How to Motivate Yourself to Do Hard Things

I spend a lot of time thinking about how motivation works. You can even read my in-depth review of some of the relevant scientific literature on motivation ^[1].

My rationale for studying motivation is simple: motivation seems to explain a lot of divergent results we see across people’s lives. Successful people almost universally appear highly motivated, and even those without particular gifts or talents seem to live decently if they’re sufficiently conscientious and hard-working.

This isn’t to say that motivation is everything. Talent, resources and simple luck are important factors as well. But it seems hard to deny that motivation plays a causal role in the kind of lives we lead.

Given the importance of motivation, it seems like we should strive to understand how it works. Yet motivation is often mysterious! I have received countless messages from readers whose problems, in their own words, seem to result directly from difficulties of motivation: procrastination, aimlessness, lack of persistence or low energy. Motivation matters, but it’s tricky!^{1 [2]}

Below, I’d like to hash out the mental model I have of motivation—and the key insights it suggests for cultivating motivation in practice.

My Mental Model for Motivation

My working theory for how motivation works could be summarized in a simple formula^{2 [3]}:

Motivation = Value x Probability x Return on Effort / Distance

Let’s break down each of those things:

1. Value. This is the amount we desire the object of our actions. If we value something more, all else being equal, we’re more motivated to pursue it. A complete theory of motivation would explain value rather than take it as a given, and it would try to figure out why some things have value and others don’t. But, in keeping with the motivational literature, I’m going to skip that step and take value as a given. There’s no real mystery as to why we don’t pursue things we don’t value; most of our motivational frustrations occur when we value something but don’t put effort toward it.
2. Probability. The likelihood that an action will lead to success influences how motivated we are to take that action. Probability can be broken down into outcome expectations and self-efficacy expectations. Outcome expectations are the things we believe will likely follow taking a particular course of action. Self-efficacy expectations arise from our internal assessment of our ability to execute the course of actions.
3. Return on Effort. It’s not just the value of the object we strive for that influences our motivation, but the amount that that our effort increases the value we will get. For instance, I value oxygen more than I value having a successful business, but, unless I’m underwater, the former comes sufficiently without conscious effort. This helps explain some paradoxes of motivation, such as that decreasing expectations of success can motivate people more, or that more difficult goals inspire more effort than easy ones ^[4].
4. Distance. This is a combination of Piers Steel’s Impulsivity and Delay variables in his Temporal Motivation Theory. The idea is that we are more motivated by the here and now, and distant goals in the future inspire less effort. However, we’re not entirely rational in how we conceive of time, making a big distinction between the current moment and near future, but little distinction of the same interval when it takes place much later.

This formula suggests a few levers we can adjust to increase motivation:

1. Increase the perceived value. The more valuable something is, the more motivated you’ll be to get it. While some aspects of value are fixed, attention is limited. This suggests why some kinds of visualization-oriented goal-setting and affirmations might be motivating: by focusing your attention on a valuable goal for a period of time, you raise its perceived value compared to other alternatives you are not attending to, even if your values themselves are relatively fixed.
2. Increase the likelihood of success. This can come from making the outcome more likely, such as solid planning, research, and emulating successful models, but it can also come from increasing your sense of self-efficacy in executing the action. This is why building conscientious habits can be so valuable—when you believe you can stick with a difficult course of action to the completion of a project, it automatically raises your subjective assessment of how likely you are to achieve your more ambitious goals.
3. Increase the return on effort. One paradox of motivational research is that the probability of success has opposing impacts on goal choice and goal striving. We are motivated to choose goals with higher likelihoods of success, but we’re more motivated to work hard when achieving a goal is less likely. I think the easiest explanation is that the marginal value of effort differs. Complacency is a rational result when a goal is too easy, since the effort might be better spent elsewhere.
4. Reduce the psychological distance. The more immediate your goal feels, the more motivating it will be. It’s easier to motivate yourself to study for an exam tomorrow than one two months away. However, many of the goals we struggle to motivate ourselves toward are in the far future. This might be why productivity strategies that shift timelines and work on our goals closer to the present are effective. Soft deadlines, regular reviews, daily habits and other productivity devices can fail if you don’t invest any psychological reality in them, but they can inspire effort toward your goal by shifting the object of your motivation closer to the present moment.

Debugging Our Motivational Hardware

While the above formula is a simplification, I think it captures a lot of the everyday frustrations we have about motivation. The key to motivating yourself is to diagnose what in the formula is going awry, and then take steps to improve it.

For instance:

1. Problems of not having a good goal to work on.

Sometimes the issue is simply not having something that’s valuable enough to inspire effort. Goals and courses of action are something you have to imagine before they can motivate you. Therefore, even if you have a vague sense that you’d like life to be better, unless you can form a concrete image to direct action toward, it’s difficult to sustain effort in a particular direction.

In other cases, the problem isn’t a lack of goals, but a lack of goals with personal value. Goals imposed by teachers, parents, spouses or friends may not inspire a great deal of commitment if they aren’t also personally valuable.

If you are struggling to figure out which goals you should set, increase your exposure to possible inspirations, and spend time thinking deeply about what resonates with you.

2. Problems of having low personal self-efficacy.

Sometimes motivational problems are due to not believing that you can take the action. A lack of self-efficacy can form a vicious circle where momentary setbacks and failures can grow into perpetual discouragement.

It may be that some forms of sustained behavioral inhibition and negative self-beliefs contribute to things like clinical depression (even if there likely are biological factors contributing as well). Cognitive behavioral-therapy, the gold-standard psychotherapy for depression, works to rebuild self-efficacy and get patients unstuck from cycles of low motivation leading to low effort, leading to low predictions of future motivation and effort.

I think when you’re stuck in such a cycle, whether a temporary funk or a long-term persistent state, the key is to start small and build on success. Pick small goals, stick with them, and encourage yourself whenever you deviate from your low-motivation cycle.

3. Problems of procrastination.

Survey research on procrastination shows it is most associated with impulsiveness, not anxiety or perfectionism. Thus the major cause of procrastination is simply that the work is unpleasant and far off in the future—the problem is the variable of “distance.”

Any technique that can reduce the psychological distance of action will help with procrastination. If you’re procrastinating on writing an essay, it’s much easier to motivate yourself to write one paragraph, or one sentence, or simply open a Word document and sit with the blank page for five minutes.

Much of the value of a productivity system lies in creating an organizational structure around your work, so that the work that needs to be done is psychologically near. A good system should make clear “this is what you need to work on in the next five minutes,” rather than the status quo of “these are some things that it would probably be good if you did in the next five years.”

4. Problems of distractibility or lack of commitment.

The motivational formula above doesn’t apply to any pursuit in isolation. Instead, it’s a constant tug-of-war between all of the different possible things you could be doing. Too much motivation has the same consequence as too little if it’s spread diffusely over many different goals.

There are a few different ways you can change the calculus to ensure you stick with one goal long enough to achieve a desired outcome, rather than vacillate endlessly between them while achieving nothing:

1. Increase the salience of one goal over others. This is the value of daily goal visualizations or affirmations; you want to constantly bring the chosen goal to the surface, so you’re reminded of its value rather than getting distracted by shiny new objects.
2. Increase the difficulty of the central goal. Harder goals inspire more effort because they increase the marginal difference in outcome based on the effort you exert—or don’t. Goals that are too easy, paradoxically, may induce distractibility because you believe you can add another goal to your calendar without adverse effects.
3. Decrease the timeframe of the pursuit. Many, equally-distant goals will suffer from motivational neglect. Thus, making one goal the central focus for a shorter period of time will increase motivation since it will draw that goal closer to you than other alternatives. E.g., “I want to learn French, painting, programming and history.” vs. “I want to speak French by the end of this summer.”
4. Increase the distance for alternative goals. Another strategy for reducing distractibility is to deliberately place a non-focal goal in a well-defined and distant timeframe. “I’m going to start a business next year,” is a recipe for procrastination, but that might be a good thing if you first need to pass your exams and graduate. Maintaining “to learn” and “future project” lists is another way to place non-focus goals in a hazy future so that they don’t draw your immediate attention.

Reconciling Conflicting Motivational Advice

One benefit of the above model is that it helps make sense of motivational conflicts where people offer opposing advice:

1. Should you set harder or easier goals? It depends on the problem. Harder goals increase the marginal value of effort but lower self-efficacy expectations. Which matters more really depends on your situation!
2. Should you focus on a burst of effort or on long-term habits? Habits can be great tools because they shift the benefit of an activity closer to the present (e.g., you’re establishing an exercise habit this month, versus wanting to get in shape over the next few years). Habits can also reduce (but not eliminate) the effort needed for complex behaviors by partially automating them, which can make the cost of the behavior lower and, thus, its net value higher. But excessively long-term habits can lower motivation if the object of a habit is too psychologically distant or if there are too many competing long-term goals that distract motivation away from a particular target.
3. Should you rely more on discipline or enthusiasm? In my mind, this is a false dichotomy. Discipline is almost always needed because the motivational landscape for any goal rarely funnels you into investing a maximal effort in a serious pursuit. Procrastination, distractibility, and fickleness are the default—not the exception. Furthermore, discipline cannot override the above equation—you cannot, long-term, sustain effort on goals that are low-value, low-probability and psychologically distant. Thus, all goals that require discipline also require some enthusiasm as well.

Knowing how motivation works does not guarantee us a path to earnest striving, but it does provide the first step—diagnosing what’s going wrong when we don’t feel particularly driven—and suggests which sorts of techniques might be helpful.

1. I’m side-stepping here a popular self-help debate about “motivation” versus “self-discipline.” While those debates might be useful, I think there’s a broader notion of motivation that covers all possible reasons we choose a particular course of action over others, and thus self-discipline is a kind of motivation.
2. This theory is heavily influenced by Piers Steel’s Temporal Motivation Theory ^[5].