Neuroscientist This Simple Skill Will Keep You Motivated

So you can tell yourself the effort part is the good part. I know it's painful. I know this doesn't feel good, but I'm focused on this. I'm going to start to access the reward. When we focus only on the trophy, only on the grade, only on the win, you undermine that entire process. The ability to access this pleasure from effort is without question the most powerful aspect of dopamine. And the beautiful thing is it's accessible to all of us. Hard work is hard. Generally, most people don't like working hard. Some people do, but most people work hard in order to achieve some end goal. End goals are terrific and rewards are terrific, whether or not they are monetary, social, or any kind. However, working hard at something for sake of a reward that comes afterward can make the hard work much more challenging and make us much less likely to lean into hard work in the future. There's a classic experiment done actually at Stanford many years ago in which children in nursery school and kindergarten drew pictures. And they drew pictures because they liked to draw. The researchers took kids that liked to draw and they started giving them a reward for drawing. The reward generally was a gold star or something that a young child would find rewarding. Then they stopped giving them the gold star. And what they found is the children had a much lower tendency to draw on their own. No reward. Now, remember, this was an activity that prior to receiving a reward, the children intrinsically enjoyed and selected to do. No one was telling them to draw. What this relates to is so-called intrinsic versus extrinsic reinforcement. When we receive rewards, even if we give ourselves rewards for something, we tend to associate less pleasure with the actual activity itself that evoked the reward. If you get a peak in dopamine from a reward, it's going to lower your baseline. And the cognitive interpretation is that you didn't really do the activity because you enjoyed the activity, you did it for the reward. Now, this is the antithesis of growth mindset. My colleague at Stanford, Carol Dweck, as many of you know, has come up with this incredible theory and principle, and it actually goes beyond theory and principle, called growth mindset, which is this striving to be better, to be in this mindset of I'm not there yet, but striving itself is the end goal. And that, of course, delivers you to tremendous performance. It's been observed over and over and over again that people that have growth mindset end up performing very well because they're focused on the effort itself. And all of us can cultivate growth mindset. The neural mechanism of cultivating growth mindset involves learning to access the rewards from effort and doing. And that's hard to do because you have to tell yourself, okay, this effort is great, this effort is pleasurable, even though you might actually be in a state of physical pain from the exercise, or I can recall this from college, just feeling like I wanted to get up from my desk, but forcing myself to study, forcing myself and forcing myself. What you find over time is that you can evoke dopamine release from the friction and the challenge that you happen to be in. You completely eliminate the ability to generate those circuits and rewarding process of being able to reward friction while in effort if you are focused only on the goal that comes at the end. So if you say, oh, I'm going to do this very hard thing and I'm going to push and push and push and push for that end goal that comes later, not only do you enjoy the process of what you're doing less, you actually make it more painful while you're engaging in it. You make yourself less efficient at it because if you were able to access dopamine while in effort, dopamine has all these incredible properties of increasing the amount of energy in our body and in our mind, our ability to focus, but also you are undermining your ability to lean back into that activity the next time. The next time you need twice as much coffee and three times as much loud music and four times as much energy drink and the social connection just to get out the door in order to do the run or to study. So what's more beneficial is to attach the feeling of friction and effort to an internally generated reward system. You're not just pursuing the things that are innately pleasurable. So you can tell yourself the effort part is the good part. I know it's painful. I know this doesn't feel good, but I'm focused on this. I'm going to start to access the reward. You will find the rewards, meaning the dopamine release inside of effort if you repeat this over and over again. And what's beautiful about it is that it starts to become reflexive for all types of effort. When we focus only on the trophy, only on the grade, only on the win as the reward, you undermine that entire process. So how do you do this? You do this. In those moments of the most intense friction, you tell yourself, this is very painful. And because it's painful, it will evoke an increase in dopamine release later, meaning it will increase my baseline in dopamine. But you also have to tell yourself that in that moment, you are doing it by choice and you're doing it because you love it. And I know that sounds like lying to yourself. And in some ways it is lying to yourself, but it's lying to yourself in the context of a truth, which is that you want it to feel better. You want it to feel even pleasureful. Now, this is very far and away different from thinking about the reward that comes at the end, the hot fudge sundae after you cross the finish line. And you can replace hot fudge sundae with whatever reward happens to be appealing to you. We revere people who are capable of doing what I'm describing. David Goggins comes to mind as a really good example. Many of you are probably familiar with David Goggins, former Navy SEAL, who essentially has made a post-military career out of explaining and sharing his process of turning the effort into the reward. The ability to access this pleasure from effort is without question the most powerful aspect of dopamine and our biology of dopamine. And the beautiful thing is it's accessible to all of us, but just to highlight the things that can interfere with and prevent you from getting dopamine release from effort itself, don't spike dopamine prior to engaging in effort and don't spike dopamine after engaging in effort. Learn to spike your dopamine from effort itself.