Goals & Motivation
Intrinsic interest, and where it comes from
The advice to follow your passion assumes interest precedes competence, and the evidence generally points the other way.
Goals & Motivation
Setting them, sustaining them, and knowing when to drop one.
Goals & Motivation
Wanting the thing versus wanting to have done it
A distinction that explains a great deal of stalled ambition, and a test that resolves it in about a minute.
Goals & Motivation
Momentum and the cost of stopping
Restarting is expensive in ways that are invisible until you have done it several times.
Goals & Motivation
Comparison to your own past
Progress is invisible from inside because the reference point moves with you, which is why records matter more than memory.
Goals & Motivation
Deadlines, and what they are actually for
External deadlines improve completion. Self-imposed ones work less well, and the difference tells you how to design them.
Goals & Motivation
Long projects and the middle
Beginnings have novelty and endings have deadlines. The middle has neither, and it is where most long efforts are abandoned.
Goals & Motivation
Planning that survives contact with the week
Weekly plans fail predictably, and the reasons are estimable rather than mysterious.
Goals & Motivation
Systems, not goals, is half right
A popular slogan with a genuine insight inside it and a failure mode that its advocates rarely mention.
Goals & Motivation
Rewards, and when they undermine the thing
The claim that external rewards destroy intrinsic motivation is stronger than the evidence, and the conditions where it holds are worth knowing.
Goals & Motivation
Why most goals should be smaller
Ambitious targets are motivating at the point of setting and are the main reason plans collapse in the second month.
Goals & Motivation
Motivation is not the thing you are waiting for
The feeling generally follows action rather than preceding it, which inverts how most people plan their week.
Goals & Motivation
Goal setting: what the evidence supports and what it does not
Specific difficult goals do improve performance under conditions that are frequently absent from the situations people apply them to.