Get it Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation

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Break the goal down into smaller chunks and find milestones that are rewarding and motivating. The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. And after the first 100 miles, maybe reward yourself with a ice cream cone or something to celebrate your progress. set positive goals, as opposed to “do not do” goals; avoidance goals are chores that lead to thought suppression P57 “If you only feel calm through meditation, you might struggle to keep your cool when you can’t fit meditation into your busy schedule. Flexibility, such as having more than one way to feel calm, can be important in reaching your goals.” This type of approach doesn’t only apply to summiting a mountaintop. Each year over one hundred CEO’s in the S&P 1000 retire after reaching what can feel like a pinnacle in their career, leaving them feeling unprepared for the next phase.

ask yourself why you are committed and confident in your goal; grow your abilities, rather than proving them Coming up with the goal is the easy part. The hard part comes with putting the goal into action and sustaining motivation during the slow or hard parts. To get over the agonizing middle when most goals fall flat, the author recommends these strategies: The author’s Liberal leanings really come through strongly in the last third of the book. Too bad. It destroys her credibility. In the aggregate, Liberals have recently lost their minds. This is the reason Chicago has become so bleak. There’s a strange mental schism in which Liberals continue to believe their party and their ideas are virtuous, no matter how crappy the observable results from their ideas being put into practice by their party.Fishbach also suggests that incentives will undermine children's intrinsic motivation more so than adults', because children are still figuring out which things they're doing because they enjoy them versus because of some other incentive. That seems plausible enough. Ayelet Fishbach is a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She was president of the Society for the Study of Motivation, and continues to publish her insights into motivation research. Her work has appeared in journals such as Psychological Review and the Journal of Personality, and been publicized through media outlets including CNN, the Chicago Tribune, NPR, and the New York Times. One, it boosts your confidence in believing that you can achieve your goal. You’ve made it this far, right!?

We move toward and away from people as we prioritize or deeper towards the goals they can help us achieve. When it's the right time to attend to a goal or when we feel we're falling behind, a goal gets high motivational priority. As a result, we draw closer to those who are instrumental to achieving it. Once the goal has sufficiently progressed and its motivational priority reduces, we feel less close to those people." And two, you confirm to yourself that your goal is worth it, simply because of the sheer amount of time and effort you put in. Juggling multiple goals can dilute and slow down motivation. But in a complex life, multiple goals are often a necessity, so a hierarchy of goals is essential. When dealing with multiple goals, we need to either find a compromise that gets them both done, or prioritize the main goal over all the others, at least temporarily. People often underestimate how important it is to find the fun path to a goal. In one study, we asked people to choose between listening to the song “Hey Jude” by the Beatles and listening to a loud alarm for one minute. Seems like an obvious choice, right? But most of the people in our study chose the loud alarm because it paid more. Yet, those who listened to this terrible noise were also more likely to regret their decision than those who chose to listen to the lower-paying song. While our research participants predicted they would care more about money than sound, they ultimately cared more about sound than money.Trying to stay motivated and make serious progress in whatever you’re trying to achieve in life can sometimes feel like an impossible task. But it doesn’t have to be. There’s a simple fix – and it just so happens to be in your control. It all starts with changing your circumstances. Most importantly, you need to define your goals. You need to pay attention to maintaining momentum, stay focused when you’ve got a billion other things on your plate and get your friends and family involved. And when you make your behavior and environment work for rather than against you, your goal of getting that raise, or that strong healthy body, or that tax return form sorted, or that new language learned, will be yours in no time!