Creativity is the basis for my motivation. In a lot of ways, my imagination is my superpower. It’s the thing that has guided me through the hardest (and boring) parts of my life. However, what I have always feared is likely true: My creativity is bounded by my lack of intrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic V. Extrinsic Motivation
Intrinsic: Within one’s self.
Extrinsic: Outside one’s self.
My ability to motivate myself (intrinsic) is my Achilles’s heel. I am known by many of the people in my life as forgetful and prone to having a short attention span. I believe that these two things coupled together have added to my inability to motivate myself into doing tasks that I want to do. These tasks are generally things that I think will bring me financial or personal gain in the future. If the length of time that it takes to reach the desired outcome is long, the likelihood of me forgetting, or outright getting bored, is very high.
This website was created on a dream of becoming a game developer. When it became unclear what progress was being made towards that goal I became unmotivated. Without any real feedback I lost my routine, and eventually lost interest entirely. That’s not to say I don’t still program or make games because I do, but they’re not as career oriented as they were before.
Alternately, I have–and always will be–motivated by outside forces that put some form of pressure on me. School, for example, I was always motivated to do my assignments in a timely manner and done well because of the grade that was attached to it. Group projects were especially effective because social pressure works even better on me than the academics.
Having a job that I have to attend, or simply seeing the money also makes a big difference in my motivation.
The feed back loop is more effective for me when its tangible what I’m gaining, or could lose, if I don’t do the work.
Utilization of Outside Pressure
Since going through the loss of programming motivation, I have gone through it with a whole bunch of other ‘passion projects’. So many that at dinner last night, I proclaimed one of my latest obsessions to my partner, and she remarked that she can’t wait to hear about the next one the following week. We laughed about it, but there was genuine merit to what she was saying. This past month I’ve proclaimed so many new interests that I was going to pursue in my free time that I can’t even remember all of them. This blog included.
Last week, I entered into a short campaign for a tabletop game called Daggerheart. Similar to Dungeons and Dragons, you roll dice and collaboratively tell a story with one player at the helm known as the Game Master (GM). Campaigns are usually broken into weekly sessions which the GM preps for. As a long time GM myself, preparations for the session always got done because I knew if I wasn’t ready, or prepared poorly, myself and my friends, who I run for, would be upset.
This got me thinking: What if I utilized pressures to fulfill my passions. Not only would they be more likely to get done, I’d be more likely to stick with them. I always struggled to motivate myself to program a game, but the two projects I am most proud of (Spirit Mansion and a game I made for my partner) came from the pressures of collaboration and instant feedback.
I’ve boggled the avenues of extrinsic motivation into 2 main categories:
- Collaborative: Finding others who are interested in the project to keep each other motivated.
- Apparent Effects: There is tangible increasing value from producing the project. Such as money or a following.
I’m still learning what works for me because I tried YouTube, but something about it didn’t hook me entirely. When I had a following on Twitch it worked because I felt pressure to deliver entertainment. When no one was watching–like on most of my YouTube videos–it was hard to care.
All Bark
Saying all of this is meaningless if I don’t actually have a projects or a plan to fulfill it. Currently, I’m all over the place and I need to narrow down specific areas that I’m seriously interested in. I also work 10+ hours everyday, so my biggest enemy after motivation is time.
Only time will tell what will come of this because I have a tendency to say a lot of big things, but never actually follow through them. So, instead of bothering my friends and family with this I’ve decided to type it into the void of space (AKA my personal blog).
Hope the aliens don’t mind a little yapping.
