#55: Three Things that got me thinking
#55: Three Things that got me thinking
😈 Rock & roll therapist + 🌼 Holly Willoughby + 😬 embracing discomfort
Hello, bienvenue!
In case you missed it: last week, I published a podcast interview with Nir Eyal, best-selling author of Indistractable, and a compelling speaker. We spoke about: time management as pain management, scheduling spontaneity, and why his daughter doesn’t go to school—among other things.
Click below to hear our conversation:
Now, let’s look at Three Things that made me think about intrinsic motivation in the past week.
1. Your own rules
This weekend, I re-read Play from your fucking heart, “a book for people who wouldn’t normally be seen dead reading a self-help book” written by “gonzo therapist” Jerry Hyde. As you’d expect from its title, the book covers sex / creativity, drugs, and rock & roll. But mostly, it is an invitation to observe ourselves lovingly, befriend our own darkness, and write our own rule book:
Write a new list of rules, your rules, from your heart, from your truth, from your integrity. […Y]ou can rewrite the book whenever you feel, and you’ll probably need to as you grow and deepen and change.
Below is an example of some of my rules. […] By all means steal some of them if they ring true, but don’t follow them because you read them here. And now you’re going, ok, must not follow these rules, they’re his rules and he says I mustn’t follow them—shit, I said don’t listen to me, look… Just check these out and then write your own…
Hyde also starts each chapter with a series of quotes, and this one by Osho has stayed with me:
Never obey anyone’s command unless it is coming from within you also.
2. Your own rules (again)
For weeks, I’ve had an interview with UK television presenter Holly Willoughby on my list of things. I sat on this partly because, I admit, I thought it wasn’t cool or highbrow enough. Gah.
Today it strikes me that Willoughby—in all her bright, girl-next-door wholesomeness—is the apparent opposite of Jerry Hyde and his tattooed, swearing irreverence, BUT they are saying THE SAME THING.
Here is one of the three failures1 that Willoughby confessed to Elizabeth Day in her podcast How To Fail: “the failure to live by her own set of beliefs”.
You’re born, you go to school, you might go to university, you meet someone, you fall in love, you get married, you buy a house, you have kids, dadadadada. […] There are moments in my life where I think I wish I’d gone with my own set of rules on this, and not what somebody else expected of me, because I’d probably have done a much better job, or been happier.
For instance, when she prepared to interview the Prime Minister during her first week on the morning show:
You end up reading [the producers’] questions, and it’s like a puppet. Your mouth is moving and somebody else’s words are coming out. […] I just thought: Why are you being so scared of being you? […] Why am I catering for a set of beliefs of what I think a presenter should have when interviewing a prime minister? Why don’t I just ask some of the questions that I really wanna ask them? Because I think that’s probably what the majority of people would want to know.
3. Well that’s awkward
I want more improv theatre play in my life, which is certainly why I wrote about it here and here. So I was intrigued by this study (to be published in the journal Psychological Science), carried out by Kaitlin Woolley at Cornell University and Ayelet Fishbach2 at the University of Chicago.
They wondered: would a person who seeks discomfort be more motivated? and found that in improv classes (and other awkward settings3), the answer is Yes.
This is a version of “no pain, no gain”, writes Fishbach in this Behavioural Scientist article: discomfort should not be seen as a cue to quit, but as a sign of progress.
Fishbach and Woolley carried out their study at The Second City, one of the meccas of improv theatre training in the US. They found that instructing players explicitly, ahead of an exercise, to seek discomfort and to see it as a sign of progress, boosted the students’ motivation/engagement in the exercise—which they measured as “time spent holding focus and perceived risk taking”. That’s compared to other groups who were told to develop skills and feel themselves improving, or merely to see if the exercise works.
those asked to seek discomfort inhabited the focus role longer and took more risks (as judged by raters who didn’t know which group people were in)—for example, by jumping around rather than walking normally—than those in the other two groups.
This reminded me of this piece I wrote about sucking at something and doing it anyway:
Also
Willoughby’s other two self-admitted “failures” are the failure to live in the present and the failure to be an individual, which are variations on the same theme.
Fishbach wrote the motivation book Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation, which I haven’t read yet.
The researchers got similar results in the following settings: “engaging in expressive writing to process difficult emotions, becoming informed about the COVID-19 health crisis, opening oneself to opposing political viewpoints, and learning about gun violence.”
As someone slowly approaching their 40s, it’s comforting (by that tweet) to know that it can be a decade of joy :D
Wow, Tania, this was especially good. I LOVE that tweet at the end -- amazing.
The idea that a person who seeks discomfort would be more motivated is very interesting. All I have is the anecdotal evidence of my own experience, but I have certainly felt I've grown more (and more quickly) when I've said yes to opportunities that make me just a little bit uncomfortable (in a positive way). It's kind of like a bullet train for growth -- you can get there, or close by, on the regular train, but it's a much slower journey with more detours, whereas stepping into discomfort seems to speed things up and push you forward faster. So intriguing!