How to Motivate Yourself to Do a Thing You Don't Want to Do

There are a lot of positive implications that become obvious when you say you want to be strong and lightweight. While "not weak" is a passive character judgement, "strong" is a constantly available opportunity.

I have many complaints specific to my experience of dragging myself to church, but the experience itself was incredibly neutral.

So a small team of us stuck together since and we've been unraveling, decrypting how that initial audience craving might work out as a next language.

In retrospect it now seems obvious, how the path led here, but then in 2001, it was a complete mystery.

This confused conviction is the real problem. There is no other you to convince. The same you that you are bargaining with to do the thing is the same you that's doing the bargaining. You can at any moment just do it.

My disagreement is that I think exercise should not primarily be about calories - it should be about fitness. And almost all of the fitness gains from exercise persist even if you replace the calories with a donut.

Exercising for 30min and then relacing those spent calories with donuts is FAR better than not exercising and forgoing those extra calories.

the aerobics build up muscle that will always be burning calories by merely existing. a donut here and there won't make a negligible difference, as long as the weekly aerobic activity level is maintained.

Any ways, a lot of studies have shown your body has a variety of methods that attempt to counteract excess calories burned, like reduction in non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

When my friend randomly suggested that we try a very ambitious hiking route, I knew it would absolutely suck if I didn't train for it. I got a gym membership and told myself I'd at the very least set foot in the gym 7 days a week for the first few weeks, just to build the habit of going. I was motivated to make sure I didn't slack off and ruin the hike for the group by being undertrained. A few months of that and the hike went great.

When we got back, though, I found it felt weird to not go to the gym in the mornings before work (as a decidedly NON-morning person my friends and family looked at me like I'd grown a second head when they heard me say I was working out before work). I started running outside on days the gym was crowded, and it felt good! In the nearly eight years since then, there have been only a handful of weeks where I didn't go for a run—I genuinely really enjoy it, no motivational tricks required.

But sometimes the problem isn't motivation. Sometimes it's energy. Sometimes you really do want to do it, to the core of your being, but you're just too fucking tired. That's a very different problem.

As a more concrete example, as soon as you learn to enjoy learning as an activity, it becomes fun, whatever you are studying. So you only need to learn to have fun while learning. Start with simple things, make it a game, find beauty in what you are learning.

I remember before I learned the basics of cooking how hard everything was, and how much I had to concentrate. These days I'll spend 20 minutes cooking something, plate it and go to the bathroom, and have forgotten what I cooked before seeing it again. I remember when I was learning Spanish, and every successful paragraph I read merited a celebration, and now I sometimes can't remember whether something I read was in Spanish or English an hour after I've read it.

My biggest improvement in writing came after I stopped listening to music while doing it. Get it over with, then listen to music. Once you get into the habit, it's like taking a nap not having a party. I remember a factory I worked at in my 20s where I got up to doing 76 hour weeks with no days off because I was so good at what I was doing, I entered a timeless place. There was no time to get bored in. I'm sure I might have hummed, but I wouldn't remember. I certainly wasn't thinking about anything important; those machines could have ripped my hands off.

Call it pain avoidance or dopamine stacking, they're probably both apt, but there's a difference in degree between the level of control and personalization and dependence between humming a tune or listening to a stationary giant radio and the current state of not being able to do anything remotely unstimulating or arduous like standing on a train or going to sleep without a distraction; how normal it is seems like logical fallacy, It's also pretty normal for people to spend 5 hours a day looking at their phones, not have made any friends in adulthood outside school, or have any romantic prospects.

I find it funny/depressing that I've been asked at least 3 times why I don't wear headphones at the gym. If you can pull a lever or click a button and take your mind of something you've never let become less painful, how important is the distinction?

I think this is a major issue with so much of the "creator community". When you make this thing your job, you can't just not show up to work for a few months at a time. But, if your content is "information regurgitation", like reading health studies and reporting them to your audience, is there really enough out there to make it a full time job? Doubtful. So, you'll end up either rehashing yourself over and over (your viewers will get bored and leave), or start going to the fringes of your field where there is far less basis for your statements than what originally brought your audience in.

This can take literally days and the first thing they are told is don’t listen to music they enjoy while doing it, because they will never again be able to listen to that music.

Probably not a healthy outlook!

Actually do it? That's a lot less certain than you would expect.

I would probably start. Since this hypothetical is a pretty simple one-off, I might even manage to generate enough executive functioning to follow through.

What I can tell you for certain is that I am still very excited to work on a custom keyboard project that I started 4 years ago. I have all the parts and equipment readily available at home, and plenty of free time. I have not worked on it at all over the past 4 years.

For $100 million I would probably just learn to put on the scuba gear but for instance my mind would go to "I should make my own scuba gear". So for a personal project I start on something and decide I need something else, so then I want to make a tool to help me make that thing and so on. I think it's probably related to a shorter attention span so I'm working on that.

Is it fun/interesting? Can I make it fun/interesting? Does it make me or save me money so I can do something fun/interesting?

If the answer is no to all of these questions, I'm going to have a bad time. Unfortunately, I'm that simple. I've gotten better at number two over the years, though.

Scuba diving sounds fun. I'd probably do it for less.

1) you're talking about ADHD which is a disability. It's like asking someone with no legs if they could sprout legs if the reason was compelling enough. The answer is still no.

2) If you were to counter the above by saying that, if you were compelled enough you might devote a small fortune and a few years training yourself and researching how to develop and use bionic legs, we then run into problem no 2: exceptional incentives / circumstances are not scalable, and the logic cannot be applied to problems of daily routine.

Back when I was a med student, I was expected to attend a clinic which started at 9. Unfortunately the local bus always arrived at that stop at 9:05, and the line was known for its flakiness. The route was 1h and 5min long, and I was about an hour's walk away from the stop myself. So in order to be at the hospital at 8:05 instead of 9:05, I aimed for the 7am bus, meaning I woke up at 5:30 to get to it. Except the 7am bus never showed up. So I waited another hour and got the 8am one, which inevitably arrived at 9:05.

When I got to the clinic 5 minutes late and got told off, I explained what happened, and the consultant said exactly the same thing you said: if there was a pot of money waiting you'd have been on time.

Yes except there wasn't, and I have to be at clinic every day, there was no way of knowing the first bus would not show up, and I can't afford to wake up at 4:30 everyday to get two buses ahead of the 8am one, just because some idiot thinks an imaginary pot of guilt-trip money would have instantly solved the problem.

But it feeling 10 feet tall is enough to make you avoid it entirely for a long time.