#99: Three Things that got me thinking

👽Learning from extremes + 🫧Oliver Burkeman + 🎮 gamers' motivation

Bonjour, smart reader!

In case you missed it: last week I published a letter to my pregnant friend listing five (of many) things I wish I’d understood before giving birth—from an intrinsic motivation perspective, of course. It might be useful to other people around you who are preparing to meet their babies.

Also, I’m excited to announce an interview with Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, the expert on psychological safety at work (and beyond), next week.

Now, onto the Three Things that made me think about motivation in the past week:

1. Personal growth ‘freaks’

2. Deconstructing big projects

3. Intrinsic motivation in gaming

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1. Let your freak fly

You may have seen me occasionally quote “personal growth” authors around here, while also claiming to be wary of gurus and prescriptions. I nodded my head in recognition when I read this post by Jeff Gill of the FFOREST newsletter, who put his finger on why consuming “growth stuff” leaves him (and me) “feeling vaguely angry”:

[These ‘growth people’] are not normal. They are at the ends of all the spectrums. They leap out of bed before five AM and drink a gallon something green and powerful while immersed in ice and doing journalling with key members of their power team. […] They studiously avoid all social media while simultaneously creating 75 pieces of social media content daily— I’m actually getting annoyed now.

They live their freakish lives then turn to you and say, If you want to be successful, you must… and they list the freaky things they do. […]

You and I are closer to the middle of these various spectrums. We find it easier to shut down our weirdness and go with the general flow of culture. I think the big lesson here is: Let’s not.

It’s easy to dismiss that kind of content as prescriptive and removed from our reality (as I do), and just close the tab. I liked Gill’s invitation to view the growth people’s “success” as non-literal inspiration—to find our own ways and metrics and “do our own weird.”

Read Gill’s (short) post here:

🔋 TREE 467: I consume personal growth media so you don’t have to

Photo by Tim Peterson on Unsplash

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2. A single action

Oliver Burkeman, the author of Four Thousand Weeks (I’ve mentioned his work before here, here and here), notes in the latest issue of his sign-up-worthy newsletter that “a lot of advice on how to get things done is borderline useless” to him. He’s either in a good place, making steady progress with his projects with no need for elaborate systems, or in a bad place, where the mere idea of a productivity system is “preposterously over-ambitious.” Yes!

Instead, he suggests doing one thing.

It's noteworthy, I think, that framing the challenge of action in this way – that is, by focusing on one thing you could and would do – differs subtly from the cliched old time management tip that you should "break a big project down into small chunks." Thinking in those terms still places the "big project" – that intimidating or repellent thing – front and centre. It's still ultimately a matter of trying to force or trick yourself into working on something you'd rather not be doing. Whereas zeroing in on a single action has a way of bringing into your awareness at least one little task that, in fact, you wouldn't mind doing at all. And one is all you ever need.

In the end, it isn't really a question of "breaking big projects down into small chunks." It's more a matter of seeing that "big projects" are nothing but psychological constructs, quasi-illusory entities summoned into existence by taking a particular view of what our lives really consist of – which is moments, and the actions that unfold in them.

Photo by Jan Sandbrink on Unsplash

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3. Nihilist gamers

Finally, I found this Twitter thread by game designer Rosa Carbó-Mascarell intriguing. It certainly matches my very limited experience of gaming (see also this post about my frustration with a gamified language learning app):

Rosa Carbó-Mascarell 🍊 @moreelen

Bonus! I write up a hierarchy of motivations to ensure that everything, from the smallest core action to the games progression system, contributes towards the player's emotions and intrinsic motivators.