fyf pdf 3 drivefindyourfocus.com/media/fyf-3-drive.pdf · right now, you have two long-term goals...

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Copyright © 2012 - Zach Browman - All Rights Reserved Worldwide

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2012 – Zach Browman. All rights are reserved. You may not distribute this report in any way. You may not sell it, or reprint any part of it without written consent from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

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WARNING: This PDF is for your personal use only. You may NOT Give Away, Share Or Resell This

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Drive, Motivation and Rewards

Zach: So, when we last left off, our horse and our rider were still not at the farm and nothing was working. So what’s a rider to do?

A rider goes to the apple tree and picks a couple apples, and takes a piece of apple and tosses it in the direction of the farm and the horse goes running after the apple and gets the apple. He takes another piece of apple and he throws it in the direction of the farm and the horse goes running after it. He keeps going until the horse starts moving closer and closer to the farm.

This is really the essence of the first part of the system I’m going to teach you. It’s using the power of small, immediate rewards to motivate yourself and to motivate your emotions and your drives to naturally want to do what’s in line with your long-term interests. You can leverage the power of immediate rewards to make work more engaging and fun.

Obviously I discovered this experientially first, but then I was researching why it was. I found that by setting up work as a series of challenges with small, immediate rewards, you transform it into a game that keeps you engaged and motivated.

This challenge/reward sequence turns on a part of your brain called the “seeking circuit” which naturally focuses your mind and drives you forward with a feeling of excited anticipation. This is what video games are based on – small challenges followed by immediate rewards. No one has trouble paying attention to a video game. It never feels like a chore, and that’s because of this challenge/reward sequence that turns on the seeking circuit.

Let’s talk about the seeking circuit a little bit. It’s a system in your brain that orients you, releases dopamine, and it creates this sense of excited anticipation. It promotes eagerness and directed purpose; it makes you more creative; it makes you more focused which makes you more productive; it makes you enjoy yourself more and improves the quality of your work.

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When the seeking circuit is activated, it produces a feeling of pleasurable anticipation as if something wonderful is just around the corner. This is the feeling that you get on Friday afternoon before a long weekend. You know that feeling you get? You feel good.

I remember in school (I think it was grade four), we were asked, “What’s your favorite day of the week?” My favorite day of the week was always Friday. You had Saturday and Sunday off. Saturday was second. A lot of kids actually chose Friday, especially over Sunday. Sunday wasn’t that much fun. You get two days off per week. Of course you want your free time. That’s what it’s all about. But the looking forward to it part that we had on Friday actually made Friday a lot more fun than the Sunday which was where you got freedom, but you knew that you were going to have to go back to school the next day. It’s a state that we love to be in.

There are two kinds of pleasures. There’s the pleasure of satisfaction of getting something and enjoying it – satiating. Then there’s the pleasure of anticipation. Using these small immediate rewards to increase your drive produces that feeling of anticipatory pleasure. You procrastinate because the immediate rewards of doing so overpower the distant rewards of being productive

Solution: make work more frequently and more immediately rewarding.

We’re talk about how exactly to do that – how to set up these challenges, what it is that you’re going to reward, and how it is that you’re going to reward it.

We have long-term goals and short-term goals, small challenges. Your long-term goals give you direction and they help you choose the short-term challenges, so they’re important. We need to know where it is that we want to go. The rider needs to know where the farm is so it can set up and knows where to toss the apple. Knowing what your long-term goal is also helps you make decisions. It gives you a context when you’re indecisive. We’re talk about this coming back to “Does this serve my long-term goal or not?”

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There are two kinds of long-term goals that we’re concerned with here. One is the long-term goal of completing a task – being successful, writing a book, getting my website up and edited. The other is self-development goals (improving yourself).

Right now, you have two long-term goals in being here. We’re going to address two long-term goals. One is whatever task it was that you came in with that you wanted to work on. The other is the goal of overcoming procrastination.

We’re going to start by defining your task completion goal. Before, we wrote down what area of your life you want to apply these techniques to. Write down the benefits of achieving that goal. We’re going to use them for something later, but take a few minutes and do that right now.

So, you’ve defined where it is that you want to go and why it is that you want to go there. I was going to have you do the same thing for your overcoming procrastination, but we already did it. We already listed what the benefits would be if you overcame procrastination. Again, we know where we’re going. We’re trying to cure procrastination and why we want to get there (your list of benefits).

Setting Up Short-Term Goals

Now we need to set up the short-term goals that are going to lead us there. These are the small challenges. There’s a science to how we set up these challenges – how we set up these goals –that are going to maximize the rewards we get from them. I find this is a big area that causes people problems. Often people who fail to achieve their goals are not lazy; they’re not un-ambitious. In fact, they’re usually people who are very ambitious, but they don’t know how to break these things down and make sure they’re going to be successful. There are some common mistakes that people make when they’re setting short-term goals, and we’re going to go through them now and how to avoid them.

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Mistake #1: Trying to do too much too soon.That’s you, and right around you, you have your comfort zone or your familiarity zone – what you can do right now. Just outside of that is a little bit uncomfortable. That’s stretching yourself a little bit. Way outside of that is very uncomfortable. That’s never lifting weights and deciding you’re going to go pick up 300 pounds.

What happens is when we try and take on too much, and we try and go too far too soon, it becomes overwhelming. We set ourselves up for failure, and we tend to go rushing right back to the comfort zone.

Let’s say we’re talking about exercise. You’re out of shape, you’ve had trouble getting in shape, and you decide, “Every day for 90 days, I’m going to work out for two hours.” Your body is going to rebel. It doesn’t like that very much and it’s going to go rushing right back into your comfort zone and reinforce that feeling that exercise is no fun.

But, if you go just outside your comfort zone – if you take on a little bit – what happens is that comfort zone starts to expand and it starts to become easier.

A number of years ago, when I decided I wanted to get back in shape, I started with five two-minute runs a day three times a week. That was it: five two-minute runs. It wasn’t inside my comfort zone, because the first minute was easy and the second minute I always had to push myself a little bit. But, it was always enough for me to know I could do it, so I was successful.

Let’s take two people. They both decide they want to get in shape and they both run a mile a day five days in

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a row. At the end of the week, one of them feels great and encouraged to continue, and the other one doesn’t. The first one, his goal was to run a mile a day a day. The second one, his goal was to run for two miles a day. The one whose goal it was to run for two miles a day failed every single day and got discouraged and didn’t want to continue.

When we take on too much, when we try and do too much too soon, we set ourselves up for failure, and that failure saps our drive. But when we build little successes (small wins), that increases our drive and motivation to continue.

Key: Make it reasonable.

This is a big one. I’m going to keep coming back to this, because I find a lot of people who have difficulty with procrastination want relief quickly from the symptoms, but they also tend to be very ambitious. That’s one of the reasons they got into the problem. They say, “Well, if I work this much, I’m going to get over procrastination this quickly. If I do twice as much, I’m going to get over it twice as quickly.” It doesn’t work that way.

I remember this was a huge problem for me, and I got out of this rut. I’d have work to do, and I had frittered the day away, frittered the night away, and I’d say, “Okay. Well, I’m going to go to bed, but tomorrow I’m going to put in seven hours of work.” Then I would never get started, because seven hours was a lot. But the next day, I was even further behind, so I’d say, “You know what? If I put in a good nine hours, I could catch up.” It would keep on getting bigger and bigger, and of course I’d fail.

It wasn’t until I stopped and started saying, “If I do an hour of work today and an hour of work tomorrow, I’ll probably get more done this week than I otherwise would have.”

Mistake #2: Having a vague or subjective finish lineWhen you play a video game, you kill the bad guy and it’s done. You can’t argue with that. You crossed the finish line and you get a coin. All these rewards that come are unambiguous, but when you set goals for yourself, if you set goals that

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are qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, you can end up discounting your successes.

For example, we talked about writing a book. Writing is a great example. If your goal is to write well, then you could look back at the end and say, “It’s not good enough.” But if your goal was to write for ten minutes, you can definitely achieve that. Quantify it. Make it quantifiable.

“I’m going to work really hard today.” You know what? You could work very hard and it still might not be good enough for your own evaluation. But “I’m going to write two pages today,” then you know that you’ve succeeded and that’s where the rewards come in, and that’s where the drive increases – motivation increases – and you start enjoying it more.

Key: Make it concrete

Mistake #3: Making the success point of your goal something that’s outside of your controlThere are two ways to do this. One is it depends on somebody else’s approval. I was working with a guy recently who is a freelance copywriter. One of his goals was to write a piece of copy (an e-mail newsletter or a sales letter) that his client would love. He could succeed; he could fail. He’s put it outside of his control.

If his goal was quantitative – “I can write two pages the best I can do” – then he’s definitely going to succeed. If his boss doesn’t like it, he can set another goal. He can keep doing it until he gets it right. But if your goals (your small challenges) depend on someone else’s approval, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

The other kind of goal that is outside of your control is a goal that’s based on how you feel. One of the things we’re talking about is transforming work into play – removing your resistance. But if you make that a short-term goal – “I’m going to sit down and work until I feel more focused” or “I’m going to sit down and work until my resistance is gone.”

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Our brains are funny the way we set goals and achieve them. We track how close we are to them at all times, and if your goal is based on how you feel, you’re constantly checking in to see if you’re there and that creates this different mental condition of self-consciousness. You can’t win, because each moment, you’re like, “I’m on there yet, I’m not there yet,” and you never will be there yet because you keep failing.

Whereas, if your goal is behavior-based (something you can definitely accomplish), then you’ll accomplish it and you’ll feel the rewards of having accomplished it, and that will indirectly shift your mood.

Key: Keep it within your boundary. Define goals by YOUR behavior

Mistake #4: Immediately resetting your goalsThis is particularly true for self-development goals. If you’ve decided that you want to go for a 15-minute run and you’re at 14.5 minutes, you get to 15 minutes and you say “I’m going to do another 15,” you set another goal. Maybe you do it. And you set another one. Sooner or later, you’re going to fail. Because of the way memory works, that failure is going to stand out more than the successes that you already had.

Resist the urge to reset as soon as you’re done. Decide beforehand “I’m going to work for two hours today.” Finish your two hours and don’t set another goal for another two hours.

Now, you can do more work or you can run another 15 minutes, but make that a bonus. Everything after that is a bonus. I do this all the time when I’m exercising and I’m on the treadmill. In fact, for the last couple months, I run for 45 minutes. But I always set the timer for 30 minutes, and then I bump it another 15, because the 15 is bonus to me. Some days, I come in and I’m feeling kind of tired and it’s really hard to get on the treadmill and I just make it 30. I know when I’ve done that, I can be done.

In other words, you can reset, but if you don’t achieve that, it doesn’t count as a failure. You can say “I’m going to run another ten minutes,” but if five minutes in, you decide to stop, you’ve still succeeded.

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Key: Don’t immediately reset

So to review, these are the short-term goal setting guidelines:

1. Keep it reasonable

2. Make it quantifiable

3. Make sure it’s within your control (defined by a behavior)

4. Don’t immediately reset

What to Reward

There are two things you can reward. You can reward results or you can reward effort. Rewarding results is good if you have a clear idea of how long something will take. Rewarding results is like crossing things off your to-do list. “I did that. It’s done.” (Writing two pages, for example.)

Again, if you’re just rewarding results, you need to have a clear idea of how long things will take; otherwise, you can go too long without a reward.

Murphy’s third law is everything takes longer than you think it will, even if you take into consideration the fact that it’s going to take longer than you think it is. That’s definitely the case with me. If my goals are only task-based (“I’m going to get this done, this done, this done, this done today), I generally tend not to hit my goals every day.

Rewarding effort gives you a better idea of how frequently you’ll be rewarded. Time-based is good. Work for an hour. Effort might not be the right word, because it’s difficult to quantify. You could say, “I’m going to work for an hour,” and then work and say, “Well, I didn’t work hard enough.” It can be difficult to quantify, but try and keep that equation out of it. By effort, I’m talking about time spent doing something.

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Learned Industriousness

The good thing about rewarding effort is that it conditions you to associate effort with reward. This was something I discovered recently that was fascinating. Robert Eisenberger came up with this theory of learned industriousness. What he showed is that when people are rewarded for high effort, the effort is rewarding itself.

Classical conditioning – Pavlov’s dogs. When you experience two things at the same time, they get fused. If something is rewarding every time you do it, if you get a reward right after you do something, that activity itself becomes rewarding.

What he found was that you can actually condition yourself to enjoy effort. This is what happened to me when I started applying this to work. I’d go off to a coffee shop and I’d work for a couple of hours and I put a lot of effort it, then I’d come home and have this strange desire to clean the kitchen (which my wife loved). I’d clean the kitchen and tidy. I have two young kids, so cleaning the house happens about three or four times a day throughout the day, right after they go to bed, and then in the morning after they get up.

Since I started rewarding myself and going through this process, I’ve started to naturally want to keep my place clean. I’ve been a slob my entire life. My mom has tried everything to get me to clean up my room.

It starts generalizing to other areas of your life. I experienced it first, and then I found this research later. I was quite fascinated to see it. If you’re rewarded for high effort, effort itself becomes pleasurable. It’s called learned industriousness.

I’m going to show you a way to reward both. But first, how to reward yourself. What are the rewards that you’re going to give yourself? What qualifies as a reward?

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How to Reward: What is a reward?

1. Rewards are IndividualWell, a reward is something that stimulates your reward circuitry. It’s very individual. What’s a reward to you might not be a reward to me. What’s a reward to me today might not be a reward to me tomorrow.

You go out with your friend and your friend buys you a drink at the beginning a night – that could be rewarding. The next morning, somebody handing you a drink is not a reward; it’s a punishment. If you’re hungry, food is a reward. Later on, it’s a punishment. It’s very individual and it can change over time.

I’m using the term “rewards”, but really I’m talking about positive reinforcement. I try and avoid that language as much as possible, because it gets really confusing with positive punishment, negative punishment and all those things.

But essentially, reinforcement is defined by the fact that it increases behavior. It’s defined by the fact that you want to do it more. If it doesn’t increase the behavior, it’s not a reinforcer. It’s individual. It basically means it’s lighting up your reward circuitry. It can change over time.

2. A reward must be contingent on a behavior. I was working with someone who recently quit smoking. He was working with this system I had given him. He was doing really well. He said, “I have a question. I used to take a smoking break every hour or so at work. That was very rewarding. How come that didn’t filter back and make me enjoy my work more?”

It’s because that reward was disconnected from what he was doing. No matter what he did, he’d go out every hour and have a cigarette.

This involves being able to withhold the reward if you don’t do the behavior. We’re talking about self-rewarding now and the ability to reward yourself. What they found in studies where people reward themselves or they’re given rewards by other people is if you can learn to reward yourself, that skill generalizes to other areas of your life much more quickly.

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3. A reward must be delivered as immediately as possible. This is the real key to rewards. This is what a lot of people miss. It’s the delay between a behavior and a reward that makes you want to procrastinate. “If I do this behavior, I’m going to make money… next month.” It’s not motivating. A lot of things are punishing because their immediate consequences are punishing, even though they’re rewarding shortly after.

I like to think about jumping in the lake. I love swimming. It’s very rewarding to be in the water and feel free and all that stuff, but that first moment of getting in is a little bit unpleasant. A lot of people avoid going in the water at all because they don’t want that first moment of punishment, even though it’s followed by a great reward. It’s the immediacy that’s important.

I smoked a few cigarettes when I was 19. Maybe for about a month or so, I borrowed cigarettes from friends and I swore I’d never by a pack. Then I bought one pack and I realized I crossed the line and threw out the pack and quit. But I remember I felt great when I’d take a drag, and that high lasted maybe 30 seconds to a minute, and then I would crash.

Smoking is really addictive because the immediate reward is there, even if 30 seconds later it’s unpleasant. Do you get the difference between going swimming and smoking? It’s the immediacy of the reward.

Primary and Secondary Rewards

Rewards can be primary or secondary.

Primary RewardsPrimary rewards are food when you’re hungry, water when you’re thirsty, warmth when you’re cold, sex anytime, music, chocolate, things that satisfy you hedonically, with a sensation – pleasurable sensations.

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Premack’s PrincipleYou can use an enjoyable activity to reward a less enjoyable activity. Eat your broccoli and then you get dessert is another reward we seem to understand quite well.

I want you to brainstorm things which are rewarding to you. It could be praise. It could be chocolate. It’s good to have a nice reserve of things that you know are rewarding to you. Basically, if you want to know what’s rewarding to you, what do you choose to do in your free time? This can be a running list. You can come back to this anytime and keep adding to it.

Who wrote porn down? Porn is something that can be addictive, and the thing about addictions is they’re very stimulating to the reward circuitry. That’s exactly what cocaine does. It hijacks your reward circuitry and releases a ton of dopamine and creates that craving very, very quickly.

Those are primary rewards. Let’s talk about secondary rewards.

Secondary RewardsSecondary rewards are symbols of access to primary rewards. Let’s say you go to the same vending machine every day. The sound of the snack that you get falling down can be a secondary enforcer. It says, “Primary rewards are available now. You can get them now.”

Money is a secondary reinforcer. It has no value to your senses, except that it symbolizes increased status, increased accumulation of stuff, increased access to food, increased resources.

The interesting thing about secondary rewards is that they travel straight through the amygdala, without mediation of conscious thought. They go right from your senses – right from your eyes, right from your ears – right through your amygdala and release dopamine. They can be much more powerful than primary rewards.

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An example of a secondary reward is money. You guys noticed when we played that game where you could choose between $50 now and $100 later that I had this picture of money up on the screen. I had it up there for a reason. Just that picture – the presence of money – puts you in more of a state of wanting short-term gains. They’ve done experiments with this. Someone has a picture of money on their shirt (the person who is running the experiment) or pictures of money on the walls and they see what people choose.

What happens is the presence of an immediate reward actually shuts down your ability to control your impulses. It shuts down your concern for long-term rewards. This happens especially with sex. The more sexually aroused you get, the less you care about long-term consequences. That’s how we get together. That’s how a lot of bad ideas happen. That’s why people cheat. Despite the fact that they know the consequences could be devastating to their family – they could lose their family, lose access to their kids – but in that moment, that’s all gone. It’s important to understand this.

One of the reasons why I like learning about the brain is it lets me understand the root of some of these impulses that we all have and these desires and thoughts. When you understand the mechanisms behind them (at least for me), you become much less judgmental of your own processes and accept “Okay, you can have that.”

If you feel this way, it’s not because you’re weak or you lack in character. It’s because you’re wired to desire immediate rewards. When you put yourself in a situation where there’s a lot of immediate rewards around, it makes it more difficult to choose long-term gains.

I mentioned it releases dopamine. I went on to YouTube and Googled “won the lottery” and people have fake tickets. Let’s see this guy: “Oh, my God, dude!!! Yessss!!! Woo-hooo!!! Yes! Yes! Yes! That’s $10,000!!!!”

That’s the power of secondary reinforcers.

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This is a secondary reinforcer.

The little icon saying that you have a message waiting for you on Facebook or in your e-mail releases dopamine. There might be a little social connection there or something validating.

What I’m trying to impress upon you right now is the power of secondary reinforcers, because we tend to think it’s a symbol and it doesn’t mean anything. We think “I’m an intelligent person. How can that really affect me? How can that really motivate me?” But you see how excited that guy was about thinking he won the lottery. That’s a big one.

Who’s on Facebook? Most people. Does that symbol make you think about checking your Facebook right now? Are you feeling a little bit of you wish you could reach in and take out your cell phone and check it right now? That signal - the secondary reward - it creates a craving.

Here’s another secondary reinforcer:

Tetris.

It’s going to feel so good when all those blocks line up and go “Bing!” You’ve played Tetris before. People will play for hours to get that feeling. “So close!”

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This is a game I play called Tiny Wings. I’m going to show you a few secondary reinforcers here. This guy is learning to fly. You’ve got to jump of these hills here – oh, that feels good. It’s hard to get them up off the ground, but you feel the momentum. This is a really successful game. See all those stars? Isn’t that fun. If you haven’t played this, I don’t know if you have the same reaction to this as I do, but man that makes my brain fire like crazy when I see that little guy jump off those hills. At the end of each level, it automatically goes like that so you get a big reward at the end of each level. Weeeee!!!

These things are extremely motivating. The video game industry is the fastest-growing industry that there is. It’s overtaken music and movies because it appeals to your reward system like this.

This is a secondary reinforcer:

a checkmark. Of course, it has to have meaning to you in this context, just seeing a checkmark. I bet we’ve been so conditioned in school. You’re looking for the checkmarks so much that it probably, in and of itself, is conditioned to be a reward. But when that’s next to something that’s important to you, that’s a secondary reinforcer.

Tracking Your SuccessesYou can start tracking your successes. You’re going to start a daily tracker and we’re going to be adding to this tracker as we go. Basically, what you’re going to create is a little reward system for yourself.

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fyf pdf 3 drivefindyourfocus.com/media/fyf-3-drive.pdf · right now, you have two long-term goals...

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