motivation

August was a month of deep diving into anything motivation-related. After a short and frustrating session with my psychiatrist where she’d told me there isn’t really a pill to give one motivation, I delved into this feverish search. Since I was a kid, motivation seemed to be something that was just there; I loved sketching, building little paper houses for my Pound Puppies, constructing a little guitar, learning a few lines of The Entertainer (the rag-time song, not Billy Joel) on piano each day. As I got older and started paying bills, things changed gradually. Motivation seemed to elude me at times and didn’t come as naturally as it used to.

Motivation can be divided into two parts — extrinsic and intrinsic. Things external to yourself that inspire you to do something versus an internal drive to accomplish a task. This was the first thing that sort of clicked in my “studies.” I seemed to be leaning way more on extrinsic motivators than that natural, internal voice I’d always followed before. I thought maybe that’s one of the reasons why I had a hard time with substance use, with nicotine, with watching numbers on Spotify or Instagram, or looking to a record label. A lot of extrinsic motivators have instant gratification (if you’re a long-time reader of this blog you might remember I wrote a whole piece years ago on instant gratification). Feel a little tired? Hit the vape. Only got a few hours sleep? Pop an Adderall. Bored but promised yourself you’d finish those vocals? Have a whiskey. It’s like lately I’d constantly been reaching for something outside of myself to jumpstart the process and keep me focused. Or I was looking to someone else (a record label, a manager) to inspire me to make my art.

The most beautiful and meaningful motivation I ever experienced was that intrinsic motivation. Doing something just because I wanted to. For some phantom reason, I just have to do this thing. In 2017 I put out my first EP and it started a whole new career trajectory that I didn’t plan. Most of the big moments in my life came from these sorts of experiences. I sent the “Strange” EP to a (then) little company called Marmoset and they auditioned me to write for a Secret Deodorant ad. Six years later, I’ve composed music for many clients and I now freelance for eight different music houses. At the time of writing this first EP, I was touring with Nate Ruess as his guitarist. I made demo after demo in the tour bus, I made entire EPs and then scratched them, I worked with a bunch of producers but none seemed right until I worked with the band RANN and we made “Strange.” I could have easily given up or not have had the time to make this record, but for some reason I just kept pushing on. It might have been frustrating and confusing at times, but mostly it was fun and I just felt that inner drive to do it.

There have been several studies that show how extrinsic or contingent motivators (think the carrot and the stick, or, if you do this, you get this) work best in specific situations. Dan Pink explains it well in this Ted Talk:

If-then rewards work really well for those sorts of tasks, where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination to go to. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind; that's why they work in so many cases.

He goes on to talk about several experiments that have been performed where they divided up test subjects into three groups with three levels of rewards — small, medium, and large. They were to complete a creative, conceptual task. Contrary to what you might think, the bigger the reward was the worse that specific group did. You’d think if someone was offered more money, for example, to complete a task, then surely they’d perform the best. But this isn’t the case, and that finding surprised me. It turns out that creative, conceptual, right-brained problems require a wide focus to find the best solution or discover something new. Extrinsic motivators or constraints (money, deadline, reward, etc) tend to narrow one’s focus, so you might miss the bigger picture or that unique creative idea.

So science has told me that for creative tasks intrinsic motivation is where it’s at. Now, how do I harness this and keep it consistent? I’ve read endless Reddit forums (this post is actually pretty cool) and listened to several podcasts on the topic (this Huberman Lab episode on goal-setting was enlightening) and there’s really no clear answer. I think it takes knowing yourself and what you need to cultivate intrinsic motivation. For me, I know I need an environment that makes it easy to write music. Everything in my apartment needs to be setup, accessible, and functioning. That means everything is plugged in, the space is clean, guitars are just a reach away, they’re all re-strung and ready to go. My DAW is up to date and runs smoothly, my sessions are copied over to external hard drives so my laptop can run efficiently. The next big thing for me is if my personal life is conducive to maintaining this motivation and focus. Some people thrive in drama, but I really don’t. It’s not even just about the actual dramatic event (a confrontation with a friend, an argument with a partner), it’s more about the replaying of it in my mind, the rumination. This is a trait of depression and OCD which is its own thing to be managed, but that’s a whole other post. Life certainly isn’t without its trials that test you, but I generally try to keep the waters calm when it comes to my social and romantic life. This helps me feel inner peace so I can better follow that inner motivation.

There’s so much more I want to say on this topic, but imma leave it here today. I hope some of this info has been helpful. Enjoy the journey and be good to yourself <3

Also,

“Motivation such an aggravation
Accusations, don't know how to take them
Inspiration's getting hard to fake it
Concentration, never hard to break it
Situation never what you want it to be”

1,000 points to whoever names the song and band.