I’m going to try something difficult. I’m going to try and persuade you, convince you, or change your belief or perspective, that humans have the capability to grow, iterate, improve, and be better than they were, and be better tomorrow than they are today.
You will be in one of two camps.
The first is you will disagree with me based on personal experience, anecdotes from friends and family, or intrinsic beliefs.
The other camp will agree with me for the same data set informing said belief.
There are two premises on which this rests.
The first is if you expand your worldview or perspective to be greater than it is today, such that you know more about the world and understand the day-to-day lives of other people, whether they are similar to or different from you.
The second premise is that you can identify specific aspects of your own life where the current state of who you are today and an improved state of who you are tomorrow requires less friction than you might think. However, it will still probably be difficult, but that’s fine because life is already difficult.
The combination of “Wow, there is so much more than I had originally believed,” and “Oh, I actually can change and be different, and the path to do that is somewhat knowable—it is difficult, but not as difficult as I thought”—together may bring you some intrinsic drive to change.
To clarify, I don’t love the word “motivation” because people think that by doing a few things, they can change their behavior. Watching videos or even reading a book that is labeled as motivational will not necessarily get you off your seat and make you do something.
The problem with motivational content is that it is not great at helping you internalize incentives, or rather shift them; it’s too random. If it were easy to know, “If I say something a certain way, display it, or help the viewer visualize or think of something, then I can better influence them,” there wouldn’t be so many self-help books—it would be more “solved.”
The explanation for human behavior is that people act on incentives that benefit them and/or the group they care about. If I can do something that benefits me by one star, and I can do another thing that benefits both me and my mom by one star, I am probably going to do the latter because I have both her and my interests at heart. The point is, motivational content doesn’t inspire natural internal incentives, and that is something you need to walk through and set up in your life.
There are two things you can do. One is tangible, and one is intangible.
The tangible thing is when an external factor drives your incentive. For example, if you have a crying baby in your apartment and you are responsible for its food and water, and you don’t have money to buy food or grow food, then it’s on you to go find food or money to get food. This is a problem because, in general, people act ethically, but some might steal food out of necessity. The incentive is not to earn money ethically but just to find food to satisfy the baby.
The second thing is more intangible and vaguer. It comes from one day waking up and deciding you’re done with X. You’re done with not wanting to be something, so the only action left is to act on being the opposite of it.
If you don’t want to be overweight anymore, it’s not about waking up and saying, “Oh, I’m really comfortable with my body, blah, blah.” It’s more like, “I’m done being overweight. I need to go to the gym. I can’t take it anymore.” I use this example because this happened to a friend of mine, and it actually led them to become healthier and more confident. I just wake up and make the decision. I wake up and say, “This is my last drink.” Or rather, you just don’t care about it anymore. It doesn’t have to be a sharp realization; it is okay if it happens gradually. There’s a way to get there by being satisfied internally with what that feeling is, that you are done and ready to move to something else. That’s a bit more difficult.
Published on November 10, 2024.
Tagged: Growth