Stop talking about it and do it.

I've noticed lately that I've talked a lot about cleaning the house and doing taxes. I've told Cindy probably 5 times that I was going to work on taxes. I started telling her this back in late February.

It's April and I still haven't started. Why not?

Yesterday I read a blog post about how people who announce their intentions are less likely to make them happen.*

I agree. This advice does fly in the face of self-help authors who suggest that you should announce your plans to everyone you know. Supposedly by doing this you obligate yourself to actually competing your projects.

But, in actuality, the theory says by announcing your plans you're tricking your brain into thinking that you've already taken the first step. You get a tiny sense of accomplishment. Therefore you have no motivation to actually complete them.

So keep your plans quiet. Instead of spending energy announcing the plans, just do them.

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* Reference: “Symbolic Self-Completion” (1982) by Peter Gollwitzer

When motivation goes wrong.

Common practice often lags behind social science. Motivation is the perfect example. We think that we can motivate people by offering rewards like money or coupons or benefits.

This does work, but only for dull, repetitive tasks.

For the important tasks, you can actually decrease motivation by offering money. I'm reading Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink.

He cites an experiment with school-grade children who liked to draw. The experimenters measured how much time children spent drawing.

Then they offered the children certificates and other prizes for drawing. The children started drawing less.

Versions of this experiment have been replicated over and over again. Not only does offering if-then rewards fail to motivate people, if also stifles creativity.

Adults who were paid to solve a puzzle took longer than those who weren't.

The theory is that by offering money for something that people already enjoy we cause them to think of the task as "work". They lose pleasure in the task. When the children were bribed to draw, they felt like they were losing their freedom to enjoy something they already loved.

Don't break the chain.

I wrote yesterday about how a guy drew one thing every day and posted it to his website. After a few years, he was an amazing artist.

There's a motivational technique called "Don't Break the Chain" whose central idea is that you should do something every single day, mark it in your calender, and try and keep the chain as long as possible. That's it.

Apparently Jerry Seinfeld is a big believer in this technique.

It works because 1) you're practicing every day and therefore improving your skill 2) every once and awhile, through quantity alone, you'll hit upon an amazing day. If you wrote 100 jokes a day, it wouldn't take many days to come up with a few amazing jokes.

(This blog is a bit like that. I haven't missed a day yet, but in reality I do a few posts at once so that I can have days off. So this blog is not a true chain. )

We first encounter the "Don't Break the Chain" technique when we're toddlers being toilet trained. Our parents put a gold star on the calendar and that gold star is so satisfying we want to fill the entire calendar with stars.

So what creative thing could you do every day or every week?

• write a short story
• write a poem
• write a song
• paint a picture
• draw a picture
• build something
• make something
• start a conversation with a stranger
• exercise

And that's all. You can't do anything else in a day or a week. Just those things.