Your biology is cyclical. Rise above it.
Human beings are slaves to motivational cycles. Such cycles define our productivity, expertise, and well-being.
Most things in life are cyclical. Our mood, happiness, and productivity are no exception.
Similarly to how your meteorologist predicts rainfall in a certain area over time, you can also predict patterns of human motivation and output over the course of your life.
Generally, people follow a similar pattern of activity when beginning a task. Initially, their output is high. They’re motivated and intrinsically interested in what lay ahead.
Over time, however, this interest wanes. The shiny gloss of whatever you’re doing turns to a dull matte, and you fall prey to tedious monotony.
This happens for several reasons. For one, gaining skill in a task allows you to see problems you didn’t notice before. Things you previously thought you could manage in a few minutes might now be estimated at a few hours. You get realistic.
Additionally, as your time investment in the task grows, you fall increasingly susceptible to disorganization. Your mental browser opens too many tabs — without a good system, you grow increasingly inefficient and lost. Discipline replaces motivation as the primary driver for completion. But you only have so much.
Lastly, you lose your curiosity. Human beings are perpetually attracted to the unknown. We love chasing (it’s in our DNA, after all); the catch usually seems less exciting in comparison. When you’re done something — or nearly done something — it becomes quite easy to convince onself that the task was never worth doing in the first place.
Once you’re sufficiently disinterested, you begin looking for new, shiny things to do instead. You excitedly pick one, and the cycle repeats itself.
How many of these cycles have you gone through? Mine probably number in the hundreds by now. I get highly involved in things, discover difficulty and tedium, and as I approach completion, jump ship to something new and presumably less monotonous. But really, everything is monotonous if one goes deep enough.
A simple meta-solution to this cyclical dilemma: don’t depend on yourself.
You know you have faults. That you’re irrational, illogical, and prone to behaviors that you wish didn’t exist. Every human being on the planet is like that. It’s biologically ingrained.
The ones that succeed are those that rise above their genes; those that escape their cyclical proclivity to do certain things and act certain ways. And you do that by not depending on yourself at critical junctions or moments where you know you’re liable to give up.
The three most beneficial meta-actions I have ever taken towards my personal growth are creating systems, monitoring output, and using social shame as an accountability tool. Each one removes reliance on my own, frail human power, and offloads it to something greater.
We’ve been doing this since the beginning of time. When our ancestors developed the first spear hundreds of thousands of years ago, they did so to escape a cycle. They didn’t want to wake up every morning, afraid for their life, to scavenge food from bushes and dead carcasses. They wanted to rise above their biology and succeed.
You can do the same, today. Ask yourself what actions in your life you consistently screw up. Then, stop doing them. Use technology, friends, colleagues, and systems to do them for you. Watch your output skyrocket and your life improve.
