation about motivation without talking about growth versus fixed mindsets so first of all what is a growth mind mindset or a fixed mindset is it just the cringey stuff I see on Instagram not really it is actually a scientific psychological phenomenon that we have actual scientific research to B so someone of the growth mindset views their abilities intelligence and skills as something that is learnable and changeable over time they are able to improve whereas someone with a fixed mindset believes that their intelligence pretty much doesn't change over a long time their talents pretty much doesn't change over a long time and skills can't really be learned in excess now you might say well that's fine obviously I know that but the thing is knowing something and believing something are two different things a lot more people than you think have a fixed mindset let me give you an example if you've ever sat in a Math's class and said well I'm not a Math's person if you've ever said I'm not smart enough to do this if you've ever said I don't know how or I can't do something then you have a fixed mindset now that's not a bad thing if you now work to change it because again fix mindsets are quite negative in the sense that it even works in the other direction people that are naturally very smart or they have gained a lot of knowledge through whatever circumstance they may be in maybe they had really good teachers maybe they had tutors who knows will look down upon people that think are dumber than them because they think intelligence is fixed they believe that they're a smart person that means there must be dumb people and therefore they're better than them now good news actual research that has been done has proven that the idea that abilities intelligence and talents are fixed is just not true period intelligence grows over time if you put the effort in any human can learn any skill someone that isn't a music person can learn to play the piano if sufficiently motivated someone that doesn't know how to play basketball can learn how to play basketball again yes maybe there's physical advantages that you may have but anyone can learn to do it and perhaps most importantly is that intelligence is not fixed people that are not Matt people can learn Matts if they are motivated and if they do not have a fixed mindset it is an actual provable fact in fact one of the biggest issues with this is that before we did think that fixed mindsets were real that intelligence was hardcoded into a human the problem is we couldn't find the genes and we also couldn't find the area of the brain responsible just for maths we have things for reasoning but reasoning isn't just to do with maths it's to do with pretty much anything this is why you may have people doing badly in maths but actually have a lot of Street smarts have a lot of logical reasoning maths is just logical reasoning but they don't believe that they can do maths and that was a big problem so essentially it's scientifically proven that you can do whatever you want and you can achieve whatever you want to achieve if you put in the effort and if you have that intrinsic motivation I'm hoping that that has somewhat convinced some of you that you don't have a fixed mindset you if no matter what set you're in and in a subject no matter what you think you can or can't do you can literally do anything even if you are in the bottom set mats you could achieve a grade nine at gcsc or an a star and a level it is possible it may take a hell of a lot of work but it is possible so how does this link to what we're talking about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation well if you link back to what I said before I mentioned the three psychological needs for motivation which were autonomy competence and relatedness now if you look at it growth mindsets actually solve or fill in the first two autonomy because you need to believe that you can affect change in your life if you have a fixed uh mindset you do not believe that you can change it you you believe that you have a fixed amount of intelligence you believe that you cannot learn new skills and new talents so first one done competence again with a fixed mindset you're either competent or you're not and then that's it you can't actually gain competence which of course as we know now is proven not to be true whereas people with fixed growth mindset sorry sorry they are able to realize okay I may not be able to do this now but I will be able to do this in the future so that fills in two of the three psychological needs straight away which means that people with growth mindsets naturally have two out the three needs for intrinsic motivation which means they are naturally more intrinsically motivated than people with fixed mindsets who can only really get the last need which is relatedness that's the major problem the next thing is that growth mindsets also Al Foster resilience and this is a huge issue that I see again as a teacher this is why I seeing students a hell of a lot if they ever get a bad result in a test if they miss the gym one day if they got stuck on a problem whatever the problem may be it could be it doesn't have to be a math problem it could be literally any problem in life they get extremely demotivated and disheartened this is because of a fixed mindset let's say again I'm a math teacher sorry I'm going to use the example of a math test let's say you fail a math test with a fixed mindset you'll just say well I'm just dumb I can't do it I'm not a matth person with a growth mindset you'll say okay I see this test it's not good however if I studied more I could have done better right if I studied these topics that I got wrong I Can Do Better which means they don't get as disheartened they will still look at it and say Ah that's a bit annoying that's not great but they are more willing to then work harder if anything they actually work even harder they get more motivated to study harder for the next test which is a much better place to be and yes life is not all about tests but the idea of what they represent is you are going to make mistakes you are going to fail at some point in your life it is a guarantee it's a certainty the only way to not fail in life is to not be of any use to anyone so you will fail the question is how are you going to deal with that are you going to just say well this obviously isn't for me I'm just going to give up or you're going to say okay if I work a bit harder I can succeed at this whether it's a test whether it's going to a gym whether it's learning a language whether it's learning an instrument whether it's anything what are you going to do about it there is a huge push in schools in the UK to try and Foster growth mindsets because people with growth mindsets are more successful the people that have made companies and made Millions the people that have got you know the best gym physiques and can are the strongest people in the world the people that have learned the most number of languages these are all growth mindset people it just is if you you ever read any of their biographies you realize they don't let setbacks set them back right they don't stop ever and this is true for every successful person in history so in short the way we can benefit Society the most is to try and Foster a growth mindset into young people so that way they believe that they can do anything that they want to they don't get stopped by knockbacks hopefully that kind of gives you an idea of how to actually you know what motivation is and how you can actually Foster it again a lot of it is in here I can give you study planners I can give you motivational talks and stuff but at the end of the day it all comes from within it's how you frame things and hopefully this video has put you on the right path if you are interested you can obviously look up more stuff but at the end of the day just remember the research your intelligence your abilities are not fixed ever and take it from someone that's a lot older than you probably you will fail at some point just try again and things will get better hope to see you in the next one have a great day