Motivation
12 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- Dopamine isn't a pleasure chemical, it's a surprise signal.
In 1997 Wolfram Schultz recorded dopamine neurons in monkeys. They fired at unexpected juice. Once a light reliably …
- How "do your best" became the worst goal there is.
Locke and Latham reviewed some 400 studies over 25 years. The result: specific, hard goals beat vague or easy ones in …
- How a Monday helps you start, and so does a birthday.
In 2014 Dai, Milkman and Riis found people prefer to start goals at temporal landmarks: searches for "diet" rose 82 …
- How an if-then sentence makes your goals stick.
Peter Gollwitzer calls it an implementation intention: instead of "I want to exercise more" you say "When I get home on …
- How motivation arises when nobody's paying you.
Deci and Ryan identified three basic needs that feed intrinsic motivation: autonomy, meaning you choose; competence …
- How to build confidence in yourself without talking yourself into it.
In 1977 Albert Bandura described self-efficacy: the belief that you can accomplish a task. It draws on four sources …
- How to combine positive thinking with the obstacle.
Four steps: name the wish, picture the best outcome, find the main inner obstacle, then build an if-then plan against …
- How to use your favourite podcast as exercise bait.
In 2014 Milkman, Minson and Volpp gave students gripping audiobooks they could only listen to at the gym. That group …
- Once a metric becomes the target, it stops working.
Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Pay programmers per line of code and …
- Pay someone to draw, and afterwards they draw less.
Lepper, Greene and Nisbett showed in 1973 that children given an announced reward for voluntary drawing later drew less …
- The state where you forget the clock has a recipe.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it flow: full concentration, sense of time gone, action and awareness merging. His …
- Two free stamps make you three days faster.
In 2006 Kivetz, Urminsky and Zheng handed loyalty cards to 108 café customers. One group needed 10 stamps, the other 12 …