I liked this article as a collection of tips for effective writing, but did not find much about the topic of motivation within it. The author appears to be internally driven to write from the outset, and the advice given assumes that you also have the volition to write yourself and want to improve.
Is lack of interest a solvable problem? This is a question I continually revisit. In one of the comment threads for the last "how to write" article that was submitted recently, there was an opinion that it is not. There is nothing you can do to motivate someone who is fundamentally a non-writer to be a writer. The interest will never be there, no matter what the person chooses to say or think on the contrary.
Does the concept of interest have some kind of divide between "mental" (the subjects your brain is capable of focusing on at a biological level) and "volitional" (the things you say you want to focus on)? Certain mental conditions include symptoms like "specific interests" as diagnostic criteria, which makes me believe that biology plays a part in motivation in addition to routine.
Ideas such as those have made me question many other things. Assuming that lack of motivation is not solvable, is it justifiable to have interest in nothing (productive/creative/cultural) in particular, yet still be dissatisfied with the ways you spend your time?
There is some kind of cognitive dissonance that arises when I think that "writing would be nice," when attempting to write is an activity that I lose interest in within days of actively returning to it, but the original thought of "writing would be nice" never goes away.
> There is nothing you can do to motivate someone who is fundamentally a non-writer to be a writer. The interest will never be there, no matter what the person chooses to say or think on the contrary.
I heard once this expression for those who dislike wine: It's not that you dislike wine, you just haven't found the wine that you like.
Writers don't write on anything and everything. They write on what interests them. It's what they're writing on that keeps them writing. Whether that's fiction or non-fiction.
Switch writing with math. How does someone go from having no initial interest in math to pursuing a career in it like G.H. Hardy?
pg's essay "How To Work Hard" highlights this:
"I suspect most people have to learn what work is before they can love it. Hardy wrote eloquently about this in A Mathematician's Apology:
'I do not remember having felt, as a boy, any passion for mathematics, and such notions as I may have had of the career of a mathematician were far from noble. I thought of mathematics in terms of examinations and scholarships: I wanted to beat other boys, and this seemed to be the way in which I could do so most decisively.'
He didn't learn what math was really about till part way through college, when he read Jordan's Cours d'analyse.
'I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what mathematics really meant.'"
A bit OT, but I think the wine comparison goes in exactly the opposite direction. Some people will never like wine or alcohol no matter how much they search:
>Is lack of interest a solvable problem? This is a question I continually revisit.
I guess if you really don't like writing and put it off at every opportunity, it's reasonable to ask whether--assuming it's not your primary job--this is something you really need to do, at least on a regular basis.
(And others really try but in spite of editors putting a lot of work into it, they just don't get better.) I've had a couple jobs that involved a lot of writing for the past 20 years and writing has been good for me. But I wouldn't really advise a developer or other engineer to start writing as a path to riches over and above clear, effective day to day communications.
Books and a regular blog likely won't make you much money to speak of directly. And while there are a variety of benefits, you need to think about what you're not doing if you're spending a lot of time.
I would say yes, in large part. The solution is simple but not easy. The key is “Motivation follows action”. When you don't have motivation, act like how you would if you had it. Motivation will follow.
People who are prone to procrastination may find it difficult to decide what to act on. Begin with the most trivial action that is almost silly to consider an action. After you do it, continue with the next most trivial one.
>I would say yes, in large part. The solution is simple but not easy. The key is “Motivation follows action”.
Maybe I've always misunderstood that common saying but there are so many counterexamples that it doesn't seem to be true.
E.g. I actually know how to cook and have already taken the "action" of home cooking many hundreds of times such as preparing spaghetti and baking cakes without any premade kits and yet -- I'm still not interested in cooking at all.
At the same time, I can appreciate that others like chefs or hobbyists take a deep interest in cooking and take delight in combining brand new ingredients. However, even when I give a cookbook as a gift and let that book pass through my hands, it doesn't trigger any interest in cooking.
Maybe another more widespread example is photography. Most people have cameras on smartphones now but most take photos as a utility function rather than some artistic photography interest. The act of taking photos doesn't really get most people over that threshold of being "interested in photography". E.g. they take a picture of where their car is parked in the airport as a reminder -- and then go on to think about everything else that's more interesting to them than photography.
Likewise, making people do more math will make many (most?) become less interested in math. I think that's what some people mean by "generating internal interest is unsolvable".
Where "Motivation Follows Action" makes much more sense is the limited scenario of already being interested in a particular domain but you're just temporarily stuck. E.g. a book author has written texts before but is now staring at a blank page. (Writer's Block.) So the idea is start writing anything -- even nonsense -- and then let the momentum of laying words down start feeding itself and then eventually you end up with a finished book.
Re your cooking example. A virtue ethicist (Aristotle, Augustine, Confucius, ...) might say that you still have work to do.
The idea is that knowing how to cook, and even being good at cooking, are not enough. You're not "perfected" in a particular virtue until you actually experience the value of the practices that the virtue involved.
One way to go about "perfecting" a virtue, from a subjective perspective, is to look at those people you know who do enjoy cooking. These people are exemplars, and you have to be charitable, trusting that there is something to cooking that they see that you do not. You then try again, trying to emulate their approach to cooking - not just the recipes or even the procedures they follow, but also their attitudes toward it. That is how you come to experience the full excellence of cooking. In other words, in the virtue ethicist's view, cooking well doesn't by necessity make you a good cook.
Maybe a better phrasing would then be "Motivation does not precede action".
It seems perfectly reasonable to me that you can try something as a hobby, and if after honest effort, you're not interested in it and you'd rather do something else, by all means do so.
But you're not actually interested in doing something until after you do it. You might be daydreaming about the idea of having done something because you saw someone else do it on TV or whatever, but until you've done it -- and tried to love it -- you can't really say you're interested in it.
For two reasons:
1. You haven't tried it, so you don't know if you actually like it
2. By sheer definition, if you aren't willing to try something, you're not interested in doing it.
If you'd rather eat pre-processed or pre-packaged food and save your time for pursuing your true passion of playing Tiddywinks or developing Javascript user interfaces, by all means do so.
Just be sure to take care of your heath and make sure your true passion isn't sitting in the basement trolling people on the internet.
> Where "Motivation Follows Action" makes much more sense is the limited scenario of already being interested in a particular domain but you're just temporarily stuck.
Very good point. Perhaps it's a good tactic, but not a good strategy. I don't know what could make someone interested in a topic. One thing I can think of is discovering what aspects of experience one enjoys in the areas that they are already interested and transferring them to the new topic. Structuring the experience around the flow factors could be another one.
The best writing advice I ever heard was “Don’t write unless you can’t not write”
For 99% of writers there is never going to be any other reward than the writing itself. If the writing itself isn’t rewarding to you, you will never stay with it long enough to get to a level where you may have a chance at joining the 1% who get external rewards for it.
I don't think there's a binary of writers/non-writers. I think there's an energy threshold, above which people with an inclination to write would start doing so.
If you took the average person, put them at a desk in a locked room with pen and paper, and left them there, they'd eventually write or draw something out of sheer boredom.
General point here is that the activation energy of a task gets lower the more bored you are. Even if the exact proportion of the population who'd write or draw is below 50% (which I don't think it is), the general point still stands.
Answering somewhat weirdly, because I kinda haven't started writing (or, more precisely, publishing) yet either: I had a similar problem, but very recently I feel I got to a place where I might have cracked the motivation issue for me. This was a result of some talks on a parting party with colleagues from the previous job. So, for one thing, one colleague was really encouraging me to start writing for some time already. But secondly, and crucially: the "write for myself" angle didn't seem to be clear enough for me to have a reader persona I could identify with - in retrospect, why would I write to myself about things I already know? And here, the discussion I had on the party eventually led me to a more detailed persona: "write to myself at the time when I didn't know about [some particular stuff] yet." When I imagine this 'me' existing somewhere in timespace, oh I do feel an urge to sit and write to them; and as an extra bonus, I know I don't need no fancy style, that direct and no-fluff words will be enough - knowing he's smart enough to understand and be engaged by interesting stuff - and I feel the urge to do it basically as soon as possible: the longer I don't write, the longer he doesn't know, which is such a waste and lost opportunity given that he is me!
>but did not find much about the topic of motivation within it.
Agreed, this is much more of a "What to do to write once you have the motivation". That's not to say it's not a useful article, but perhaps a bit misdirected by the title.
> Is lack of interest a solvable problem?
That is an interesting question. One that I also find my self faced with regularly(and solving the general issue of motivation in general). I'm more into the fictional/creative side of writing, bit I think that general "motivation" issue is the same. I know I want to write. I consider writing a good use of my time, but I have trouble getting myself to sit down and a spend significant amount of time writing. I know for me specifically there's some degree of depression that suppresses my motivation to do anything, but even between those episodes, I do find it more difficult to actually motivate myself to write.
I've thought about this a lot and have come across two separate issues. One, is that trying to create something "new" in the world presents a challenge in of it self, whether its technical or creative. It's something I run into even when I'm working on something technical for work. For me at least, this is the easier barrier to overcome because I do enjoy the challenge when I'm in a state of mind to rise to the challenge. And that state of mind brings me to the the second issue, and that is the catalyst of the motivation. For professional/technical work that catalyst is essentially and external force (i.e. I need to work to make money and live), but for personal projects there's not that external catalyst. When I was younger I always had motivation for personal projects and my daughter spends all of her free time drawing(and she's very good at it). So I wonder if spending all of your "creative juices" at work(and despite people always creating barriers between technical and creative work, I think they may fulfill/tap similar parts of the brain) is the real barrier. The author of the article even mentions that he's done this since leaving Uber. I would be interested in seeing any statistics that correlated marginally successful authors(in any format) with the really successful ones to see of the marginal ones were more productive with putting out content because they needed too versus the super successful ones that had a major hit or two and are basically set for life.
How to motivate yourself to drive? You can't unless you know that it is required to go somewhere. Driving alone doesn't make sense (unless you just enjoy it). Same with writing. You have to "get it out" (intrinsic motivation) and you do it for some incentive (extrinsic motivation). Both are required. When intrinsic dies, extrinsic will pull. If extrinsic dies, intrinsic will pull.
P.S - I'm no expert. I spent like 10 mins writing, deleting, modifying, discarding and again writing this reply. The process was streamlining the thought process and edit it to have a most impact (tbh).
I think there is a simple tip that can help anyone who does not feel motivated to be a writer:
Don't do it. Find something else you are motivated to do. If you feel like writing is something you should be doing -- or at least something you should want to do -- because somebody told you that, just get your advice from someone else.
It may be that motivation begets more motivation, which would then become a question of how to get the ball rolling each day or, however often. For me if I want to write something I will not sit down to write but rather to brainstorm with notes, this gets the ball rolling. I often lie to myself saying just sit down for a few minutes to think and write, no big obligation. But I usually carry on for longer
You might want to have written something. I have things I would like to say, or rather to have said. But I have little interest in the business of writing. At intervals I make a desultory attempt to set up a blog but then I fail to actually fill it with anything interesting, not because I have nothing to say but because I can't summon up the effort required to say it.
Writing can also a tool for thinking and for finding flaws in your ideas. It sounds strange to me that you would like something to have said but don't really want to spend the time to make your argument.
That said, podcasts could also be a way to explore ideas without having to write them down.
> It sounds strange to me that you would like something to have said but don't really want to spend the time to make your argument.
Why is that strange? That is how we run our lives in most other fields. I want to holiday in Spain but I really don't want to learn how to fly to get there. I want a house to live in but i don't want to build it; that is; I want to have built a house but don't want to build a house.
Maybe it's just a little bit arrogant to think what you would like to be said could be important to other people when you don't even want to take the time to write it down in a convincing way.
Living in a house somebody built for you is equivalent to reading.
> Writing (with good style on interesting topics) would be nice.
Sure. Playing piano improvising over jazz chords would be nice too. But as with writing you need to put in the hours to get there. The hard work is a reality check on a maybe romanticized idea of writing.
I think the lack of interest is because of lack of information. Eg. I don't like making YouTube videos but if it helps me make some money then i can find motivation to make videos.
My experience and techniques have been remarkably similar, albeit on a smaller scale than Gergely. A few years ago I decided to start writing one post per month on any subject within tech/software development. I've missed that goal a couple of times but my average since then has still been ~1.4 posts per month.
I write about whatever is interesting to me and most often that's exploring topics in tech that were a mystery to me before like compilers, databases, etc. Like Gergely I keep an ever growing list of projects or topics that seem interesting to tackle at some point.
One book I'd recommend most to folks writing in tech (whether it's technical or not) is On Writing Well, which teaches you the same kinds of things Gergely uses Hemingway Editor for. That is, to be concise and precise.
I think the biggest benefit to writing consistently is that you improve as a writer and that you get to explore interesting topics. Even if you are doing coding projects to improve as a developer, it's a whole new level to start trying to explain that work in blog posts. It's easier in coding to get things right without understanding exactly how/why they worked. When you write to explain you have to actually dig into that how/why.
Some people say tech blogging is great for getting jobs but in my experience, of all the things that helped me get work, my blog didn't contribute much. But I'm just one data point. I say this so that you don't get discouraged if you don't suddenly unlock emails from hiring managers because you start writing more.
The autobiography is wonderful, and brilliant, but understand it is not so truthful. The type of aphorism you cited is typical of his output. It most likely never happened, but it should have happened. This is like Franklin's great public persona of temperance even though he was a notorious drunk.
Franklin was a scoundrel, an inveterate liar, skirt-chaser, always obese, and extremely lazy. A man of great intelligence, appetites, and very little in the way of self-restraint.
He would generally sleep till noon or later. He'd lie naked on his bed until the afternoon, opening the windows, and calling it an "air shower". He had many mistresses, a knack for self-promotion, and swindled several business partners.
At the same time, he was one of the most brilliant, wise, and influential men in the colonies, making important scientific discoveries, establishing hospitals, fire departments, post offices, libraries, schools, and many other projects. A successful author, inventor, diplomat, business man, and polymath, his work infused with wisdom, creativity, and common sense. He makes the modern "3 hour work week" sound like an amateur enterprise. It's incredibly how productive he was.
Well, at least he claimed the bulk of the credit for the public works -- his drinking buddy and dear friend Chief Justice William Allen also played a big role (until the relationship soured and Allen had him fired from trusteeship of the Academy of Philadelphia due to yet another financial dispute).
But Franklin was a great schmoozer, and he knew what needed to be done, how to get it done, and then how to take credit. He was extremely popular, told great stories, and was generally the smartest man in the room wherever he went.
But later in his life, when he discovered his own son was following down the same dissolute path, he wrote this autobiography as a hagiography to hard work and self-discipline, and had the big brass balls to portray himself as that early-to-bed, early-to-rise, temperate moral paragon, even though all of his contemporaries understood exactly what kind of a man he was, and must have laughed their asses off when reading that book.
And yet, it's a masterpiece. A critically important historical document while at the same time being enjoyable to read and inspiring millions. Franklin wins again.
Hmm, the "air shower" I got from a Thaddeus Russell's podcast about famous dissolute men, in which he covered Churchill, Franklin, and others. You can ping him on Twitter or elsewhere for a source.
I guess that's a good argument for writing, even if you don't want to.
He who tells the best story gathers the greatest audience and gets the credit -- and reward.
And good writing will be around a million years after MySpace and YouTube are long gone. Benjamin Franklin will be remembered and more highly regarded than Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk -- in their own lifetimes.
> I also use Grammarly to catch spelling, and grammar issues, and sometimes take suggestions the tool gives - though I just as frequently reject them.
Grammarly has become a crutch. It either fails to catch typos or distracts me when I am writing. Moreover, I feel like I am progressively becoming bad at catching grammar mistakes.
I like Grammarly, but I definitely wouldn't let it interrupt me while I'm writing. I don't install the Grammarly extension or write in the Grammarly app. Instead, I paste my content into Grammarly as a last step after editing the content myself, and I find that to be an effective workflow.
I began writing recently in a browser editor (substack) that doesn't do the corrective spelling. I could barely write because I had to constant stop and figure out how to really spell the word. Totally revealed, for better or worse, how sloppy I had become as a typist.
My go to is MS notepad. I will write everything in paragraphs in notepad then copy paste it in. Nothing is more fast and convenient than the classic Notepad.
If only I could find something that is as fast as notepad, as convenient as notepad, as easy to work with as notepad but with Vim key bindings. That would be fantastic. Tried Gvim but that is no notepad.
Now that I REALLY think about it.... I guess I don't need vim. I am one of those persons who tries to convince themselves they need vim for everything to fit in the with the cool kids. I understand the hypocrisy and I kinda need this hypocrisy for motivation reasons I guess.
Modifying Vim to the point it replicates notepad defeats the purpose of using vim. I need a handful of Vim key bindings but beyond that customizing the rc file to make it more like notepad is just too much of a hassle.
I use text wrap and frequently use the scroll zoom. I miss 2-3 letters words in my writing so I have to get to them quickly when I am revising. Being a vim novice vim is great for me as I am writing but not for editing and revising.
And Windows environment really isn't great for rapid typing with vim. Initializing the terminal takes me 10-20 seconds.
I disagree. If you're putting effort into writing, writing often and on new themes/ideas is much more likely to lead to better habits and learning to write more effectively.
It's like drawing 100 one hour drawings vs one 100 hour drawings - same effort in terms of time but you're far more likely to learn how to be a better artist by learning to start quickly and progress further each time within the given amount of time. The traditional way of learning to draw is often subdivided into multiple 2 minute, 5 minute, 15 minute, and then longer form practice pieces. You can learn to start an artwork more efficiently with just two minute sketches that you would never get to practice if you only did long effort works.
Writing more often is even better than that, since you develop better habits compared to writing less often. It's like drawing 100 one hour drawings vs one 25 hour drawing, instead. Consistently practicing as often as you can be productive for is how you learn skills of all kinds.
Not really disagreeing- just stressing that there is a large literature on what’s called expert performance, which shows a powerful function for what they call deliberate practice. Stressing the explicit effort to get better. Not like some who play golf for 40 years yet never improve.
I think my point is that practice should stress 'deliberate practice' but also consistency, frequency, and also quantity. less deliberate practice is going to be worse than more deliberate practice. deliberate practice doesn't preclude quantity, and in fact quantity is a good measure of your ability to put out words.
I'd rather get 500-1000 words an hour and go back to edit, than get 250 perfect words that I'm likely going to have to go back and edit anyways. The standard you talked about is related to the final draft, and the product of writing is rarely the product of the first unedited draft. Quantity has a very large value in learning to write.
One very poor practice in higher ed and universities is that people rarely go through an editorial process where they can see how much early drafts can be improved through re-writes. So students write 100 essays, submitted and graded, with not a single polished work. At least that was my experience as a student and teacher
The idea of draft and edit was taught to me in high school but my high school english teacher was an author so perhaps they had better insight than most english teachers - I can't say since I only had the one teacher and they knew how to write.
I think in university the issue becomes largely one of limited time and effort budget. I was an engineering major and took some economics courses for a minor (which I never got in the end) that involved essay writing. The issue wasn't that I didnt know i could improve it by editing, it's that each piece of homework competes against each other piece of homework for time and attention. The goal is 'how good can I make it in the time I can justify putting towards it'.
I'm sure I made some boneheaded errors in some of my work but I was already doing 'homework triage' and leaving the least valuable but time consuming assignments to when I might be able to get to them.
Writing a work you intend to publish rather than submit to a teacher is a different exercise. It's hard to practice in an environment where you're already racing the clock to get your 4-6 hours of homework out of the way each night.
The post touts writing and publishing regularly as the most important factors in having a blog, as many posts of this style do.
I figured I'd give it a shot, so last summer I set myself the goal of writing one blog post each week, for at least a year. So far, I've never missed the deadline. The audience/reach of my blog, however, didn't change significantly, and it gets progressively harder to go on since it feels like I'm writing "to the void."
A lot of people talk about consistency, but I have come to realize that after a certain point, "marketing," (e.g. spreading your stuff) is even more important. I'd love to see a post talking about that.
I would love to work with an editor. If any editors are reading this and are interested in a) working with a new client, and b) think they can help me improve, I’d love to hear from you. My website is in my profile.
I have the motivation to write and did write some short articles about things that I learned, but I feel that those are too trivial and mentioned elsewhere on the web and too shy to publish them. I feel that publishing a blog with trivial articles looks dumb. Is this normal? Is there a way to overcome this?
Re the point regarding writing regularly, I built an app to develop my daily writing habit. I’ve been writing every day for almost 2 years, averaging around 800 words per day. I’m pretty happy with it:)
Is lack of interest a solvable problem? This is a question I continually revisit. In one of the comment threads for the last "how to write" article that was submitted recently, there was an opinion that it is not. There is nothing you can do to motivate someone who is fundamentally a non-writer to be a writer. The interest will never be there, no matter what the person chooses to say or think on the contrary.
Does the concept of interest have some kind of divide between "mental" (the subjects your brain is capable of focusing on at a biological level) and "volitional" (the things you say you want to focus on)? Certain mental conditions include symptoms like "specific interests" as diagnostic criteria, which makes me believe that biology plays a part in motivation in addition to routine.
Ideas such as those have made me question many other things. Assuming that lack of motivation is not solvable, is it justifiable to have interest in nothing (productive/creative/cultural) in particular, yet still be dissatisfied with the ways you spend your time?
There is some kind of cognitive dissonance that arises when I think that "writing would be nice," when attempting to write is an activity that I lose interest in within days of actively returning to it, but the original thought of "writing would be nice" never goes away.