Get it Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation

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You’ll be more patient if you decide between the smaller-sooner and the larger-later options ahead of time, when they’re both scheduled in the far future.” 5. Do it with others.

Finally, think about times that you’ve been successful and unsuccessful in achieving your past goals. Thinking about successes is kinda easy, right? But we’ve all messed up at one point. I know I have. I’ve tried, I’ve failed, I’ve tried, I’ve failed again. So, how about learning from those failures? If you’re someone who struggles to lean into your mistakes, you’re not alone – but you are missing out on a bunch of important information. Professor Thaler: please note here that your colleague points out that your students would value quite highly an autographed book by you, even one that you start off by describing your reaction upon hearing that your friend has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. :( Fishbach includes chapters about self-control and patience. Her strategies for increasing self-control and managing temptations were fantastic, and I've included many in my article explaining ways to procrastinate less. In short, self-control is a two-step process: detect or become aware of temptations, and then battle them. Fishbach writes, Finally, we hold goals for other people, and they hold goals for us. Marie and Pierre Curie wanted their two daughters to do well in school. We assume they cared mostly about science, which could have prepared their oldest, Irène, to win her own Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1935. Irène, too, won with her husband, with whom she was working. In her insightful new book Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation (debuting January 4 from Little Brown Spark), Fishbach takes on the questions that plague us most:To get the most out of your incentives, make sure that you end up rewarding the right action. Otherwise you might risk “the cobra effect.” It’s a wild story. Look it up. It involves people in India breeding cobra snakes only to then collect rewards for catching them. 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. Consider whether goals are "ought" goals—i.e., things you need to do—versus "ideal" goals—things you aspire to do, but aren't strictly necessary. Ideal goals are easier to frame as approach goals. Ideal goals are also more likely to tap into your intrinsic motivation. ( Read more about intrinsic motivation!) In addition, set your own goals. If you set the goal, then you have at least some amount of motivation toward achieving it! 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. Ayelet Fishbach is a leading expert on motivation—her research has consistently produced insights that are both surprising and useful. In this engaging book, she shows what it takes to close the gap between your intentions and your actions.”

I mean it wasn't as heavy on the theory part, but towards the end, there was a lot more examples of this type of motivation than this other one and they just became like a numeration and not quite a manual on how to get motivated.

We can use this principle to increase patience. All we need to do is introduce more time before the smaller-sooner option becomes available. You're not going to have just one goal, which means you will inevitably attempt to juggle goals. Fishbach shares different goal systems and ways of categorizing goals. For instance, you might categorize goals into the categories social connection, wealth, and health. Then, you might sub-categorize goals among those categories: finding a spouse, finishing a degree, getting a promotion, meeting exercise goals, and so on. Achievable goals are framed positively, as a behavior to do, rather than as the avoidance or suppression of a behavior (which is harder). When I was a fencer, my coach explained how we should encourage our teammates from the side of the strip in a similar way: shout "Keep going!" rather than "Don't stop!"—because for the latter, they'll only hear "stop!" In Get It Done, psychologist and behavioral scientist Ayelet Fishbach presents a new theoretical framework for self-motivated action, explaining how to: 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."