[Applause] a little while back I was walking on my way from home from school to home when I suddenly realized that I had a 1,000-word paper due the very next morning so in a panic I ran home I sat at my desk and I stared blankly at my computer screen to be perfectly honest I wished I could be anywhere but here doing anything but this so I sat there Like a Rock waiting for magic to happen waiting for inspiration to just hit me unsurprisingly it didn't now as any reasonable person in my position would do
I told myself you know what you should take a short 5 minute break no less no longer before I knew it I was kneee into this and a whole lot of this they say that optimism is telling yourself and managing to convince yourself that you can watch a full 20 minute episode of Netflix in less than 5 minutes well if that's true then I'm quite an optimist but all seriousness I think this is a classic example of the trade-off between motivation and procrastination and it goes a little bit like this you keep procrastinating and procrastinating
until one day something gives maybe you pull one too many all nighters and then you suddenly realize that you just can't to for it to keep putting your work off to the last minute whatever it is you realize that your intent and your actions don't meet so you make the resolution to commit to something new and it might work for a few days maybe a few weeks or maybe even a month if you're lucky but chances are sooner or later you'll end up relap in and then the all too familiar feelings of guilt anxiety self-loathing
will set in and what do you do you go back to your resolution and so the process repeats and it repeats you're basically like Tarzan swinging from Vine to vine from the person you used to be and the person you want to be so why is it so hard to stay Resolute on a resolution well there's a simple answer and a not so simple answer so I'll start with a simp simpler answer simply put motivation is finite so when you're say when you set your goals way too high often times you run out of motivation
too quickly so I'll start with a personal example if I told myself that I wanted to wake up every morning at 400 a.m. and exercise for 45 minutes every day I might wake up bushy eyed every morning for two days but 2 weeks later we know that that motivation will be replaced by eh I'll do do it later what's the problem here I set my sight too high what you really need to do is tell yourself you know what I'll wake up at 5 and I'll exercise for 10 minutes every day and then you do
that for a week once that habit is formed you make that into 15 minutes and then 20 minutes and so the habit is formed if you start small and work and form that habit and then you work your way up it's a lot easier so I've given the simple answer so what's the not so simple answer because the answer is not so simple I'll take some help from a study that was conducted by professors from MIT Carnegie melon and the University of Chicago the study was quite interesting it looked at the effects of extrinsic rewards
on individual performance what they found was that people completed tasks the best when they did them for their own sake when they did them because they enjoyed them not because they wanted an extrinsic reward now at the time this was groundbreaking because why do people exercise because they want to get fit and it's that end goal which motivates them to exercise right or so we thought what this study tells us is that the most important thing to maintaining a habit is getting Buy in from yourself it's not enough to just enjoy the outcome you have
to enjoy the process and only then will the outcome follow think about it think about about examples from your own personal life that time when you wrote that essay or you submitted that assignment that you were really proud of did you write it on the back of a napkin in the 5 minutes before the deadline just because you wanted to get it over with or did you work tirelessly at it did you worked so hard that you didn't even notice the time going by that is what motivation is when you're so emotionally invested in the
process that the outcome seases to become important if you look look at people who are truly motivated they don't need to force themselves out of bed every morning to do work they just work and it just comes to them but you might be asking sure it may come to certain people but what if I'm not one of those people well here's the thing right motivation is a skill and like any skill it can be taught and it can be learned what this study told us is that the key secrets to motivation is changing a little
thing about the task or assignment that you're given so that it becomes a little less tiresome and a little bit more enjoyable here are a few examples if you want to exercise skip the treadmill maybe go outside for a run and that'll make it a little less hard for you to exercise in morning if you want to get that homework or that assignment done on time don't lock yourself in a room and do it alone at a desk maybe find a group of friends and do it with them or do it do your homework in
a different location so that that your work is a little bit less monotonous and look I don't profess to be a master of the art of self motivation I like any other person watch my fair share of cat videos and I'm still trying to find the perfect balance but what's the message here the message here is that self- motivation when done right can be truly transformative because it enables us to find that inner spark so that we enjoy every little thing we do in our lives I'll leave you all with a quote from Carl Young
one of the world's leading psychologists he who looks outside dreams he who looks inside awakes thank you
