Atomic Habits Chapter 19: The Goldirocks rule: How to stay motivated in life and work

 The Goldirocks rule: How to stay motivated in life and work

The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is withing an optimal zone of difficulty. If you love tennis and try to play a serious match against a four-year-old, you will quickly become bored. It's too easy. You'll win every point. In contrast, if you play a professional tennis player like Roger Federer or Serena Williams, you will quickly lose motivation because the match is too difficult.

The Goldirocks Rule states that human experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.

Improvement requires a delicate balance. You need to regularly search for challenges that push you to your edge while continuing to make enough progress to stay motivated. Behaviors need to remain novel in order for them to stay attractive and satisfying. Without variety, we get bored. And boredom is perhaps the greatest villain on the quest for self-improvement.

What do the really successful people do that most don't? He mentioned the factors you might expect: genetics, luck, talent. But then he said something I wasn't expecting: "At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.

The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty. Perhaps this is why we get caught up in a never-ending cycle, jumping from one workout to the next, one diet to the next, one business idea to the next. As soon as we experience the slightest dip in motivation, we begin seeking a new strategy -- even if the old one was still working. As Machiavelli noted, "Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly." Perhaps this is why many of the most habit-forming products are those that provide continuous forms of novelty. Video games provide visual novelty. Porn provides sexual novelty. Junk foods provide culinary novelty. Each of these experiences offer continual elements of surprise.

As habits become routine, they become less interesting and less satisfying. We get bored. If you're already interested in a habit, working on challenges of just manageable difficulty is a good way to keep things interesting. Variable rewards or not, no habit will stay interesting forever. At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.

Anyone can work hard when they feel motivated. It's the ability to keep going when work isn't exciting that makes the difference.

Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way. Professionals know what is important to them and work toward it with purpose; amateurs get pulled off course by the urgencies of life. Professionals take action even when the mood isn't right. They might not enjoy it, but they find a way to put the reps in.

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.

Saduran dari: Clear, James. 2018. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (Chapter 19).