How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work Using the Goldilocks Rule
It was 1955, Disneyland had just opened in Anaheim, California, when a ten-year-old boy walked in and asked for a job. At the time, labor laws were free, and the boy managed to find work selling guidebooks to visitors for $ 0.50 apiece.
This post originally appeared on James Clear’s blog .
Within a year, he moved to Disney’s wizardry store, where he learned tricks from senior employees. He experimented with jokes and tried out simple magic exercises with visitors. He soon discovered that he liked not to practice magic, but to act in general. The young man decided to become a comedian.
After entering high school, he began performing in small Los Angeles clubs. The crowds were small and his performance was short. He rarely appeared on stage for more than five minutes. On one occasion, he literally took his performance to an empty club.
It wasn’t a glamorous job, but he was undoubtedly getting better. His first magical exercises lasted only one or two minutes. In high school, his material expanded to include a five-minute parody, followed by a ten-minute show. At 19, he performed weekly in clubs for twenty minutes at a time. Of course, he had to read three poems during the performance to make the routine long enough, but still. He was getting better.
He spent another ten years experimenting, tuning and perfecting his performance. He got a job as a TV presenter and gradually was able to appear on TV shows himself. By the mid-1970s, he had become a regular guest on The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live .
After almost 15 years of work, he has achieved tremendous success. He traveled 60 cities in 63 days. Then 72 cities in 80 days. Then 85 cities in 90 days. 18,695 people attended one show in Ohio. His three-day show in New York has sold 45,000 tickets. He catapulted to the pinnacle of his genre and became one of the most famous comedians of his time.
His name was Steve Martin.
Steve Martin’s long road to success
I recently completed Steve Martin’s excellent autobiography, Born to Stand .
Comedy is not for the faint of heart. It is difficult to imagine a situation that would strike fear into the hearts of more people than the absence of a single laugh on stage. And yet Martin has been working on it for 18 years. According to him, “I spent 10 years on training, 4 years on improvement and 4 years on insane success.” His story offers a fascinating insight into motivation, persistence, and consistency.
Why do we keep motivated to achieve some goals and not others? Why do we say we want something but give it up after a few days? What is the difference between the areas in which we maintain our natural motivation and the areas in which we give up?
Scientists have studied motivation for decades. While there is still a lot to learn, one of the more consistent takeaways is that perhaps the best way to stay motivated is to work on tasks that are “easily manageable”.
Goldilocks Rule
People love challenges, but only if they are in the optimal zone of difficulty.
For example, imagine you are playing tennis. If you try to play a serious match against a four year old, you will quickly get bored. The match is too easy. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you try to play a serious match against a professional tennis player like Roger Federer or Serena Williams, you will find yourself demotivated for a different reason. The match is too difficult.
Compare this tennis experience with your peers. As the game progresses, you win a few points and lose a few points. You have a chance to win the match, but only if you try really hard. Your focus shrinks, distractions disappear, and you are completely absorbed in the task at hand. The challenge you are faced with is “easily manageable.” Victory is not guaranteed, but possible. As science has found, such tasks are most likely to keep us motivated in the long run.
Tasks well below your current ability are boring. Tasks that are beyond your current capabilities are discouraging. But tasks that are on the verge of success and failure are incredibly motivating for our human brain. We want nothing more than to master a skill that transcends our current horizon.
We can call this phenomenon the Goldilocks Rule . The Goldilocks Rule states that people are most motivated to work on tasks that are on the verge of their current ability. Not that hard. Not so easy. Just right.
Martin’s comedic career has been a perfect example of what the Goldilocks Rule looks like in the real world. Every year the duration of his comedy numbers increased, but by only one or two minutes. He always added new material, but also left behind a few jokes that are guaranteed to make you laugh. There were enough wins to keep him motivated and enough mistakes to keep him working hard.
Measure your progress
If you want to know how to stay motivated to achieve your goals, then there is the second part of the motivational puzzle that is very important to understand. It has to do with achieving the perfect combination of hard work and happiness.
It was found that working on tasks of the optimal level of difficulty is not only motivating, but also a major source of happiness. As psychologist Gilbert Brim said: “One of the important sources of human happiness is working on tasks of the right level of difficulty, not too difficult or too easy.”
This combination of happiness and peak performance is sometimes referred to as the flow that athletes and performers experience when they are “in the zone.” Flow is the mental state you experience when you are so focused on a task at hand that the rest of the world disappears.
However, in order to achieve this state of maximum productivity, you need to not only work on tasks with the correct degree of difficulty, but also measure your immediate progress. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains, one of the keys to achieving a state of flow is that “you get immediate feedback on how you are doing at each stage.”
Watching your progress at the moment is incredibly motivating. Steve Martin told jokes and knew immediately if it worked by laughing from the crowd. Imagine how exciting it would be to make you laugh. The flood of positive reviews Martin experienced after one great joke would probably have been enough to overcome his fears and inspire him to work for a few weeks.
In other areas of life, the dimension looks different, but it is equally important for achieving a combination of motivation and happiness. In tennis, you get immediate feedback on whether you won a point or not. Regardless of how it is measured, the human brain needs a way to visualize our progress if we are to keep ourselves motivated. We need to see our victories.
Two steps to motivation
If we want to uncover the secret of how to stay motivated in the long run, we could simply say:
- Stick to the Goldilocks rule and work on tasks of easily manageable difficulty.
- Measure your progress and get immediate feedback whenever possible.
Wanting to improve your life is easy. It’s another matter to stick to it. If you want to stay motivated forever, start with an easy task, measure your progress, and repeat the process.
The Goldilocks Rule: How To Stay Motivated In Life And Business | James Clear