Tag: Motivation

The Pursuit of Solid Answers

The Pursuit of Solid Answers

Posted on by jabittan
Human’s have egos, and that causes a lot of problems. To be clear, it is often not the ego itself that causes problems, but our feeling that we need to be right, that we need to be powerful, that we need to have important friends and connections that becomes problematic. Humans evolved in small tribes where survival often depended on being high status. Men had to be high status to pass their genes along and being high status meant that people would come to your aid if you needed help. Knowing useful things, being physically imposing, and having useful skills all contributed to make us higher status. Today, the drive for higher status is often understood as ego, and it is still with us, even if survival and evolutionary pressures toward super high status have declined.
One way in which this status and ego pursuit manifests to cause problems in our lives is in our intellectual discussions and debates. We often pursue our own ego rather than accurate knowledge and information when we are in debates. We are both signaling to our tribe and trying to dominate a conversation with our strong convictions rather than trying to have constructive discussions that help us get to correct answers.
Mary Roach writes about this phenomenon in her book Spook when discussing paranormal phenomena. She writes, “hasty assumptions serve no one. To make up one’s mind based on nothing beyond a simple summary of events – as believers and skeptics alike tend to do – does nothing to forward the pursuit of solid answers.” When we get into debates on religious topics, questions of psychic or paranormal phenomena, and complex social science questions, we often fall into reductive arguments that are mostly aimed at people who hold the same assumptions and beliefs that we already hold. We make hasty assumptions because our ego wants us to appear decisive and correct without spending time in ambiguity carefully considering the truth. The goal for us should be to become less wrong, but that is not a mindset that is generally rewarded by the ego, which for much of human evolution was rewarded by conviction and demonstrations of loyalty. Making changes so that more considerate thought is rewarded over ego-centric thought is crucial for us to move forward, but it runs against evolution, our self-interest, and what gets the most attention on social media today. Hasty assumptions may not be helpful, but they do get strong reactions and generate support among like-minded individuals.
Motivations, Virtues, & Vices

Motivations, Virtues, & Vices

Posted on by jabittan
Virtues are teleological. At least the argument that Quassim Cassam puts forward in his book Vices of the Mind relies on the suggestion that our virtues are defined by their actual outcomes and results in the real world. Cassam specifically looks at epistemic vices in the mind and demonstrates that epistemic vices systematically obstruct knowledge, where epistemic virtues systematically lead to an increase in knowledge. If the outcome of a particular way of thinking is more likely to increase the generation, transmission, and retention of knowledge, then it is a virtue, but if it is more likely to hinder one or more of those aspects of knowledge, it is a vice.
From this base, Cassam argues that our motivations are also teleological. Virtues and motivations are connected, and both are understood by the ways they actually shape and influence the world. Cassam writes, “every virtue can be defined in terms of particular motivation, and the goodness of the virtue is at least partly a function of the goodness of its particular motivation.”
I think this puts us in an interesting place when it comes to our motivations and whether we think we are virtuous or not. Initially, to me, motivations felt like they would be more deontological than teleological. As though motivations would be an intrinsic quality where they were defined as good on their own and rather than in reference to their ends and the outcomes they produce. But on closer consideration I think that Cassam is correct. Certain motivations underpin certain behaviors, and behaviors can have systematic results in the real world, giving us a teleological view of our initial motivations.
As an example, Cassam quotes Oklahoma University Professor Linda Zagzebski by writing, “an open-minded person is motivated out of a delight in discovering new truths, a delight that is strong enough to outweigh the attachment to old beliefs.”  In this example, motivations associated with discovering new truths, learning, and developing more accurate views of the world lead to the virtue of open-mindedness. These motivations, like the virtue they build into, systematically lead to more knowledge, new discoveries, and ultimately better outcomes for the world. Conversely, a motivation to hold on to old beliefs, to not have to adjust ones thinking and admit one may have been wrong, serves as a base for closed-mindedness. These motivations, along with the vice of being closed-minded, systematically inhibit knowledge, discovery, and progress. From this example, with the quote from Cassam in mind, we can see that virtues, vices, and motivations are teleological, capable of being understood as having consistent, if not univariable, positive or negative outcomes in our lives. Just as we can think of something being a virtue if it generally leads to positive outcomes, we can think of our motivations as being virtuous if they too lead to positive outcomes.
When we consider the motivations we have in our lives, and if we have motivations to become virtuous people, we can think about whether our motivations will systematically lead to good outcomes for ourselves and our societies. It is possible to hold motivations that may be beneficial for us while producing negative externalities for society. We can examine our motivations just as we evaluate our virtues and vices, and try to shift toward more virtuous motivations to try to systematically increase the good we do and the knowledge we generate. Few of us are probably motivated to be closed-minded, arrogant, or to hold any other epistemic vice, but our motivations may lead to such vices, so it is important that we pick our motivations well based on the real world outcomes they can inspire.
External Versus Internal Goals

External Versus Internal Goals

Posted on by jabittan
I don’t think about it as much any more, but several years ago I was nearly obsessed with the idea of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. I ran cross country in high school and at the time I was very motivated by winning medals, winning a state championship, and impressing my friends and family. After graduating and starting college, I was no longer on a team, but I was at the peak of my running and I was still motivated by shiny medals and bragging rights. For a long time, my motivation with running was extrinsic and I was focused more on external versus internal goals.

 

However, after I finished my undergrad and started working, got married, and eventually returned for more school, I had to re-think my motivation with running. I have asthma, so I was never quite able to be the best runner in any given race, but I was always competitive and if I got lucky I could win a race here or there. I could live up to the external goals that I set for myself. But once I started working 40 hour weeks and had to balance my time between work, a new wife, and eventually returning to school, I couldn’t run enough or be competitive enough to match those external goals. If I was going to keep running at all, my motivation had to be intrinsic, and I had to identify internal goals that could challenge me and keep me motivated. This is why a few years back my mind was constantly thinking about ideas of motivation.

 

The last few years, extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation and external versus internal  goals haven’t been on my mind as much, but thoughts about motivation and goals came back to me while reading Gerd Gigerenzer’s book Risk Savvy. When discussing recent increases in rates of anxiety among young people today he writes:

 

“The best explanation can be found in what young people believe is important in life: in the distinction between internal and external goals. Internal goals include becoming a mature person by strengthening one’s skills, competences, and moral values, and living a meaningful life. External goals have to do with material rewards and other people’s opinions, including high income, social approval, and good looks. People’s goals have shifted steadily since the end of World War II toward more and more extrinsic goals. Annual polls of college freshman showed that recent generations judged being well off financially as more important than developing a meaningful philosophy of life.”

 

I think that Gigerenzer’s message is a little overblown and has a little kids these days element to it, but I think the trend he identifies is generally correct, but possibly mischaracterized*. Studies have shown that our overall level of wealth or wellbeing doesn’t really mean much to us and isn’t predictive of happiness. Our expectations and a sense of improved wellbeing and opportunity is predictive of happiness. Today, young people are more connected to the world. They see more possibilities, see more ways to use and spend wealth, and have a much bigger world than children around the time of WWII. A child growing up in a small town around the 1950’s or 1960’s may have been impressed by the dentist’s house and new car, but today, a child growing up in a small town can see far more opulence than the dentist’s Mercedes. He can easily log into any social media platform and see LeBron’s mansion and Drake’s new Bugatti. It may not be that people’s goals have shifted between external or internal, but that the external goals have become far more conspicuous, expensive, and extravagant, making them all the more noteworthy and hard to reach.

 

Combine this increase in expectations of wealth and standards of living with a near constant consumer culture messaging in TV, radio, and social media advertisements, and it is not hard to imagine that external goals have become more important than internal goals as Gigerenzer notes. We are presented an image of a successful life that is full of material possessions, to the point of being unattainable. Having financial wealth, owning a large home, and having lots of toys is presented as more than just an image of success, it is in some ways presented as a morally correct way to live.

 

The problem, as I learned with running, of having external versus internal goals, is that you can’t always live up to external goals based on the ideas, skills, and thoughts of other people. No matter how hard I trained, I was simply never going to be the best runner in my city because I have asthma. On top of that, I have other constraints that are inherent to the life I live. By sticking to external goals, I would have been burnt out and defeated, likely giving up running completely. Much of the motivation and goals we set for ourselves in life are similar to the goals I had with running. We want a certain income level, a certain size house in a certain neighborhood, and a certain car to go with it all because all those things will impress other people. External goals create pressures that don’t need to exist, and can drive us to anxiety as we try to impress other people.

 

Internal goals are more realistic and can be more appropriately tailored to our actual interests, abilities, and limitations. For example, I have goals around running that are focused on health, avoiding injury, and feeling good about my physical shape. I can still have goals around running a certain mileage or a certain pace, but I try hard to calibrate those goals around my own abilities rather than the performance of my friends. Internal goals that are focused on growth and development rather than displays of wealth and social status are healthier and can actually help us achieve more than external goals that don’t align well with who we are and how we actually want to live. In the end, being able to recognize this and adjust our goals is important if we want to flourish and avoid unnecessary stress and anxiety.
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*I wrote this post about a week ago, and since then have read a section of Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now which further challenges Gigerenzer’s assertion that college students these days are different than college students of the post-war period. Pinker notes that studies like the ones that Gigerenzer highlights are unreliable because it is almost impossible to accurately compare different cohorts at different times. Far more people attend college today than they did during the post-war period. It is possible that even more people with intrinsic motivations for learning attend college today, but that they may be outnumbered in surveys by students with external motivations. It is possible that the increasing number of students just changed the mixture of responses, and doesn’t represent some overall change in human mindsets. Pinker presents additional challenges to these long-term comparisons which I will try to link to in a future post.
Self-Control Depletion, Continued

Self-Control Depletion, Continued

Posted on by jabittan
“The evidence is persuasive,” writes Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow, “activities that impose high demands on System 2 require self-control, and the exertion of self-control is depleting and unpleasant. Unlike cognitive load, ego depletion is at least in part a loss of motivation.”

 

Yesterday I wrote about our misconceptions regarding individual self-control. I wrote about how important it is to structure our environment accordingly for productivity and self-restraint. We are influenced by far more factors in our environment than we like to admit, and we don’t have as much self-control over our behaviors as we believe we do. Being intentional with our environment, shaping the systems, structures, and institutions around us, will enable us to move through life without needing unreasonable (or unattainable) self-control and motivation.

 

Today’s quote from Kahneman gets more detailed with self-control, ego depletion, and our experience of focus, attention, and mental effort. Cognitive load, as mentioned in the quote, is the effort put on our thinking processes. Remembering a 7 digit number is a light cognitive load, while holding 7 digits in your mind and adding one digit to each number to get a new number is a higher cognitive load. At a certain point under cognitive load, our mind simply can’t hold any more information and can’t continue to accurately do more mental weight-lifting. This is the point where ego depletion sets in if we continue to try to push through and maintain the hard work.

 

The more we engage System 2, the part of our brain needed for focus activities and complex problem solving, the quicker we lose motivation for mentally taxing activities. This is the ego depletion that Kahneman writes about. Our brains in theory can keep going, we could keep reading, writing, plugging away at a spreadsheet, but our brains start to get tired, and our motivation to focus and push through with continued mental effort fades. If we continue to exercise self-control, preventing ourselves from a diversion, such as playing a video game, then we are slowly going to wear ourselves out, and we will be more likely to get a cookie, have a drink, or binge watch a whole TV series once we do stop.

 

Just as our brains are not able to continually hold more and more information without making mistakes, our brains are not able to continually do more and more deep work without reaching a breaking point. As Cal Newport writes in his book Deep Work, for most people who are serious about doing their best work, the limit is roughly 4 hours of intense deep work per day. The mind, even a well trained mind, will get tired and lose the motivation to keep pushing through more deep work without making dangerous mistakes and becoming less productive in the long run. We have to keep in mind the twin forces of cognitive load and ego depletion, and focus on doing the right work at the right time, before our cognitive load is overwhelming and before our self-control has been depleted. We can do great work, but we have to be intentional about how we do our deep work, and we have to set up our environment to minimize the pull of distractions and the need for self-control.
The Why Behind the Drug War

The Drug War’s Goals

Posted on by jabittan
A book I haven’t read, that has been on a reading list of mine for a while, is Simon Sinek’s book Start With Why. While I haven’t read the book, I am familiar with Sinek’s ideas and have listened to him in several podcasts and TED talks. At the root of the book is the idea that great leaders think deeply about the why behind their actions. They understand their motivations, understand their goals, and understand how the things they do contribute to a larger picture of the world. When we start with why, we ask ourselves about purpose, about our fit for what we do, and we consider our end goals and how we can best approach the outcomes we want.

 

The global drug war, which the United States leads and forces upon smaller countries, doesn’t really have a why at its heart. In researching his book Chasing the Scream, Johann Hari traveled across the globe to discover and write about the impacts of the drug war on the lives of drug users in the United States, communities controlled by drug cartels in Mexico, and public policy officials from Vancouver, Canada to Portugal. Everywhere he traveled he saw lives destroyed and people left with nothing, not just due to their own drug use, but also due to the policy responses and financial drives of the governments and people confronting each other in our global drug war.

 

In the face of all the violence and destruction of the drug war, Hari asks, what is the rational for the drug war? What is the why behind the global prohibition on drugs and the global persecution of drug users and suppliers? He writes, “The United Nations says the war’s rational is to build a drug free world—we can do it! U.S. government officials agree, stressing that there is no such thing as recreational drug use. So this isn’t a war to stop addiction, like that in my family, or teenage drug use. It is a war to stop drug use among all humans, everywhere. All these prohibited chemicals need to be rounded up and removed from the earth. That is what we are fighting for.”

 

I think Hari would argue that this why is under-developed, impracticable, and unreasonable. He details animals like mongoose and elephants that do intentionally use chemicals at times to alter their states of consciousness. Humans, he explains, are not alone in using drugs, and there are some common times when animals and humans will turn to drug use. The elimination of all chemicals, Hari believes, is not a real goal that we should be working toward as a global community.

 

For some reason humans have decided that all drugs besides alcohol should be strictly prohibited. We seem to accept that alcohol can be fun, stress relieving, and enjoyable, despite the fact that it can also be addictive, harmful to health, and deadly if used inappropriately. Other drugs that might be recreational, are not given the same leniency as alcohol, and our efforts to stop anyone from ever using other drugs has created a deadly war, with rival gangs competing for product and territory, and drug users pushed out of society and shunned from basic healthcare and normal functioning human connections.

 

Hari believes that we will fail in our efforts to eradicate all drugs from the planet because the why behind the goal is so weak. The rational is built on the fear and egos of those who don’t use drugs and think of themselves as being superior to those who do. The drug war doesn’t fully consider the reality of humans, society, and animal nature to respond to hardship by altering states of consciousness. The why misses the point, so the how will never be successful.
Willpower maximization

Limited Willpower

Posted on by jabittan
When we imagine who we are going to be in the future, what we want to accomplish, and how we are going to reach our goals, we see ourselves as a super version of who we are now. We imagine that we can focus and achieve anything we set our mind to, at least if we can work hard enough. All it takes, in our vision of the bright future, is willpower to push ourselves to work harder, be smarter, and do the challenging but important work to get to the top.

 

The reality for us, however, is that this ideal version of ourselves will not simply appear with the flip of a switch. The hard work we view ourselves completing is not just hard, it is impossible to complete without focus and an ability to engage in deep work. We have to cultivate this ability if we want to see it in our lives, it is not simply a matter of willpower.

 

In the past I wrote about Dan Pink’s book When and how we move through several predictable stages throughout the day. For most people (those of us who are generally morning people – night owls are the same process in reverse), we wake up and our brains are fresh and ready to tackle the day. We can do our best focus work and complete important analytical work during the first roughly 6 hours of the day. Afterward, we fall into a trough, where our brain is tired and we are not good at being focused or doing analytical work. Later in the day we see a rebound, where we become a bit better on complex thinking work, but still find ourselves easily distracted.

 

What Pink’s research shows is that our day and our work isn’t driven so much by willpower but by the biological reality of the brain. Cal Newport’s research in his book Deep Work supports this idea. Newport presents several studies which show that our willpower only lasts so long before we give in. As he writes, “You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.”

 

We are not superheros and don’t have superpowers. We operate with a brain that can only handle so much before it becomes tired and stops working as well as we would like. We can resist those donuts in the morning when our brain is still fresh, but as the day goes on, we are going to become weary from the tough decisions we have to make, and our ability to fight off the donut craving will likely fail. We need to remember that our willpower won’t last forever and we need to set up systems and structures to help us do our best work when our brains are at their peak. Through these structures we can avoid negative temptations when our brains are in a rut. Plan ahead reasonably, and work to take steps that align with the reality of the brain. Don’t force yourself to rely on a superhuman effort that just isn’t realistic to be successful and accomplish the important things in your life.

Slumps

Posted on by jabittan
“Slumps are normal,” writes Dan Pink in his book When, “but they’re also short-lived. Rising out of them is as natural as falling into them. Think of it as if it were a cold: It’s a nuisance, but eventually it’ll go away, and when it does, you’ll barely remember it.”

 

Pink’s quote about slumps ties back to stoic philosophy in many ways. Stoicism encourages us to focus on the present moment and avoid ruminating over the past or fearing for the future. When we are in a slump, we are in a sense doing both of those things. We are thinking of a future without creativity or the possibility of things being better, ultimately zapping our energy and ability to put forward a meaningful effort in the present. We are also thinking of a past that held more promise than the present moment, and wondering why and how the energy of the past disappeared. What we are not thinking of is how we can use our present moment to make improvements and take steps that meaningfully improve our current situation.

 

The slumps that Pink focuses on are the midpoint slumps in projects that we engage with in work type situations. His advice and reflections on slumps, however, can carry over into many areas of our lives. A slump in a school report or business project parallels slumps that we might feel in middle age or even just in the middle of a work-week (fitting for me to be writing this on a Wednesday morning).

 

“If you’re feeling stuck in the middle of a project, picture one person who’ll benefit from your efforts. Dedicating your work to that person will deepen your dedication to your task.”

 

The problem with a slump is that we are focused inward and fixated on a past that was better and a future we fear will be even more bleak. Changing our perspective to think about how we can make a difference for someone else shifts our thoughts back to the present moment, as stoicism encourages, and gets us to think beyond our own problems and concerns. It forces us to ask what we are doing with our brain power and efforts now, and how we can use the resources available in a way that maximizes our impact for the world around us. Helping others can be inspiring, and it can serve as a spark to help us overcome slumps in business, school, and life. It changes our motivation and helps us imagine a future that can improve over our past. Thinking of how we can help others isn’t just wishful thinking, it is practical thinking about the ways we can be better in the present moment and helps get us through our own slumps.

Midpoints

Posted on by jabittan
I’m a big fan of college basketball, and I really enjoyed the section of Dan Pink’s book When that discussed midpoints. Pink shared interesting research of college basketball teams which showed that teams that were down by one point at halftime were more likely to win the game than the team that was up by one point. When teams were down by more than one at halftime they were less likely to win the game, but a one point deficit seemed to be a good thing. The reason, according to Pink’s read of the research, that the team down one at halftime came back to win was due to the “uh-oh effect” which spurred a sense of urgency for the losing team. The team that was up one point, and teams that faced larger halftime deficits were more likely to face an “oh-no effect” and were more likely to retreat.

 

Thinking about college basketball teams at halftime can translate into other aspects of our lives. If we hit 40 or 50 years-old we might have our own “uh-oh” or “oh-no” moment. When we are two quarters into the big project at work that we said we would complete before the end of the year, when we are halfway through a school semester, and every day at lunch we face a midpoint. We can look at what we have accomplished up to that point and decide whether we are going to push forward and double our effort, or if things feel hopeless and we might as well fold.

 

Regarding midpoints, Pink writes, “with midpoints, as with alarm clocks, the most motivating wake-up call is one that comes when you’re running slightly behind.” In college basketball, the team that is down one at the break realizes that they still have a chance, and that they need to pull things together to get the win. In life, we recognize that we have wasted several years at a job we dislike, that we haven’t hit the milestones on our work-project that we need to, or that we didn’t perform as well as we hoped on that midterm exam. These moments can spur us to action if we see that we are not too far off pace to reach our goals. However, if we are really missing the mark, we should recognize that midpoints can turn our motivation the other way.

 

If we see that we don’t have a chance of living in a mansion after all, if we won’t hit the project deadline even if we add 10 additional staff, and that we have no chance of getting an A in the course after bombing a midterm, then we are likely to give-up. In work and school we don’t have control over when we set the midpoint, and that wake-up call can be painful. Walking away might really be our best bet.

 

In life, however, we can control what we consider the midpoint, and we can change our motivation accordingly. Where it might make sense in business or school to walk away and focus a better effort elsewhere, in life we must move forward. Our best option becomes changing our midpoint perception and finding a way where we can look at our life and see ourselves as just slightly behind where we want to be. That way we take advantage of the motivation form the college basketball study and spur an “uh-oh effect” rather than face an “oh-no effect” and give-up.

 

What is important to recognize with midpoints is that they can be an opportunity for honest reflection of our progress in life, business, and other endeavors. Where we find ourselves at the midpoint can shape how we perform for the second half. Being slightly off-pace can spur us to action, but finding ourselves way behind can trigger a sense of defeatism. When possible, we can manage our halftimes to be more favorable for us, but when we can’t pick and choose our midpoint, then we face tough decisions in how we proceed.

Keep What’s Meaningful

Posted on by jabittan
The last few weeks I have been wasting time with thing that are not meaningful. My time and attention have been eaten away by things that don’t add value to my life and leave me feeling slightly guilty.

 

This morning I recognized, when I took advantage of an extra 30 minutes in my schedule, of how important it is to keep valuable things in our lives by cutting out the wasteful things. The easy path through life is filled with distracting, quick, and ultimately meaningless parts and pieces. We stay up too late watching pointless tv. We oversleep and eat low nutrition and thoughtless breakfast foods. We purchase large houses and put up with long and wasteful commutes. We make decisions all along the way that we don’t realize sacrifice our time, attention, and ability to meaningfully contribute to the world.

 

These observations on how society pushes our lives lead me to reflect on our daily decisions. I believe we all need to think critically about what are the most important factors in our lives. From there, we can begin to consider the large overarching decisions that we make to shape our lives. Once those decisions have aligned with our core values, we can start to think about the million small decisions that we make each day. This will bring our lives into alignment with our core values and help us cut out things that do not bring us value. It will help us think about what is meaningful and what decisions will help us  build a meaningful, thoughtful, and fulfilling life. Without this approach we won’t be able to think about how we live and our life choices, and we will fill ourselves with meaningless distractions and wastes of time.

 

Looking back at quotes I have written about, a quote from Colin Wright in his book Becoming Who We Need To Be seems particularly fitting with these thoughts. He writes, “Pursuing what’s meaningful is important, but just as important is understanding why we’re pursuing what we’re pursuing and how we’re undertaking that pursuit. Pay attention to the why behind your actions, and the how and what become a lot easier to define and control.” Understanding that why helps us see what we need to do to get to a place where we can have a valuable impact on the world. Each of the daily actions that we can take become more clear when we understand our motivations and what we truly want to work toward. Thinking deeply about purpose and meaning gives us a sense of how to make the most out of the short time we have on this planet.

Why Do You Do What You Do?

Posted on by jabittan
A book that is on my reading list for the future is called Start With Why by Simon Sinek, you can find a great Ted Talk from him with the same title to get the idea of the book. People, businesses, and groups all need to figure out why they do what they do if they want to truly build something that lasts. Jumping into something, doing some type of work, and having goals doesn’t really matter too much if you don’t have a good understanding of why you are doing something in the first place. If you have not figured out the motivation piece, the basic core element of the why, then it will be hard to sustain motivation and hard to make sure you are always moving in the right direction.

 

Without truly understanding the why, we give a certain amount of our decision making over to our ego. The “why” behind the actions of the ego is almost always about showing off. The ego wants to impress other people, have more things than others, and feel like it is on top of the world. But chasing the goals and dreams of the ego can put us in dangerous places that don’t align with the life we want to live. In my own life, ego has pushed me to plenty of running injuries, drove me to switch my major in a haze of confusion multiple times during my undergraduate degree, and has urged me to generally try to take on more than I can handle. If I could have put my ego aside, I would have run a little slower and avoided a painful ankle injury, I could have been more comfortable with my undergraduate studies and better embraced my time as a student, and I would even today be better at engaging with things that I find interesting and important even if they are nerdy and won’t bring me lots of friends and attention.

 

In his book Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday encourages us to think deeply about why we do what we do and if we are letting our ego run the show. He writes, “So why do you do what you do? That’s the question you need to answer. Stare at it until you can. Only then will you understand what matters and what doesn’t. Only then can you say no, can you opt out of stupid races that don’t matter, or even exist. Only then is it easy to ignore “successful” people.”  Being able to answer Holiday’s question takes honest self-awareness and reflection. We have to acknowledge the motivations behind our actions, and we have to accept that very often our motivations are not as high minded as we would like everyone to believe. This is also the core idea of the book The Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler. We often act more out of self-interest than we want to admit, and while we can’t turn that off completely, we can at least better understand it and shape the decisions we make in a better direction.

 

Be aware of your motivation and try to pull back on activities and things that you do simply because you want to earn more money to buy a bigger, newer, more shiny, more impressive thing. Acknowledge the ego’s desire to have something that other people don’t have, to impress other people, and to be praised and ask yourself if the sacrifices of time, attention, and health are worth it to obtain other people’s affection. Be aware of the negative externalities to yourself and others that stem from your actions, decisions, and behaviors and ask if yourself if those costs are truly worth what you seek. Over time try to shift your behaviors so that instead of purely serving your ego, they also fulfill a deeper part of who you are and produce more positive externalities than negative externalities. Accept  that you won’t completely turn off your self-interest, but do things that you believe will make a positive impact on the world, and then try to find the glory in doing those things well, even if the world doesn’t pat you on the back for them.