#92: Three Things that got me thinking

👟NOT self-discipline + 📚 reading + 🐦 fact-checkers

Bonjour bonjour, dear reader.

Surprise! You’re exceptionally getting a second batch of Three Things this week. On Wednesday you’ll receive a Q&A / podcast episode (!) with Jennifer Petriglieri (!!), and a Why Would Anyone post on Friday. Then we'll resume our usual programming.

Now, onto the three items that made me think about motivation:

1. Gift-goals > should-goals

2. How to read more books (if you want to!)

3. Free content moderation

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1. Let running be easy

This quote on setting “gift-goals” rather than “should-goals”, from Tara Mohr’s excellent Playing Big:

… whenever I’ve had the opportunity to get a closer look at the people I thought of as having remarkable self-discipline, I found they were each driven by something different. For one of my friends who is a marathon runner, authentic passion for running plus a running group she loves are the drivers that keep her doing it every day, even when it’s hard. But another friend of mine runs daily because she feels terrified of gaining weight and uncomfortable with her body. They both look self-disciplined from the outside, but in fact one is taking action out of compulsion and shame, and the other is taking action because she’s well supported and loves what she’s doing.

Photo by Mārtiņš Zemlickis on Unsplash

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2. Let reading be easy

A dear friend (who sees me quoting a lot of books in this newsletter) asked me how I find the time to read. I’ve identified three elements that I believe make it easier for me to weave reading into my daily life, although none of these feel like an effortful, conscious strategy.

(Before I go into these: this newsletter is my job at the moment; I am paid to write it. It’s part of my work to read as widely as I can and mine books for ideas related to motivation. This is a privilege that I don’t take for granted.)

1. I don’t feel I should read certain books in a certain way. I give myself permission to read whatever I fancy, no matter how (un)fashionable, and usually have several books going on at the same time. I stop reading whenever I want, come back to books I’d abandoned, re-read books I loved. (If you need permission to do any of this, go here or here.) I have periods of profuse reading, and other periods where I’d rather binge-watch Breeders. It’s all okay.

2. I make it convenient to read. The game-changer for me has been owning a backlit e-reader. It allows me to download books in a flash; I otherwise wouldn’t have easy/quick/cheap access to books in English where I live. More importantly, it allows me to read in the dark (I read most evenings while my children are falling asleep) and one-handed (I used to spend hours reading while feeding my babies).
   What would be convenient for you? Could you leave great novels in the toilet? Install a reading app on your phone so you can read while queuing at the post office?

3. I associate reading with the pleasure of going to sleep. When I’m immersed in a really good book, I’m impatient to go to bed to read that next chapter. Maybe you could associate reading with another habit, like eating a fine sandwich on your lunch break, or listening to an audiobook while you drive or fold laundry.

Psyche published this guide in 2020, titled How to read more books. It echoes the suggestions above and adds other ideas:

• Reflect on why you want to read more books. What would the benefits be?

• Set modest goals—maybe a few pages / minutes a day, and “track your progress by recognising every day that you managed to read, rather than by ticking off completed books.”

• Does your social environment support reading? (You could consider joining a book club.)

Last but not least, my friend Sarah wrote eloquently last month about prioritising our own reading in Can we read?, her newsletter about children's literature:

in our culture, we reward immediate, tangible results — a vacuumed house, a homecooked meal on the table, tasks that “prove” we are “doing our jobs” as, let’s be honest, mothers — rather than the outcome of a more nebulous life of the mind: reading, and the vast knowledge that come from it.

Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

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3. Crowd wisdom

Twitter has launched a pilot programme called Birdwatch to flag and slow down the spread of misinformation on the platform. Gizmodo reported last week on potential problems with it: some misinformation specialists worry that the “criteria to become a [Birdwatch] contributor are lax”. It works like Wikipedia:

Birdwatch relies on its thousands of anonymous unpaid contributors — there are currently 15,000, although Twitter plans to onboard up to 1,000 more each week going forward — to add contextual notes to tweets to stop the spread of misinformation.

Here’s Twitter vice-president of product Keith Coleman explaining why the Birdwatch volunteers aren’t getting external rewards for their work (also, free labour is cheaper?):

We think that generally the more intrinsic that motivation is for people doing that, the better the outcome will be and the more trustworthy it will seem. So, we’re open to exploring other kinds of recognition for contributors. […] These people are doing great work and some of them are doing a lot of it, and we want them to feel the power of that. […] We wanted the contributors to feel that like, “Hey, I wrote this note and 100,000 people saw it,” or “I helped rate this note and a 100,000 people saw it.” […] We do hear again and again that the reason these people are here is because they want to get information out in the world that helps people stay informed, and so we think that’s an avenue to at least satisfy that core motivation that they have.

Photo by visuals on Unsplash