Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation

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This type of approach doesn’t only apply to summiting a mountaintop. Each year over one hundred CEO’s in the S&P 1000 retire after reaching what can feel like a pinnacle in their career, leaving them feeling unprepared for the next phase. A refreshing read and reminder of ways to get things done. Start with motivational methods and incorporate adequate support. “Trying to stay motivated and make serious progress in whatever you’re trying to achieve in life can sometimes feel like an impossible task. But it doesn’t have to be. There’s a simple fix – and it just so happens to be in your control. It all starts with changing your circumstances. Most importantly, you need to define your goals. You need to pay attention to maintaining momentum, stay focused when you’ve got a billion other things on your plate and get your friends and family involved. And when you make your behavior and environment work for rather than against you, your goal of getting that raise, or that strong healthy body, or that tax return form sorted, or that new language learned, will be yours in no time! But not only could you be the one giving advice, you could also start to look for a possible role model – someone you could emulate on your way to achieving your goal. It could be anyone really – a friend, parent, teacher, or colleague. But your role model should know you exist. Why? Because a great role model is someone who doesn’t only set an example; they help set expectations for you. Dr. Fishbach has received several international awards, including the Society of Experimental Social Psychology's Best Dissertation Award and Career Trajectory Award, and the Fulbright Educational Foundation Award, and in 2006, she received the Provost's Teaching Award from the University of Chicago. Second, keep your goals abstract. Be careful not to be too vague, though. For example, “Improve my mental health” is better than “be happy” because it points you toward your next step: in this case, perhaps, starting therapy.

Fishbach also suggests that incentives will undermine children's intrinsic motivation more so than adults', because children are still figuring out which things they're doing because they enjoy them versus because of some other incentive. That seems plausible enough. A great deal of ink has been spilled on the subject of motivating and influencing others, but what happens when the person you most want to influence is you? great goals: are not proxies/means to other goals, are specific, have potential to fail, great incentives, intrinsic The reason that’s the case is that there are special, clearly marked points in time. It’s when you start doing something for longer that it becomes harder to maintain that enthusiasm. This is called the “middle problem.”

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P62 “Do you think that you care about how interesting your work is much more than the average person, but that you care about how much you’re paid only somewhat more than the average person? Turns out, that’s generally the case. The tendency for almost everyone to see themselves as above average is more pronounced for intrinsic than extrinsic motivation.”

P88 dynamics of “commitment promotes consistency” i.e. Alcoholics Anonymous vs. “progress promotes balancing” i.e. most dieting programs P40 “According to the dilution principle,” the more goals, including incentives, a single activity serves, the more weakly we associate the activity with our central goal and the less instrumental the activity seems for this goal.”Many, many books have been written about goal setting and productivity- more than I can count. It's a popular topic because in our hyper-productive world we all are trying to get more done in less time. It's the sacred cow of productivity that people from housewives to CEO's aspire to, and I have no problem with it as long as there's still room for family, fun, and balance. We waste a lot of our lives pursuing things half-heartedly or giving up before reaching our goals, so books like Get It Done can be very helpful in cutting through the BS and helping us focus on what matters. In Get It Done, psychologist and behavioral scientist Ayelet Fishbach presents a new theoretical framework for self-motivated action, explaining how to: The author’s Liberal leanings really come through strongly in the last third of the book. Too bad. It destroys her credibility. In the aggregate, Liberals have recently lost their minds. This is the reason Chicago has become so bleak. There’s a strange mental schism in which Liberals continue to believe their party and their ideas are virtuous, no matter how crappy the observable results from their ideas being put into practice by their party. pay attention and make the middle moments memorable when you want to give up; set subgoals; create landmarks

But if you’re an expert or you already know that you’ve committed to a goal, it’s actually the glass-half-empty mentality that may push you over the finish line. Setting the goal in the first place is perhaps the most obvious one, but as Fishbach explains, there are many ways in which people tend to get it wrong. One step we can take in goal setting is to focus on aligning our goals to our own intrinsic motivation. Role models are important figures in your life for your model is selling to whom you feel close into this place of qualities you'd like to see in yourself. ... you feel you have somewhat overlapping identities. You could potentially be like them, so they inspire you."And so, here’s a little advice from the book: if you’re new to or uncertain about a commitment, try to stay motivated looking at it with a glass-half-full mindset.