Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(15)
Writing a letter to the editor.
Keeping all ten of your New Year’s resolutions . . . for a day.
But high levels of motivation are both scattershot and unsustainable. Sandra and Adrian don’t buy a house every day. With the keys in their hands that first day, they had a lot of motivation for home improvement, and they felt capable of doing hard behaviors. And they were capable right then. In fact, motivation helped them for a while. It allowed them to fix up the inside of their home, which was hard and time-consuming. But when they made their checklist, they didn’t account for how they would feel the next day, or the next week, or the next month. At some point, their motivation would sag.
In Behavior Design, we’ve named this temporary surge in motivation the Motivation Wave. I’m sure you’ve experienced this before: Your motivation crested, then came crashing down. And maybe you blamed yourself for not sustaining it. You’re not to blame. This is how motivation works in our lives.
Each year almost one hundred million people enroll in an online course, but the vast majority drop out. Most studies show that less than 10 percent cross the finish line. These students started out excited and dedicated, but then their motivation waned. Even the prospect of having to pay regardless of the outcome wasn’t enough motivation to get students to complete the course. You see the same thing happen all around you. If you’ve ever bought a shoulder massager (as seen on TV!), I’m sorry to say that there is a good chance you can’t remember the last time you used it. And remember that vegetable juicer the incredibly fit guy sold you at the mall? Yep, that juicer got used only a couple of times after you got it home. In these and other cases, you got caught in a common trap of the human mind—you overestimated future motivation. It happens to the best of us. You are not dumb or frivolous or easily hoodwinked. You are human.
So why do we get thrashed by the Motivation Wave even though we know we’re being overly optimistic? When you are prompted to act in a way that seems like a good idea, even a necessary one, you feel something. Whether you feel desire, excitement, or fear, it doesn’t matter—whatever is motivating the behavior will be quickly rationalized by your brain. It suddenly feels totally logical to do this thing that might be costly, time-consuming, physically demanding, or disruptive to our everyday lives. We start from emotion, then find the rationale to act. Back in our prehistoric past on the savannah, this was a good thing. Motivating emotions evolved to help us succeed and survive. After all, you’d better have an automatic spike of fear that will make you run fast when you suddenly spot a lion. If we were wired to start with rationality, we would be more like Mr. Spock from Star Trek. Do you think Spock has a juicer hanging out in his basement collecting dust? No. Spock doesn’t get washed away by the Motivation Wave. He sees it rising, then he swims under it. He reasons that his enthusiasm for fresh juice will likely wane when he sees how much time it takes to clean the darn thing.
3. MOTIVATION FLUCTUATION
You also need to recognize that motivation changes on a smaller scale. It fluctuates day to day, even minute to minute, and you probably already know some of your own predictable motivation shifts. When was the last time you bought a Santa hat on December 26?
Retailers know how this works, and they adapt by selling Santa hats for cheap the week following the holiday when motivation is low and shoppers won’t pay a lot of money for Santa hats. But here are some more subtle and predictable shifts: Willpower decreases from morning to evening. Complex decisions get harder by late in the day. Motivation for self-improvement can vanish on Friday nights. These shifts are among the reasons why you cannot take full control of your motivation.
People in the health and wellness industry are particularly tuned into these fluctuations. Years ago, I taught Behavior Design to the product team at Weight Watchers so they could streamline their global program and focus their members on the best ways to change. Then-CEO David Kirchhoff explained the seasonality of their business. The company saw predictable surges in online signups and keyword searches during certain times of the year. Signups were way above average in January—hello, New Year’s resolutions. Weight Watchers also saw a spike in enrollments after Labor Day when people were looking to get back on track after a summer of hot dogs and ice cream. The company could also see where the Motivation Wave left people high and dry. Weight loss efforts plummeted in early November when people realized that they couldn’t refuse Aunt Bev’s pecan pie at Thanksgiving and Christmas. November and December are the weight-loss equivalent of a becalmed sea—no Motivation Waves in sight—which is why it’s not a good idea to rely on them.
Predictable waves are not the only way motivation shifts. Some waves are unpredictable. The same teenager who bugged you for a week to let her go to the Ariana Grande concert will declare the day before the show that she definitely does not want to go anymore. Little did you realize that her best friend cancelled at the last minute, tanking your teenager’s motivation.
Shifts in motivation can also happen quickly. You are motivated to eat lunch at 12:15 so you have a big lunch. When someone tells you there is pizza in the conference room at 1:30, you aren’t so motivated because you just ate.
That said, there’s a special situation in which motivation can be enduring. Consider a grandmother who is always motivated to spend quality time with her grandkids. Or the teenager who always wants to look good to her friends. These enduring motivations I call aspirations, and that’s exactly what I will explain next.