DOGS AND BONES AND HUMAN MOTIVATION
There’s an apocryphal story about racing Grayhounds and how when they catch the dog or the bunny, they cease to race. Though there is no confirmation of this story anywhere in actual racing circles.
I am a little suspicious of it because, though I’m allergic to anything with fur, when normal dogs catch anything, they seem to be quite happy to repeat the experience all day.
But it’s a useful metaphor about human behavior, so let’s pretend it’s true, which is also very common human behavior.
Either the dog is completely satisfied by that one bone and never tries to run again, or he’s so pissed off that the bone or the bunny is made of cardboard, he also never runs again.
This past week, I caught the bunny. Twice.
One day this week, I checked off everything on my to do list. Not just the explicit list that has a prayer of occasionally looking realistic, but also the unspoken expectations I hold myself to, that if I ate vegetables, exercised twice, got to bed on time, called my friends and actually talked to them, and smelled all the flowers – life would be… perfect?
Yes, I had a perfect day, according to some past version of myself that put down a list of tasks that when completed would mean this day was not wasted.
And then a couple nights later, I slept through the night! I put my head on my pillow, closed my eyes and opened them 8 hours later when the sun was coming up. I have nuclear levels of insomnia and can count on my fingers the number of nights I’ve gone to bed and woken with the sun. In my entire life.
It was the perfect day and the perfect night. In the same week!
It was terrible!
ASPIRATIONS ARE THE EPIC FANTASY VERSION OF YOUR LIFE
The day after the perfect night’s sleep, I was actually kind of groggy. It was hard to get started in the morning. I wasn’t calmer, more clearheaded, or more articulate. Or any happier. In fact, I was just still me. And then I slept like absolute crap the next night.
The day of perfect productivity, I felt kind of frenetic. Too busy. Too rushed. I wasn’t more accomplished, peaceful, connected. Or any happier. I was also still just me.
I’ll leave the sociopolitical antecedents of productivity from the Protestant reformation to modern hustle culture for another newsletter. We definitely have a really screwed up relationship with work and leisure, but I think the heart of our difficulty with getting things done is more fundamental than our present stopwatch age.
My favorite book on this subject is the Gap and the Gain, by Dan Sullivan, though there are many that cover reality vs aspiration, the real vs expected self, and many other synonyms for the fact that human brains can imagine the future.
One scientist calls that improvisational intelligence, or more prosaically, creativity. We can picture something that hasn’t happened yet.
That little jump in intelligence means we are forever living two lives:
- Today: the exhausting, smelly, inconvenient, delicious, disgusting, crying, silly, distracted experience of reality.
- Tomorrow: the productive, calm, impulse-free, benevolent, successful perpetual future.
Sometimes imagination sucks.
Sullivan says that handling the gap is a key skill to life satisfaction. Note, I didn’t say closing the gap and finally living up to tomorrow, getting everything done, and fulfilling all your dreams.
Today and on the day of your death, there will still be a gap between what you want to happen and what happens.
We will always have to manage that gap. It’s a skill I deeply suck at, by the way, so this is not sage advice on how to do this. This is that I am here in the trenches next to you, and I peaked out for a second.
This week was proof positive that closing the gap does not make life better, because for twenty four hours, I lived as close to tomorrow as I think I’m ever going to get.
I lived exactly how I wanted to, perfectly, and felt like the exact same as all the days I fail miserably.
HERE ARE A FEW TIPS FOR HANDLING THE GAP
REMIND YOURSELF IT’S NEVER GOING AWAY
When we fall short of what we aspire to do, we hardly ever look at the aspiration. We always blame ourselves. A huge leap forward is just remembering that we have made up what we want to do and so when we fall short, you need to examine the expectation as closely as reality.
Even as I write this, I hear the voice in my head that says: you’re going to be a lazy failure sitting on the couch forever. But I promise you, as someone who did nothing but sit on the couch for several months, it’s really hard to do.
Even when I was so sick that I couldn’t do anything but sit on the couch, it was still extremely hard to do. The version of yourself that plays on a loop when you don’t drink enough water or watch one more episode isn’t going to happen.
CHAOS HAPPENS AND SUCCESS IS ONLY A PROBABILITY
We think accomplishing everything we want to protect us against failure. We can keep the chaos at bay if we are perfect.
The perfect version wouldn’t have been taken in by charlatans. And would have picked the right job. And the right partner. And wouldn’t have said that boneheaded thing to your sister-in-law.
We don’t live in a deterministic universe; we live in a probabilistic one governed by chaos. Things just randomly go wrong, and the things we plan have only a chance of coming true. That means we waste a lot of time, take a lot of chances that don’t pay off, and even the things we are successful at are often random too.
TRY FOR THE MINIMUM EFFECTIVE DOSE
Often when we make changes, we want to do all of the things. I’m a big fan of the geographic cure, when you quit your job, break your lease, and move across the country and start in a completely new industry. But that’s just me.
The minimum effective dose is a medical term, but it can be applied to just about anything. It means making small changes that add up overtime. It’s prosaic and not at all sexy, but it makes for a smaller gap which is what we’re going for.
MEASURE YOURSELF AGAINST THE PAST, NOT YOUR FUTURE
This is Sullivan‘s main advice for handling the fact that we are always aspirational beings. The answer is not to let go of anything that you want and just sit like a slug. The answer is to want things and to attempt to improve, but to measure not against an imagined perfect future, but against your very imperfect and probably less skilled past self.
That way you are always looking at realistic progress that you have made, which is motivating, and you’re measuring accurately instead of always feeling like a failure.
And if this sounds like a cop-out, in his research, the people who do this get much farther in life because they are more motivated and more realistic and they just have a much better time than people who always move the goal posts.
TASTE YOUR FOOD; SMELL SOME FLOWERS 😉
Oh yes, mindfulness, that old chestnut. And yet it makes every list for a reason.
I am absolutely not telling you to sit down and meditate every day. In my 20s, I went on a month-long retreat where I meditated for 16 hours a day on top of years long daily practice. And I am back to tell you it also did not help. You are still you.
Only you get really hypersensitized so that every twitch of fabric feels like sandpaper, and every rustle of noise sounds like gunfire. And then you have to go back to your life and everything is loud and bright and busy and crazy and it takes a while for all your senses to shut back down. And for you to stop asking: what was the point of that?
I went from that to a long period of time where I did not want anything to do with any kind of mindfulness. But all of the folk wisdom about missing your life isn’t wrong. If you don’t spend at least sometime in the present moment smelling the flowers, you will go for years without truly enjoying anything.
My favorite resource on mindfulness now is a book called Positive Intelligence, which is extremely misnamed because it has nothing to do with positivity or intelligence.
It preaches popcorn moments of mindfulness.
Rather trying to beat yourself up maintaining your focused attention on anything, you just try and notice your senses in brief moments. Taste a few bites of every meal; stop and look at something beautiful; smell your shampoo, actually hear the music you’re listening to. If you pay attention to the best moments of your day you’ll enjoy more of it.
ALL THESE MAKE YOU A LITTLE MORE SATISFIED AND A LITTLE LESS MEAN TO YOURSELF
Maybe examine the picture in your head as carefully as you examine your actual performance. Maybe cut yourself slack when you run up against chaos or you run up against the probability of success and you didn’t get the thing you want. Maybe when you do try something, measure against what you’ve already tried.
Life is not a string of perfect productivity. It’s a mess. Even when it goes perfectly, it still doesn’t really change that.
Enjoy the strawberries. Drink enough water.