Losing motivation is one of the biggest killers of habit formation. You lose motivation for several reasons, including choosing the wrong habits to start, not seeing progress fast enough, and failing to allow small changes to lead to others. However, one of the biggest killers of motivation is boredom.
We tend to believe that successful people work from a super-charged place of eagerness and fortitude. Because of this, you likely believe that you must get “amped up” to accomplish a difficult task. You take any signs of boredom as evidence that you need a new challenge. These ideas promote quitting a positive behavior simply because it’s not exciting anymore.
To really succeed at forming positive habits, you must accept that boredom is inevitable. You must also acknowledge that feeling bored doesn’t mean the behavior is no longer valid.
Boredom is the state experienced when something stops being novel or entertaining. Regarding habits, boredom occurs when new habits become automatic and easy.
Mastery requires practice, but the more you practice one behavior, the more mundane that behavior becomes. When habits become mundane, you lose interest and start seeking novelty. You often look for something new and different to regain a sense of excitement, even if the old or current behavior is still working.
When you lose interest in a behavior, you lose motivation to keep working on your system. You are not unique in experiencing this sensation. Successful people also experience boredom. The difference is they are able to push through the lack of novelty and excitement and keep working. Successful people learn to love boredom, and to achieve success, you must learn to love it, too.
If you are only motivated to act when things are novel or exciting, you’ll never attain consistent results. Showing up and working hard even when bored or uninspired is what separates greatness from goodness. You may not enjoy the work when you’re bored or not in the mood, but you have to put in the reps if you want to keep improving toward your ultimate goal and identity.
Learning how to stay motivated means designing habits that draw you in, rather than repel you. One of the best-known strategies for keeping behaviors interesting is working at a level of just manageable difficulty.
Your brain loves a challenge, but this love is fickle. If the challenge is not hard enough, you will lose interest. If the challenge is too hard, you will be unsuccessful in your behavior attempts and shy away from trying.
The perfect degree of challenge for the brain is when you perform at a level that lives on the edge of your current abilities. This idea is referred to as the Goldilocks Rule, which states that degrees of difficulty must be just right to attain peak motivation.
You must start a new behavior by making it easy, as the third law states. Making a new behavior easy to perform and maintain is necessary and helps you stay focused even when motivation is challenged. But once a behavior has reached the habit line, you must increase the boundary of difficulty in small increments to keep it challenging.
If a behavior is just challenging enough, you will be more interested in sticking with it. Hitting the “just right” zone of difficulty is what creates the flow state, wherein you are fully engaged in the behavior or activity. A 4% increase in difficulty above your current abilities or behaviors is required to reach the flow state.
Improvement requires a balance between pushing beyond status quo to stay challenged and keeping the level of challenge at a point that still allows for satisfying results.
Part of this process of increasing degrees of difficulty is the variable reward. When you increase your challenge level to the just-right point, whether you fail or succeed becomes equal in likelihood.
When there is a 50/50 chance of success or failure, your desire to win increases. You experience enough success to warrant continued action and enough failure to make you work harder. Rewards experienced in this type of variable way make every attempt novel, which reduces boredom.
Still, at some point, even if you are able to create variable rewards through just manageable difficulty, you will be faced with boredom. Understanding that this will occur, regardless of your efforts, will help you address it when it comes and keep you from falling into the traps automated habits can create.
As discussed, you can only move to the next level in your habit system after forming automatic behavior. However, there are aspects of automatic behaviors that hurt more than help.
When behavior becomes automated, the action becomes mindless, which reduces your ability to notice small errors or opportunities for growth. You become less receptive to feedback the more mindless a behavior becomes. You stop thinking of ways to improve because you have learned to perform the behavior “good enough.”
Once you can perform a behavior at a “good enough” level, you start to believe that simply putting in good-enough reps equals experience and progress. Really, all you’re doing is reinforcing current behavior, not attempting to build on that behavior. This assumption is what leads to decline after a good-enough level is mastered. You can’t continue the same behavior and expect to get different results.
Stopping with the first or second habit in your system doesn't lead to the overall identity or optimal goal you're seeking. Working through the tiny aspects of your system means allowing each level to become automatic, then using that foundation to move to the next level. You have to continue building on habits once they become “good enough” so you can keep moving through your system to the end.
A combination of automatic behaviors and deliberate practice is required. Deliberate practice means finding ways to increase the degree of difficulty in your system to add new skills or behaviors. Once a habit is formed, you must deliberately practice the next level to keep improving.
(Shortform example: Your desired identity is to be a skilled athlete. You choose basketball as your opening and learn to make a jump shot from five feet away. You master this skill, making basket after basket until you know longer have to think about form. If you were to stop with this good-enough behavior, you’d find little success in an actual basketball game. If you move back a foot after mastering each preceding distance, you’ll eventually be able to shoot a three-pointer. Similarly, if you add a defender to your practice, you’ll learn how to make the five-foot shot under pressure. Now, you'll be able to compete in a game-like scenario.)
Another negative aspect of automated behaviors is the way in which they skew your thinking about your skills and identity. As you begin to form behaviors that support your chosen identity, it’s easy to become cocky or boastful about who you’re becoming.
Like good-enough behaviors, when you are cocky about mastering one aspect of your identity, you stop seeing weak spots or ways to grow. You latch on to this mastered behavior and the supported identity and believe the work is done.
The problem with this narrow focus is that life does not stop presenting challenges just because you’ve stopped growing. When you define your identity through the lens of one action, behavior, or aspect, you are not prepared for the challenges that arise and your identity becomes fragile. If you lose the thing that defines your identity, you lose yourself.
The key is to redefine your identity to include the important aspects of the system, not the end result of one aspect. Therefore, if you lose that one aspect, you still have others and the identity they add up to.
When defining your identity in the right way, it becomes flexible, not fragile. A flexible identity goes with the flow of life, rather than fights against it. If you’re struggling to improve, reflect on your habits and thoughts about identity to ensure they’re still working for you. If not, readjust your thinking to create more space for growth.
When you reflect on your behaviors and habits, you review your progress thus far, which provides a measure of successes and failures. With this measure, you learn where improvements are needed and locate the right paths for growth.
Identify mistakes and paths for growth to ensure you’re putting energy toward the right systems of behavior. Examine your processes to learn how to adjust your behaviors for optimal success. Without reflection and review, it’s easy to fall into the traps of mindless good-enough behaviors and negative thoughts. You start making excuses for why you’re not improving instead of making informed decisions about what to adjust.
Reflection and review are excellent strategies for keeping you honest about your behaviors and identity, but too much can be a bad thing. Too much examination or feedback doesn’t provide time to see the accumulative benefits or detriments of current behaviors. Change and growth are slow processes, so reflection and review should only be performed periodically to get an accurate gauge.