#82: Three (recycled) Things that got me thinking
⛏️gems + 👵🏽ages of motivation + 🔥burnout
Bonjour,
This is the second of my (Northern-hemisphere) summer re-runs, where we revisit or discover old favourites. Here are three things that made me think about intrinsic motivation, and that I had shared in previous posts:
what masters do
a funny/wise tweet
planning for burnout
Could this also be an opportune time to listen to my podcast interviews with Nir Eyal (How to stay focussed) and Daniel Pink (How to harness the right kind of motivation)? They’re under 20 minutes each, and to the point.
1. Your precious gems (from post #23)
From this soothing 8-minute video by French film-maker Mai Hua:
[Teachers or masters are not] giving anything to you. They’re pulling out of you, from the mine of your soul, your diamonds and your rubies and your sapphires, your precious gems.
2. This Tweet from post #55
It is now offline, so I’m glad I’ve captured this screenshot:
3. Burning out (from post #35)
Climate journalist Emily Atkin, who writes the Substack newsletter Heated, says she had an ambitious List of career goals from a young age. It included external markers of excellence—and possible proxies for social impact—like a Pulitzer prize or cable news invitations, and also this curious target: “By 50, I’ll have to take a few years off because of burnout.”
She writes about her planning, nay striving for collapse:
From popular culture to academia to the economy, I learned that a noteworthy life required an extreme and unsustainable use of energy. If I wanted to both improve the world and be able to take care of my parents, I would have to extract from myself more than I thought I could bear. Eventually, inevitably, I would run out of steam. But it wouldn’t be that bad, and I would recover. The benefits would be worth it. There was no other way.
You see the parallel to climate change, right? The rationale I’ve used to burn myself out is the same rationale the fossil fuel industry uses to burn up the planet.
Oof.
While I’ve never expected burnout as a necessary part of a worthwhile career, I have certainly bought into the narrative of the broken worker resurrecting into a better version of herself—finally finding the clarity and courage to be and do what she’d always wanted to, deep down. I also bought into the common confusion between our identity and our work, like we’re Gracie-Lou Freebush.
I recall the trainers of The Self-Investigation, an online course helping journalists to deal with stress and digital overload, telling us: You are as important as your work. Aha! It is OK and good to ask ourselves (and each other): How do you feel? Do you enjoy this work? Does it matter to you?
As Atkin writes:
I’m going to stop fixating on the amount of work I do, and focus more on how it feels to do it. Hopefully, that change in focus will allow me to create something sustainable—something that will last far beyond the year I turn 50.
I can’t tell you how much I needed the little nugget of the idea, “My 40s: motivated by joy.” I just felt a palpable out-breath in my whole body. Thank you.