Category: Motivation

Applying ‘Goldilocks Rule’ To Stay Motivated

Neera

You can apply the ‘Goldilocks Rule’ to stay motivated. Here is how:

Imagine you’re playing a new board game with some friends. The game is so challenging, you can’t even win a single point. And no matter how many hours you put into it, you don’t get any better. Chances are, you’d grow frustrated and want to give up.

Now imagine the flip side.

The game is so easy, you win every single time without any effort. While your ego may get a boost, it would probably get pretty boring. And you give it up.

Either way, you lose your motivation.

Because motivation requires just the right amount of challenge. Not too much. Not too little. Just like Goldilocks!

‘Goldilocks Rule’ is worth considering with whatever you do. If things are too easy, you’ll get bored. If they’re too hard, you’ll get frustrated. Do you need to add a new challenge to spice things up?

Alternatively, do you need to purposely make things EASIER so you can actually get some quick ‘wins’ under your belt?

There’s no right answer. This is something to regularly calibrate each day.

When Your Passion Becomes Your Obsession

Neera

There is a difference between passion and obsession.

Passion is a positive word that leads to growth, self-improvement, and perhaps one’s purpose in life; obsession, on the other hand, has a negative connotation about it, which could lead to being out of control and even mentally sick.

When you are passionate, everybody cheers you on, “Oh! you found your passion. Great! Be passionate! Follow your passion! Reach your goals! Live your dream!” People encourage you because they think you are on to something.

But when you are obsessed, they go, “Why you gotta be so crazy? Why do you spend so much time on [thing]?” Why can’t you be reasonable about it?” “You don’t have to be so preoccupied with it, it’s just a hobby (or a job, or a sport), isn’t it?”

When you are obsessed, people think you are nuts.

In life, you have a choice. You can either be passionate or obsessed.

Both choices are fine.

Being passionate about something is being in love with life.

But being obsessed with something is living life at another level.

I chose to be obsessed.

I don’t know when my passion for writing turned into an obsession.

When I started writing, I found the activity so calming and fulfilling that I became passionate about it. I dedicated time to it and strived to improve. As I became better and better at giving words to my thoughts, I started feeling good about my writing.

I could pour out all my frustrations, my negativity, my fears, my anger, my joy, and my daily happenings into my diary.

And that was when the problem began.

Something inside me changed. I craved writing all the time. I had to write every day. The day I didn’t write, was a day that didn’t exist for me.

I would rather write than attend a party or meet a friend for coffee, or go for a swim, or go for a walk.

My passion had become an obsession.

The Cambridge dictionary defines passion as an extreme interest in or wishes for doing something.

While an obsession is something that you think about all the time.

A passion is “extreme” but the aspect of time isn’t present.

An obsession stays “all the time”.

I think about writing all the time.

I work on getting better every day. I don’t rest. I can’t let it go. I am not content with my progress. I want to get better. I can’t accept the level I am at the moment. I know I could be better. I will continue to work on it until I reach the level where I want to be.

If you really want to achieve something worth achieving, you must get obsessed.

If you are not obsessed, you are not operating at your optimum potential.

If no one thinks you are crazy, you are not there yet.

You are not there yet until somebody in your life says, “Jee! you really care about this in a crazy way.” That’s when people see your obsession.

The weirder you are, the more committed you are to focus on your thing.

Obsession forces you to stay focused.

Obsession makes you keep going when others are partying, socializing, having fun, sleeping, or simply fitting in.

Obsession empowers you to find new ways to learn, to push your comfort zone, and to push yourself beyond what others or even you thought was not possible.

I love this quote from one of Bukowski’s numerous letters:

My dear,

Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains.

For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.

Falsely yours,

Henry Charles Bukowski

I will rather let writing kill me than give it up for a mediocre life.

Are you passionate about something?

Is it turning into an obsession?

If You Think Your Writing In Not Original, You Need To Know About Helsinki Bus Station Theory

Neera

“The secret to a creatively fulfilling career lies in understanding the operations of Helsinki’s main bus station,” said Finnish-American photographer Arno Minkkinen, back in 2004.

Helsinki Bus Station Theory had been circulating among photographers for years before Oliver Burkeman brought it to a wider audience through an article in The Guardian.

To understand the theory, imagine this:

You are at a bus station. A big bus station that is cleaner, environmentally friendly, and inviting.

There are two dozen platforms, and from each platform, several different bus lines depart.

But for a kilometer or more, all the lines leaving from any one platform take the same route out of the city, making identical stops.

“Each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer,” Minkkinen declares.

You pick a direction — maybe you focus on making platinum prints of nudes — and set off.

Three stops later, you’ve got a nascent body of work. You take those three years of work on the nude to [a gallery], and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn.

Your work looks very much like Penn’s.

Annoyed to have been following someone else’s path, you hop off the bus, grab a cab… and head straight back to the bus station, looking for another platform.

A few years later, something similar happens. This goes on all your creative life: always showing new work, always being compared to others.

What’s the answer?

It’s simple.

Stay on the bus.

Stay on the f*#king bus.

The point Minkkinen is making is when you find your work resembles someone else’s, or you’re on someone else’s bus, traveling someone else’s path, don’t go back to the bus station at the very beginning completely reinvent yourself and start from scratch. Instead, stay on the bus.

At a certain point, your path will split off into something new.

It’s the separation that makes all the difference.

Once you see the difference in your work from the work you so admire, it’s time to look for your breakthrough.

Suddenly, your work will get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.

Your vision takes off.

There are two reasons this metaphor is so compelling:

  1. It vividly illustrates a critical insight into persistence.
  2. It points out the perils of a world that obsesses with originality.

“More often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.” — Austin Kleon.

Helsinki’s theory suggests that if you pursue originality too vigorously, you’ll never reach it.

Sometimes it takes more guts to keep trudging down a pre-trodden path, to the originality beyond.

“Stay on the f*#king bus.”

Selfish vs Selfless

Neera

Since childhood, we are told not to be selfish. Instead, we are trained to consider others’ needs before ours. In other words, be selfless.

But is it good advice?

Being selfish is putting your own needs ahead of others, often to their detriment, and being selfless is putting others’ needs ahead of your own, often to your own detriment.

Caring for others is one of the most common values people hold. When they act in line with this value, it gives them a sense of meaning and fulfillment.

But the same people cringe when the concept of self-care is presented to them.

“Oh no, this is being selfish,” is a typical response.

If caring for others is meaningful, then why caring for yourself, and putting your own needs upfront is wrong?

We often get trapped into believing in selflessness and selfishness as polarised actions. We see that if we are either focusing on the needs of others (being selfless) or ignoring the needs of others (being selfish). We do not see a continuum where there is a spot for self-care to sit in the middle.

The balance between selfishness and selflessness is called “contribution” and requires the self-awareness to know what your needs are and how to meet them. Contribution is the desire to give others what they truly desire and fulfill our own desires.

It turns out that people who value caring for others tend to feel glory in sacrificing their own needs.

Being a martyr becomes their identity, and it impacts their behavior so much that they can’t say no to others’ requests. As a result, they have difficulty maintaining boundaries and usually have relationships that aren’t balanced.

Then there is an aversion to being seen as self-indulgent.

There is a perception that self-care is the same as being self-indulgent. However, self-indulgence is a temporary and often unhelpful way of trying to avoid facing and changing what is happening. Think about all of those chocolate ads where the person finally gets to relax and have a break.

Self-care is about growth and change. It is about shifting the imbalance and building a healthier, more resilient self.

When you value and practice self-care, it creates a ripple effect for you and those you care about.

Selflessness can only be sustained if your own desires are fulfilled. If your own well is empty, you won’t be able to help others. Choosing to deny your desires simply because they are YOUR desires is stupid. You are a person of this universe, as important as the persons you are serving. Then why your desires should be dismissed?

If you are hoping (or expecting) that others will be selfless and put your desires before their own, you are mistaken. I am sure you have experienced that multiple times but still failed to acknowledge that while you were being selfless, others were busy being selfish.

We respectable types, especially women, are raised to think a life well-spent means helping others. Plenty of self-help gurus affirm that kindness, generosity, and volunteering are the routes to happiness.

There’s truth here, but it generally gets tangled up with deep-seated guilt and self-esteem issues. Meanwhile, the people who boast all day on Twitter about their charity work aren’t being selfless at all; they are massaging their egos.

If you’re prone to thinking you should be helping more, that’s probably a sign that you could afford to direct more energy to your own ambitions and enthusiasms.

As the Buddhist teacher Susan Piver observes, it’s radical, at least for some of us, to ask how we’d enjoy spending an hour or day of “me” time.

And the irony is that you don’t serve anyone else by suppressing your true passions anyway.

More often than not, by doing your thing – as opposed to what you think you ought to be doing – you kindle a fire that helps keep the rest of us warm.

So what are you going to do today to be selfish?