# The Trick to Permanent Motivation (Productivity Coach)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boo5gtr6oRU

[00:00] hey everyone welcome back and today
[00:02] we're talking about a very common topic
[00:04] here which is that of motivation and how
[00:06] do you keep yourself motivated we're
[00:08] running a slightly different format so
[00:10] i'd love to hear your thoughts leave
[00:11] your comments down below in terms of
[00:13] whether this format works well for you
[00:15] we've got two interviewers this time
[00:18] we've got
[00:19] stephanie here who is a
[00:21] student she's been on the course for a
[00:24] while
[00:25] she's a little bit more familiar with
[00:27] some of the techniques and things then
[00:29] we've got marvin here
[00:31] from germany who is sort of a student
[00:33] but also a professional i mean is
[00:36] looking at things from a slightly
[00:37] different angle
[00:38] less kind of technically deep into it
[00:40] but also
[00:42] looking at it from like a slightly older
[00:44] angle as well so hopefully the two of
[00:46] the two of them will be your voice and
[00:49] ask you know all the right questions so
[00:51] um let's take it away let's get into it
[00:53] all right
[00:54] yeah motivation is a topic that everyone
[00:57] talks about i think every other day i
[00:59] hear people say help can you help me
[01:01] find motivation i need to get motivated
[01:03] to study so what do most students get
[01:06] wrong about motivation the thing that
[01:08] most students will get wrong about
[01:09] motivation is that number one i think
[01:11] the students tend to often see
[01:13] motivation as something that is very
[01:15] inherent it's kind of like a fixed
[01:17] attribute or a characteristic they have
[01:18] like i'm a motivated person or i'm not a
[01:21] motivated person they see motivation as
[01:23] this thing that is driving influence
[01:26] like a driving force that has to power
[01:29] every single behavior they have to wake
[01:31] up feeling motivated they have to have
[01:34] motivation to study they have to have
[01:35] motivation to get their homework done or
[01:38] cover all the content but the important
[01:40] thing there is that that's not actually
[01:42] how motivation works motivation is not
[01:44] you know it's not the fire of like the
[01:46] steam engine where the steam powers
[01:48] everything you know motivation is like
[01:50] it's like a secret weapon motivation is
[01:52] like a thing that you hold that you
[01:54] protect and reserve so when you really
[01:56] need to push through something you have
[01:58] this to give the worst case scenario is
[02:01] that you're using motivation on simple day-to-day things such as just studying.
[02:07] getting through your routine therefore using up all that motivation and not having any lift and reserve when you really need it.
[02:15] and the problem is that if you think about motivation and kind of like this fixed thing that you just have.
[02:20] you're always just looking to top it up.
[02:22] you're always looking to just add more motivation because you're constantly burning through it all the time.
[02:28] and so you constantly need to just be topping up the motivation and adding more fuel to this.
[02:34] and that's not sustainable.
[02:36] we can't live and and do much when we're constantly trying to top up uh with motivation and so what we really need to start thinking about is where does the motivation actually come from and how do we facilitate it and how do we protect it.
[02:50] how do we create systems of working and productivity that are not dependent on motivation in the first place that's the main thing.
[02:56] so i get that but what do you do if you have topics that are pretty uninteresting.
[02:59] so you mean like subjects
[03:03] that you're studying right?
[03:04] Yeah, exactly. This is, this is an important distinction.
[03:06] So we can kind of divide it into, into like a couple of different components.
[03:10] We can talk about like the inherent interest that we have.
[03:12] So there's this broad term, you know, where we understand motivation, right, in terms of there being the sort of external motivation versus internal motivation.
[03:25] Right.
[03:25] And when we have external motivation, this is the type of thing that is like, um, you know, we may have a motivational video that we watch.
[03:32] We may have, you know, a teacher or someone that is motivating us.
[03:36] Um, I don't know, we might have this poster or particular slogan or a saying that we read.
[03:42] Um, you know, someone is encouraging.
[03:45] These are things that are externally motivating as opposed to internal motivation where these are things that are derived inherently from within yourself.
[03:55] Um, and other some some people call this intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation.
[03:57] It's the same thing, but when we're talking about something like
[04:03] intrinsic motivation or internal motivation.
[04:05] there are multiple ways that this can be derived.
[04:07] so one it can be derived from your own sense of identity.
[04:09] who like the type of person you see yourself as.
[04:12] so for example if you see yourself as someone that is really studious then you may be inherently motivated to study because it aligns with your sense of who you are as a person.
[04:24] it's just like how if you see yourself as being sporty or religious or culturally of a certain type of culture you are inherently motivated to do things and behave in a way that aligns with that sense of identity.
[04:35] so the first thing is about the identity.
[04:36] and some people don't see learning as an identity that they have.
[04:37] they see it as something that they need to do but they don't see themselves as a learner and therefore they're less inherently motivated towards that.
[04:46] and there's a whole bunch that we could talk about in terms of aligning yourself with your sense of identity.
[04:53] the other place that a motivation can come from is just the activity or the task in itself.
[04:59] so what this is talking about is
[05:05] the task is inherently motivating so you are motivated to do it.
[05:12] because the task is inherently motivating.
[05:13] games actually a really good example.
[05:15] you know games are designed to give you these rewards and make you feel really good about playing them and so when you play this game you're inherently motivated to play the game.
[05:22] you don't wake up being like oh man like i gotta play my game again today like i'm so sick of this like you know just one more hour let me just play one more hour of playing this game and then i can go back to doing something i really enjoy like studying.
[05:32] you know most people don't say that and the reason is because games are inherently intrinsically motivating.
[05:38] the trick here is to when we're talking about this type of motivation is to think about what aspect of this are we not finding enjoyable and motivating.
[05:49] so let's let's zoom in on this part here and we can say okay so this task or activity we can be talking about studying a specific topic but there's two angles there.
[06:01] number one is the inherent interest that you have in the topic in itself so
[06:06] this would be like saying i'm inherently interested in human biology
[06:08] i'm inherently interested in quantum physics
[06:10] and so we may for whatever reason just be really interested in that
[06:14] maybe we grew up with some fun stories around it
[06:17] or maybe we you know read some nice books or your parents you know talked about this a lot or whatever it is you know you saw some cool cartoon as a kid and you got interested for whatever reason
[06:26] we may be inherently interested in a specific topic and that's a lucky situation
[06:29] but for most people you're learning more stuff that you are not inherently interested in than stuff that you are inherently interested in
[06:37] especially in the early stages
[06:38] especially through high school and early university there's a lot of stuff that you feel like i don't really care about this but i need to learn any way to get the grades
[06:43] so there it's not really easy to get inherent interest in the topic in itself
[06:48] instead we can have interest in the process of learning in itself
[06:50] so this is process specific interest
[06:59] so the process of learning could be something that is fundamentally engaging and enjoyable
[07:03] so for example you could
[07:06] be studying and the fact that you are studying could be engaging and enjoyable in itself.
[07:10] and the thing is and this is the thing that most people don't realize is that learning is inherently actually a very enjoyable thing.
[07:14] most people actually enjoy learning.
[07:16] most people like to have that feeling that they're acquiring knowledge and getting good at something and developing mastery.
[07:22] the problem is that most people are then studying in a way that does not even facilitate those same cognitive processes.
[07:27] you have learning which is inherently enjoyable and feels great and you know you walk out feeling like energized and engaged.
[07:34] but most people are studying in a way that makes them feel sleepy and tedious and drowsy and it's monotonous and boring and not interesting.
[07:40] and what that means is that those studying processes are not activating the cognitive processes around learning.
[07:46] and once we change the studying technique so that it actually matches the process of learning which again most human beings are kind of wired to naturally enjoy.
[07:57] then you would actually find even if the topic itself is very boring you'd still find that it's relatively interesting to study and learn because you're just enjoying the process.
[08:07] of learning in itself
[08:11] and that's the that's the thing so most people are not interested and internally intrinsically motivated by studying
[08:18] and it's like why would you be when's the last time you were intrinsically motivated to do something that was tedious boring maybe you weren't even good at it and you weren't getting the results that you wanted and you were actively sacrificing other things that you actually enjoyed
[08:31] none of that is a combination for something that it would be weird if that was motivating
[08:37] right that's kind of the situation is that we want to have something that is more enjoyable and engaging in itself by modifying the techniques to activate the right processes which obviously you know many of the things that i talk about
[08:51] so the problem with most people is that it's not motivation
[08:54] motivation is not the issue motivation is the symptom
[08:58] the problem is the process that they're using
[09:01] they're doing something that sucks their brain is telling them yo this sucks and it's like yes because it actually does
[09:08] suck so the solution to that is not to say how do i make myself do something that sucks.
[09:13] it's how do i make it not suck in the first place.
[09:17] yeah that's the secret sauce which is not like revolutionary in itself.
[09:22] but i think most people don't think about it that way when it comes to something like studying.
[09:25] do we have something like a real life example of this of of getting started of starting the nuclear reactor because it does need a lot of energy to just getting started in the whole thing.
[09:37] yeah so the the important thing i think is that when you're starting from a point where you've got like zero motivation to do anything.
[09:43] so this is like motivation on the y-axis and you're starting from a point where your current method is is running like down here and you have very it's not giving you lots of motivation to do this.
[09:55] then even if you're able to bring it up to like this level which objectively is not really motivating still it's a lot more motivating than what you were doing before.
[10:03] it's like twice as motivating as what you were doing before so it's not very difficult to start making a few.
[10:11] strides on this if everything you're doing when you're studying is going absolutely terribly and then you start changing just one little thing and that one little thing is a little bit more engaging that is already very motivating so it's not hard to start the chain reaction.
[10:24] it takes a lot of time and energy to get to the top but it doesn't take a lot of time energy to actually get there because each step requires very little actual energy.
[10:36] all you need to do is just make one small change that is in the right direction.
[10:40] it doesn't even need to be the perfect step as long as it's in the right general direction it's going to be you know fine and at a certain point when your technique because i guess your technique is growing at the same time when your technique gets sufficiently advanced enough it gets harder and harder to make these improvements because there are more you know intricacies with a technique but most people are nowhere near that.
[10:59] most people are just using very passive strategies that are very time consuming and very repetitive.
[11:05] the most advanced strategy most people know is just smashing through anki and flashcards over and over again and so from that baseline there's so many areas
[11:12] that we can improve on that it's almost
[11:14] you know it's a free it's a free game
[11:16] you just pick one thing that you can start applying
[11:18] you don't even have to like i teach a lot of techniques in my videos
[11:19] you don't even need to apply all of the techniques that i teach
[11:23] you can just pick one aspect of one part of a single video and just start like that
[11:27] and then itself will get you just one step closer
[11:33] and when you've mastered move to the next step and the next step and the next step and so on and so forth
[11:37] and that's the way that your mentor builds through the progress
[11:39] one of the things that i really hate about the way that a lot of people teach study skills is that number one it's very superficial
[11:43] it's very sort of tips based so as a result it's not actually making things more motivating
[11:47] it's a little bit motivating at the beginning because there's this short-term gain that you're getting from this tip but it doesn't fundamentally change anything
[11:54] you're still using the same ineffective approach to learning
[11:57] it's still fairly repetitive we just found more interesting ways of doing the repetition
[12:02] but when you keep doing it it's still repetitive and it's still the same cognitive processes that are being used
[12:08] so it's eventually just going to be just as demotivating and just as exhausting as the old method
[12:12] the only reason the
[12:14] new one is better is because it's at least novel and new and it feels more exciting for the next couple months but at that point you run into the same issue and the reason this is bad is because it actually makes the problem worse because now you've tried so many things and you're still feeling like you're running into the cycle of demotivation like you try something new and then you're demotivated again and you you try something new and you're motivated and you you do it and then you're demotivated and you try something new and you're motivated and you demotivate it again it just cycles up and down like fluctuating motivation and then you start thinking like maybe there's something wrong with me you know why can't i just stay motivated and the thing is nothing about that behavior is inducive to actually being sustainably motivated the trick to being sustainably motivated is to eliminate the root cause for the demotivation in the first place and that takes a little bit of introspection and we need to actually think about where we're driving the motivation from i didn't mention this explicitly but we should be trying to derive more motivation from internal or intrinsic sources than from these
[13:15] external extrinsic sources least of all.
[13:17] because you can't really control this.
[13:19] often.
[13:20] whereas you can control the intrinsic.
[13:23] stuff.
[13:24] you don't want to be dependent on having like a luck.
[13:26] you don't be lucky and get a good teacher that helps you be motivated.
[13:30] you want to be able to stay motivated by yourself intrinsically.
[13:32] so you mentioned that people often fall into the trap of being tip based.
[13:37] and you've suggested that you should be working on one technique at one time right.
[13:42] how do you think students should assess themselves to know if they're going for something tip based that's just going to be demotivating over and over again or it's something that's actually giving them progress.
[13:56] right so you're talking about how you can even know whether this is a tip or whether it's something more significant than a tip.
[14:05] yeah.
[14:06] yeah so that's a good question.
[14:08] um i guess it's hard to know unless you really know what like you already know about how sort of learning kind of works which is number.
[14:15] one i think why it's important that people should actually have a theoretical understanding about.
[14:20] i know keep some people complain on my videos about how my videos are too long and no one cares about the theory but it's like you should care about the theory because if you know the theory you can start problem solving this stuff for yourself.
[14:29] like you don't want to have to watch all of my videos every single time you need an improvement like at a certain point you should get to a level of knowledge and theoretical understanding that you understand how the brain works enough to fact check and see whether something makes sense or not.
[14:41] you should be able to look at a technique and think you know i don't feel like that would really work because it goes against what i understand about how learning actually works that's there's a process so number one having a bit of theoretical knowledge actually goes a long way.
[14:56] number two as a rule of thumb generally speaking if it seems really really easy to do like you could pick it up in like a few minutes it's probably not going to make a big difference.
[15:10] there's a very small list of things that you can do very easily that make a huge difference.
[15:17] there are some things that you can do that make a big difference where even if you do it wrong it still provides a big improvement right things like just trying to write a little bit less notes.
[15:26] things like trying to experiment with you know drawing some relationships in your notes.
[15:31] things like thinking a little bit more before writing down notes or having a distraction sheet where you write down the distractions that you faced during a focus session and try to remove them in the next session.
[15:41] doing some basic pre-study for like 15 20 minutes before you cover a topic like even if you do that wrong you're still going to get a bit of benefit from it.
[15:47] having said that all of those things have more advanced versions that are like even more efficient but if there's anything that feels like this is pretty easy and it seems like it's going to provide this improvement without being needed to put in much effort it's probably not going to really do much difference.
[16:02] because if it was that easy everyone would do it and then you know it wouldn't be much of a secret.
[16:09] usually these tips are things that kind of work but they don't really work consistently there's a lot of conditions.
[16:17] for it working for a lot of people that use it it doesn't really work that well.
[16:22] so it's one of those things that's kind of like yeah sure give it a go don't expect it to be the thing that completely flips your world upside down and changes the way that you you think about learning all together which is probably the thing that would make the biggest difference and solve most of your problems but it is something that's like yeah sure you could give it a go or you could not give it a go it probably doesn't really matter what matters is the actual you know like the retraining process stuff that usually takes a little bit of investment and a little bit of work it's like making money you know everyone knows that like get rich quick schemes probably are not going to work but there probably are some that actually work right like there's probably some that will help you make some money in the short term but there's not going to be any real ways of making a lot of money in a very short period of time it doesn't involve some pretty significant investment and some pretty significant transformation that most people are not going to do otherwise everyone will be rich so just the very fact that that's not the case is enough so that's kind of a filter that i would use.
[17:15] so justin uh what is your ultimate
[17:18] advice on motivation if i had to isolate it down to just one thing i'd probably say that my ultimate advice is to make sure that you're very clear about what specifically is stopping you from being motivated and isolate it down.
[17:34] don't broadly just say like i am demotivated like an entity like as an existence in this universe i just like float around demotivated.
[17:40] don't say that think what about like where am i motivated where am i not motivated and why keep going down that hole until you've isolated the problem.
[17:49] for most people when it comes to studying the part that motivates them is the process of studying itself and it's not the process of learning because they are motivated by learning other things.
[17:58] and if we can isolate that that tells us the problem is in the in this example the studying process and we can actually change that and we can start bridging those things together.
[18:07] and at the very least what it gives is a sense of hope you don't have to live a demotivated empty life that doesn't have to be the norm.
[18:13] i know it is kind of the norm for a lot of people but it doesn't have to be one of the most common pieces of feedback that we get.
[18:19] from people that have worked through the course
[18:20] and both of you will actually know this and felt this for yourselves right
[18:23] is that when you start actually using more engaging learning techniques and actually legitimately starts feeling more interesting right
[18:30] like you're actually more engaged in the learning process and it actually becomes legitimately more enjoyable and the act of studying actually becomes more motivating because of the fact that it's more enjoyable
[18:40] and that's purely a side effect like when you guys were learning some of the techniques were you actively trying to like increase your level of motivation by learning these techniques
[18:49] nah that came as like a side effect yeah
[18:52] it's more like a side effect yeah even if you're just focusing on just increasing the study technique the the benefit that it has on motivation is usually very linear and it's often very predictable yeah
[19:00] i mean it's a bit of a long tip but that's probably the final thing that i'd leave with
[19:06] [Music]
[19:19] you