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.
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.