The Tyranny of Motivation
I’m going to let you in on a dark secret of humanity—or perhaps you already know it. Most people are terrible… let me finish… at reaching their goals. For example, New Year’s Resolutions have a reported 92% failure rate.20
Change attempts fail frequently, and when they do, others tend to assume it’s because the person was lazy or not motivated enough to follow through with the change. But most plans fail because they aren’t designed to fit the brain’s change process. It’s like saying, “Here’s a plan to stop bullets—simply catch them in your teeth!” (It will only work if you’re Superman.) The value of a solution is dependent on its implementability. The “greatest idea” is actually worthless if it can’t be executed (teleportation, for example).
Brain change must precede body change or the changes won’t last. Since the brain is changed by consistent action over time, the question is: How does one take action consistently? We can deduce the answer.
Willpower and motivation are the two mechanisms by which we consciously take action (i.e., actions not from habit). Motivation is the desire to act (our default choice). Willpower is the decision to act regardless of feelings. Nearly every self-help book in existence (weight loss books included) suggests generating as much motivation as possible and using willpower as a backup plan. It’s a bad idea to rely on motivation first.
The Undeserved Popularity of “Getting Motivated”
I bet you’ve heard of motivational speakers. Out of curiosity, how many discipline or willpower speakers have you heard of? The number of motivational books, websites, and podcasts dwarf any other self-help topic (except perhaps weight loss).21
Let me make one thing clear: The popularity of motivation is because of its perceived track record, not its actual one. For every motivational success story you read, there are many more failure stories. If a strategy has a 2% success rate, but the 98% are ignored, our perspective of that strategy’s effectiveness will be (and has been) extremely distorted. The failures don’t have stories written about them, but here’s one for you: I made very little progress in 10 years trying to “get motivated.”
Deceptive success rates don’t only happen on a person-by-person basis. People experience the same phenomenon on a micro level in their own lives. It’s on the days you feel motivated and then pursue your goals that you take notice and think, “Motivation is the key to action!”
It’s natural to pay attention to what works, so when you eat a healthy meal after feeling motivated to reach your weight loss goals, you’ll attribute the behavior (eating healthy food) to the motivation you felt just before it. It only makes sense to emulate what’s been successful in the past, right? Yes, but only if you consider the entirety of the data (not just one data point).
It’s dangerous to draw conclusions from individual events. For example, if you bet $5 on the number 20 in roulette and the ball settles into the 20 slot, you’ll win $175. But are you going to conclude that the ball always lands on 20? Are you going to conclude that the ball lands on 20 more often than on the other numbers? Do that and you’ll go broke in Vegas. In the same way, if you happen to “get motivated” one morning out of 20 mornings, or even 10 mornings out of 20 mornings, why would you assume the strategy is successful? It may be because you don’t know any other way, or because you put too much faith in your ability to “get motivated” at will.
Just to be clear, I am not anti-motivational. I feel motivated as I write this! Motivation is a wholly good thing that benefits us. I am simply calling it out as a poor basis for behavior change. Foundations must be reliable, and motivation is not reliable. That’s all. Why, then, do we think that motivation is reliable?
Familiarity, The Great Deceiver
Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Kahneman says in Thinking, Fast and Slow, “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”22 Once a concept’s popularity ascends to a certain point, people will blindly assume its truth, and no amount of valid criticism can fully eradicate it. Such is the case with getting motivated as a behavior change strategy. (Everyone used to think Earth is flat, but that one was simpler to disprove.)
Motivated people who succeed tend to confuse the symptom for the cause and say, “My desire fueled me.” The truth? Success and good habits fuel desire far more often than the reverse.
Do We Want it Enough?
Mainstream motivational theory states that, in order to enact change, one must simply “want it more.” If you fail to reach a goal, it’s your fault for not wanting it enough. As the world is suffering from obesity and its related diseases, we must not want to change enough. It’s a pity that we’re not motivated enough to save our own lives and live better. But wait… the weight loss industry made $64 billion in 2014.23 When that much money is spent on something, it means public interest is through the thermosphere.
Sadly, in this very moment, millions if not billions of people are wondering what’s wrong with them. Nothing is wrong with them! These people have willingly suffered and paid money trying to lose weight, and they are still being told their desire for change isn’t strong enough!24 That’s so wrong it’s criminal. People have plenty of desire; they just need a smart strategy that doesn’t rely on doing the impossible.
To fully understand motivation, we need to distinguish its two different types.
The Two Types of Motivation
Look at this sentence: I’m motivated to quit smoking, and I’m motivated to smoke this cigarette right now.
These are not merely contradicting motivations; they are different types of motivation. Motivation to quit smoking is a general desire. Motivation to smoke a cigarette is a momentary desire.
Momentary motivation is far more complex than general motivation. Your in-the-moment desire to do or not do something will be influenced by multiple contextual and general desires. For example, your choice to eat a doughnut right now could be influenced by your motivation to…
Be healthy: you don’t want to eat it!
Eat something tasty: you want to eat it!
Feel good: you want to eat it!
Fit in with your friends who are eating doughnuts: you want to eat it!
Avoid weight gain: you don’t want to eat it!
Get ready for beach season: you don’t want to eat it!
Other factors include your stress level, internal dialogue, and emotional state. Consider your experience: What happens to your motivation to do positive things when you’re having a bad day? It decreases. On a good day, it increases. And have you experienced random motivation drops for seemingly no reason? Me too. It’s because emotion drives much of the momentary motivation equation. Momentary motivation is messy, complex, and unpredictable, because its variables are always changing.
Conversely, your general motivation to do things is remarkably simple and stable. While the momentary decision to eat a doughnut takes place inside a particular context, your general thoughts on consuming doughnuts are calculated outside of context. Your general motivation is your theoretical view. My general desire is to avoid eating doughnuts because they’re unhealthy. That said, if you offered me $5,000 to eat a doughnut, I’d eat two.
When Your Perfect Ideals Fall off a Bridge
Isolated and without context, we would always make choices based on our general desires. But our strong, perfect ideals must first cross a rickety bridge known as Context to make it to the other side that we call Reality, and they don’t always make it across.
When the doughnut is glazed so masterfully, you’re hungry, and your friends are enjoying doughnuts of their own, suddenly your general desire to avoid eating doughnuts seems unimportant. It didn’t make it across the bridge. Context can easily override our general desires, and this is the weakness of motivation-based strategies. They fail when “life happens.”
Your general motivations in life are tied to your values and goals. These are your underlyi
ng reasons for your desired lifestyle, and they rarely change. Here’s the problem: People tend to think, “My motivation (i.e., reason) not to eat cake will motivate me (i.e., give me the immediate desire) to not eat cake for dessert tonight.” That would work, except that your general motivation is not always strong enough to defeat the other motivational influences you can’t control. The first rule for living a good life is to focus on what you can control. As such, it’s best to separate these two concepts into something we can control (general motivation) and something we can’t fully control (momentary motivation).
When people talk about “getting and staying motivated,” they’re trying to control this wild mix of variables that are always changing. They think they can reliably cross the bridge of Context and bring their perfect ideals into real life. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either hilarious or sad that so many people believe this. When your dog dies, when you are sick and exhausted, when you’re tempted in just the right way, and when you’re “just not feeling it,” not only do you stand to lose the motivation battle, it might not even take place!
Isn’t it interesting that the whole “get motivated” theory presupposes that we’ll always be motivated to get motivated. What if we aren’t? Do we then try to get motivated to get motivated? There is an easier way to go about this, but before we get to it, it’s useful to know why we try to go through this process.
Why We Prefer Using Motivation to Willpower
This final point is important to understand: We like to use motivation to reach our goals, because being motivated to do something means you already want to do it. All things equal, doing what you want to do is preferable to forcing yourself to do things. When motivation is your guiding light, everything you do feels right (even when it isn’t).
Nobody will always be motivated to do the right things, and that means trouble if you only act when motivated. What if an Olympic athlete only trained when (s)he felt like it? What if people only did their taxes when the IRS made them feel warm inside? What if people only showered when they were excited about it? The athlete would lose, the tax evaders would be punished, and the unmotivated showerers would smell terrible. They would all lose. Relying on motivation to take action is playing to lose, and that’s why it’s not a part of the Mini Habits strategy.
People will (correctly) say that motivation is necessary to do anything, even to lift your finger. This is why we separated the two types of motivation. You need to have a reason to act. No debate there. That’s important. If you have no reason to do 17 jumping jacks right now, you won’t do it. This, however, does NOT mean that your reason to do something must be stronger than all of your other contextual motivations. If you have a good reason to do something but you don’t want to do it, you can still do it.
Momentary motivation is like turbo. It’s fun when it’s there, but don’t use it as your primary fuel source. If not motivation, then what? Willpower.
Willpower
Let’s try an exercise from Mini Habits. If I ask you to touch your nose right now, you will be able to do it. Your momentary motivation to do it is probably weak, because the only reason to do it is that I asked you to and you might want to experiment. You know that no tangible benefit will come from doing it. It’s possibly annoying to consider doing something so trivial. And yet, if you decide to touch your nose, even if you are not motivated to do it, you still can.
You can act against your momentary motivation by using willpower. Willpower is a better starting point for action than motivation, because even if your Contextual bridge collapses and you’re unmotivated, you still have the tools to cross that bridge. Using willpower means being prepared for the Contextual bridge to collapse. But could you force yourself to touch your nose 100 times in a row right now? Or 1,000 times? How about 30,000 times? Probably not, and that is the limit of willpower.
An effective strategy for all changes (especially one as challenging as weight loss) must enable you to succeed not only in ideal circumstances, but also in the worst circumstances. Willpower can work even when motivation is partially or completely lacking, but if it is to be our main strategy, we must explore its weaknesses.
Roy F. Baumeister of Florida State University could be called the father of willpower. Baumeister pioneered many of the dozens of experiments done to date that have shown that when we use willpower to do one thing, we lose some strength to use it for other things. Like a muscle, willpower has been shown to fatigue with use, and get stronger with training. This ego depletion model has been the predominant willpower theory in the last few decades. Over 200 studies have been performed to test and validate it.
A popular and oft-cited 2010 meta-analysis on ego depletion summarized the findings: “Significant effect sizes were found for ego depletion on effort, perceived difficulty, negative affect, subjective fatigue, and blood glucose levels.”25 These five areas were found to lower one’s willpower strength in subsequent tasks, which makes them our biggest obstacles to consistent action with a willpower-first strategy. In Mini Habits, I discuss how each of these areas of weaknesses is mitigated or eliminated by the mini habits strategy.
Some researchers have questioned this ego depletion model, or the idea that willpower use is finite.26 But the argument of whether or not our willpower will last forever or “deplete” is irrelevant. Since a good behavior change strategy must be able to succeed in the worst circumstances, it’s best to design a strategy that works in low willpower situations.
Willpower Is Relative
Willpower is relative to actions. You can force yourself to touch your nose at any time, but how often can you force yourself to write a 450-page novel in one sitting? Against easy tasks, your willpower will seem sufficient if not strong. Against difficult tasks, your willpower will seem weak.
People tend to focus on the concept of “willpower reserves,” as if the amount of “willpower in the tank” determines whether they succeed or fail. Do you see the folly in this mindset? Your baseline willpower at any given time is much less important than your goal. While you may not be able to choose how much willpower you have, you can choose your goal, which determines your relative willpower strength.
You don’t need to worry about how willpower is depleted, if your willpower is depleted at any given time, or if it even can be. Instead, learn to succeed in all circumstances with mini habits. Mini habits work well in low motivation, low willpower, high motivation, and high willpower situations.
Mini Habits Maximize Success
The two most important scenarios for a human being are low willpower and high motivation situations. When your willpower is low, you want to avoid losing. When you’re motivated, you want to maximize the opportunity to move forward. A mini habit thrives in both scenarios.
Mini habits are “forced actions” so small that even a willpower-depleted individual can still complete them. Unlike motivation-driven systems that require you to be “pumped up” in order to take “massive action,” you can crush your mini habit goals on the worst day of your life (not just meet, crush). Think about how powerful that is. If you can still move forward on the worst day of your life, what can stop you? Even if an asteroid struck Earth, you’d continue to do your mini habits in the afterlife.
As for high motivation situations, a mini habit has no ceiling. You are encouraged to do more than your mini requirement (bonus reps). For example, if your mini habit is to meditate for one minute, you may continue to meditate for two hours if you wish.
Imagine being and feeling unstoppable when looking at a big change you want to make. It’s different from what most people experience, because most advice is based on rising to the level of your intimidating goals. Most advice tells you that you have to become great just to be at eye level with your goals. On the day you’re not feeling it, or on the day your pet parrot Picasso dies, your goals are going to tower over you in your down state, and you won’t even attempt to look them in the eye. With a mini habit, it’s different: you’re always succ
eeding, always the stronger one, and always moving forward. In no area is frequent success and encouragement more important than weight loss!
Don’t believe the books that tell you that you need to “want it more.” Isn’t it a bit insulting to tell a reader that they don’t want something enough when they’ve bought your book in hopes to change that very thing? I think it is, which is why I don’t doubt that you genuinely want to get healthier and look better. Many people desperately want to lose weight, and it’s not their amount of desire that holds them back, it’s their adoption of mainstream motivational strategies (and their prior experiences with them) that make them believe it can’t actually be done. It can be done. Mini habits, smart strategies, and a small sliver of willpower are all you need.
Mini Habits for Weight Loss: Stop Dieting. Form New Habits. Change Your Lifestyle Without Suffering. Page 4