Max, Week 10 - Motivation is Power
“Motivation makes you wanna do work. Finishing some work makes you feel good, and that gives you motivation to then finish more work.”
Credit: easy, actually on YouTube
Working toward the early POAS deadline this Thursday was a literal struggle. I would take the productivity tips I learned before, blocking out time on my schedule and following the Pomodoro technique to maximize the amount of work I could complete. I finally sat down, and an hour later, I turned up with an entire page of my critique finished. Actually, I lied—I had done absolutely nothing. I sat there thinking about what I would write and dreading the action of making my fingers type up the letters. I attributed this state of mine to writer’s block. Now, I realize that something else was missing.
Motivation.
Motivation is what fuels my every move. Hungry? Get a snack. Fear getting a B in AP Lang? Get to work. Motivation has the power to get me to do anything in life, even the things I hate (such as POAS).
Often, the most successful people are those that have strong, consistent motivation. Their dedication to specific goals drive them to keep working toward their desired final result, eventually leading to success.
I have always wanted to be extremely good at one, specific thing. It could be piano, it could be English, or it could be solving a Rubik’s cube. However, any hobby I began, I found myself dropping it eventually.
The reason? Not because I didn’t try hard enough, and not because I didn’t have intial interest. Rather, it is because my motivation gradually diminished. I had little reason to continue striving for improvement.
Everyone has had this feeling before. We want to give up, try something new, often citing our incapability as the cause.
How do we solve this problem?
We find out how to motivate ourselves. It seems that this is something that each person has to work out themselves, but sources online point to setting clear goals, tracking progress, and rewarding ourselves.
Motivation is power. If we can understand ourselves to the point where we can maintain motivation, I believe that we can accomplish almost anything we set out to achieve.
Hi Max,
ReplyDeleteI can definitely relate with you regarding the power of having good motivation while trying to accomplish your goals, especially the ones that you dread. This is definitely something I experienced during POAS. In the end, even though I tried really hard not to procrastinate and block out my time, I still kept putting off my POAS. I even considered delaying from the extra credit early deadline to the main deadline. Still, I struggled in the end but ended up finishing right before the 10 PM deadline on the 30th of January. However, I really don’t want to do this kind of thing in the future, which I’m sure you can agree with on your POAS. That’s why I think I’m going to try to integrate Google Calendar and other useful tools (Pomodoro technique, maybe?) in order to make myself more productive instead of wasting my time. I think this is one of my major fallacies in my life, time management. I hope by experimenting with various strategies and techniques that people have published on the internet, I can become much better at blocking out my time and being more productive at certain times.
-Ritwik
Hi Max, motivation is something I struggle with as well. I find myself daily coming home from school, unproductive for the first 30 minutes until around 4:15pm. At first, I tried correcting this habit, but then, as a result, when I started working, I would feel the urge to do something else that seemed more fun. I've learned through experience that sitting down and working for hours on end is simply not possible for me without a deadline, and I should learn to take breaks at smart intervals. I've also realized that the hardest part of getting work done is simply starting. Using annotations for example, I dread starting on that first word for my paper, but as soon as I get started, I get into a flow-like state and simply just write. Once that internal resistance is pushed out, it gets easier. I like to compare it to static friction in Physics (a class we are both taking), where the static constant for friction is always larger than the kinetic constant of friction. Instead of waiting for motivation, I think it's critical to take that first step, no matter how small it may be.
ReplyDeleteYes, I totally relate with your experiences. I really love your comparison with static friction!
DeleteHi Max, I can definitely relate to your example with POAS. On Tuesday, I was celebrating Lunar New Year with my family when I realized it wasn’t so important to continue working on POAS; it wouldn’t matter if I turned it in a month later for regular deadline. My biggest motivator in actually completing it for the early deadline was my senior friend, who told me he knew multiple people who had written their entire POAS paper in a day by staying up the entire night. What to do but continue the tradition right? Maybe the deadline continuously pushing on my back is another form of motivation. However, it seems that I work better closer to the deadline instead of planning out things long in advance because somehow they get a little lost during the long completion process. I’ve never heard of the Pomodoro technique, but I used to see numerous similar examples of various techniques that people have used that have allegedly brought them success, although such techniques seem to have no effect on my productivity. I really like the topic of your blog, and it makes all my procrastination feel relatable.
ReplyDelete