7 - Motivating ourselves during the long middle - Ayelet Fishbach on her book – “Get It Done”: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation

Ayelet speaks about the four steps involved in Goal setting and what it takes in getting the right balance between inspiration and action orientation of the goal. She also goes on to speak about the roles of approach goals (going towards something) and avoidance goals (moving away from something) and how we can work with the two as we move forward.

Ayelet speaks about how we should think about Goals for the long term. They need to be enough of a stretch but at the same time, they shouldn’t lead us to satisfice or burn out once we get there.

Ayelet speaks about the notion of Psychological reactance – the tendency to “not do” what you are told to do. She speaks specifically about how this shows up in the context of parenting and what we can do to avoid it.

Ayelet speaks about how having clear goals can show us the path but our ability to stick to the path is determined by our intrinsic motivation in walking that journey and the joy we experience in it.

We normally think of empathy when we think of the way we connect with others. Ayelet speaks about how we could build a deeper connect with our future selves and how that can act as an inspiration for us to make meaningful choices in the present. She speaks about the discount rate we apply on the future and how that can lead to us either over-indexing on the future or ignoring it depending on what we do.

Ayelet speaks about how we should think about “glass half full or empty” when it comes to motivating ourselves or others around us. Do we look at the ground we have traversed or the distance ahead? She speaks about the nuance involved here and when each of the approaches might make sense for us to motivate ourselves or others around us.

Ayelet speaks about the fact that we often have celebrations at the beginning of a journey and at the end of the journey and it is the long messy middle during which we often struggle to find the motivation to keep marching forward. She shares some insights on how we can overcome this long middle.

Ayelet speaks about how there is much more information in failures and in us mining the graveyards of failure than trying to overanalyze the factors behind success. Her assertion is that there is greater heterogeneity in failure that leads to richer information that could be helpful than the relative homogeneity of successes. She also goes on to speak about how we think about sharing positive and negative feedback with people.

Ayelet speaks about the link between our approach to optimizing or satisficing in a certain domain and our identity. She goes on to say that our identity often helps us prioritize across different choices and the extent to which we push ourselves in a certain domain.

Ayelet speaks about the case of Marie Curie. She wins the Nobel Prize in 1903 with her husband Pierre Curie for discovering Radioactivity. (She wins another Nobel Prize in 1911 for isolating pure Radium). Their eldest daughter, Irene Curie, won the Nobel Prize with her husband Frederic Joliot Curie. They were the second couple to win the Nobel Prize together, the first one being Marie and Pierre. Ayelet speaks about the power of joint goals using this as a reference case in point.