Takes a village

If I finish this I can have some ice cream! That’s one way to get myself to write. Except… who wants ice cream? You know what’s better than ice cream? Lazing. Lazing rules. This is my general attitude. Most rewards are not as good as the reward of not working at all, and so I don’t find rewards particularly motivating. I’m just not particularly incentive driven. I’m driven by personal achievement, to some extent, but this has limits. I find it satisfying to pull off things I didn’t know I could do - pursuing excellence matters to me - but sometimes I need a boost, and rewards just don’t provide that boost. What’s much more effective for me is punishment. I’m an avoider more than a seeker. The two biggest things I want to avoid are embarrassing myself in front of others, and disappointing others. And so in order to get things done, I sometimes make commitments to other people, and especially to people who aren’t particularly forgiving. Some people in my life love me and are really nice and aren’t particularly judgmental. They don’t want me to be uncomfortable, which means if I don’t do something I said I would do they will let it slide and they won’t think any less of me. I appreciate those people a lot but they’re not a resource when it comes to meeting ambitious goals, not as much as people who are more willing to see me in discomfort. People who are relatively unforgiving are people who will not let me off the hook if I fail to meet a deadline. These people help me actually get things done, as do people who are more judgmental and who will think less of me if I don’t do what I said I’d do. The threats of disappointing those people and of embarrassing myself in front of others help me to get things done and done to some (admittedly low) standard of completion. I also like having people in my life who can empathize with the difficulty and who can swap notes on how they carry out difficult tasks.

I’ve used social media to get this effect from other people. I used facebook when I was doing the couch to 5k running plan. Whenever I was considering going for a run I would post that I was going to run, and then I would post about how it went. If I didn’t post about how it went, some friends would ask me, so I knew if I didn’t actually run then I’d have to admit it. My fear of embarrassment overcame my laziness. I used this until I got to genuinely enjoy running. More recently I’ve been using Lift.do to manage aspirations and goals. It’s all about setting new habits. The publicness helps and I’m trying to convince some friends to start using it too, to have more people to encourage me to accomplish tasks. I’m currently doing challenges on pushups, pullups, squats, and daily writing. I think until social media I have largely thought of effort and especially creative effort as an individual thing, without any social setting. It is an individual thing but other people can shore up or inspire my own commitment to making an effort. Bad experiences with people being egotistical about their performance and insulting about others’ (including mine, and friends of mine) in various settings made me hesitant to talk much about this kind of thing before - it felt arrogant. I now realize that talking humbly about striving is possible, and it’s an asset for myself to do that, and it’s an asset to me when others do it too.