#86: Three Things that got me thinking

🏺ancient wisdom + 📚writer's motivation + ❌questioning nudges

Hola smart reader,

I’m back with three fresh things that got me thinking about intrinsic motivation.

1. A Stoic’s quote

2. A funny take on a less funny situation

3. Desacralising nudges

In case you missed it, I published an enlightening Q&A with psychology researcher Johnmarshall Reeve about how school can harm intrinsic motivation, and what we can do about it: here are part 1 & part 2.

Onto this week’s things. If these made you go 🙂💡🤔, do subscribe to receive more. It’s free:

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1. Marcus Aurelius

This quote from the second book of Roman emperor / Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, translated¹ by Gregory Hays in 2002:

“Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. But make sure you guard against the other kind of confusion. People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time—even when hard at work.”

Also, who knew there were so many Instagram accounts dedicated to sharing Marcus Aurelius quotes?!

marcusaureliusquotes

A post shared by Marcus Aurelius (@marcusaureliusquotes)

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2. ‘It is impossible to write a second novel’

I had a good chuckle at Sharon Lam’s take on the second-book slump, over at Aotearoa news website The Spinoff (‘the mid-shelf red wine of New Zealand journalism’). Are there other non-novelists here who can identify with Lam’s description of semi-coasting? (Expensive degrees need not be involved.)

You feel that your single published novel was a fluke and are worried that if you try to write a second you’ll prove yourself right. After all, you arrived at your first novel by rolling down the path of least resistance at the time – you didn’t want to get a job, so you applied to writing school. It worked, you were accepted and bought yourself another year, another Master’s degree, two in a row, which unfortunately you did not get for the price of one. You have no tertiary sanctuary now, there is literally no external reason to write another book. 

Between the funny lines, Lam points to the things we need to complete the projects we care about: community support and inspiration; deadlines; trials and errors (“false starts, traversing other mediums, a change in tools”); sitting down to work day after day until “the rhythm and habit” kick in.

I’m off to order Lam’s first novel, Lonely Asian Woman.

Rose Lu @plainricedinner

'Lonely Asian Woman' by Sharon Lam (@tofu69420) is a hilarious and wonderfully bizarre story about a young Asian woman not coming-of-age. I loved it for many reasons including the giant ass on the front cover 🍑

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3. Nudges don’t work?

I’ve written about nudges before (here) and hadn’t read the growing body of research questioning their value. “After correcting for [a severe publication] bias, no evidence remains that nudges are effective as tools for behaviour change,” write folks at University College London and the University of Amsterdam in an analysis published last month by PNAS (a scientific journal of the US National Academy of Sciences).

Magda Osman, a Cambridge researcher who studies decision-making, sums it up in an article for The Conversation, explaining why we shouldn’t put such a burden on nudges to change people’s behaviour:

Right now, the best science we have is seriously questioning the effectiveness of nudging. […] That said, efforts to use behavioural interventions need not be abandoned. A better way forward would be to focus on building an evidence base showing which combinations of nudges and other approaches work together. For example, as I have shown, combinations of nudging methods together with changes in taxation and subsidies have a stronger effect on sustainable consumption than either being implemented alone.

[…] Given how complex human behaviour is, how could one single approach ever hope to change it? There’s not a single example of this being successfully done in history, at least not without impinging on human rights.

Photo by Jasmin Sessler on Unsplash

1. Marcus Aurelius lived from 121 to 180. This is how the same fragment was translated in the book I own (which seems to draw from different translations?!):

Why should any of these things that happen externally, so much distract thee? Give thyself leisure to learn some good thing, and cease roving and wandering to and fro. Thou must also take heed of another kind of wandering, for they are idle in their actions, who toil and labour in this life, and have no certain scope to which to direct all their motions, and desires.