A good community can have tremendous influence on one’s motivation. I never appreciated this fact enough so I wanted to write about it here.
Looking at successful athletes, founders, musicians, game speedrunners, or overachievers in any area, they seem to have unlimited motivation to do loads of tedious work or practice. One might say they are interested in the work itself, but how inherently interesting can beating super mario 1ms faster be? The work of a founder might look stimulating on the surface, but the amount of monotony that has to be tolerated to make ends meet is daunting. How do these people carry through with this while I still struggle to get my laundry done?
My Story
I believe most highly motivated people have a good community working towards the same goals. A community can multiply your motivation while people working alone run out of steam easily.
My experience with StarCraft resonates with this. I have a long held passion for this game, but the game (along with the entire RTS genre) is dwindling and few of my peers even know of it. I’ve made practice plans but never ended up putting in consistent effort. It’s hard to be entirely self-motivated, especially as life priorities shift every other week.
Is contrast, I poured hundreds of hours playing, studying meta, watching pro plays into Brawl Stars, a completely brainrotting game whose gameplay itself I didn’t even enjoy a single bit. Yet I was hard grinding the game, just because I happened to have a few friends sweating this game too.
I enjoyed StarCraft a lot more, yet I was far more motivated for BrawlStars. I wonder if this powerful source of motivation can be harnessed to achieve greater things.
The Mechanics of Motivating Communities
The ideas mentioned here may sound intuitive, but I think a clear understanding of the underlying mechanics of motivation helps me come up with reasonable action plans without conducting extensive tests.
Approval Seeking. It’s in our genes to seek approval. Well-known terms like accountability partner or productive competition are in fact describing the mechanics of our approval seeking tendencies boosting productivity. With accountability partners, we’re motivated to stick to our promises so as not to let them down. With productive competition, everyone within the community is motivated to get better. A good community helps us turn our approval seeking tendency into motivation.
WYSIATI Bias. What you see is all there is. Another name for this is availability bias: when making decisions, our minds primarily deal with readily available information and ignore information that we can’t easily retrieve. As we spend more time with a community centered around some topic, we are exposed to lots of information on it. This biases our day-to-day decision making towards that goal. For example, when I decide how to spend my afternoon, I’m biased towards hopping on BrawlStars since that’s at the top of my head. Tasks that I don’t think about often, like doing laundry, are harder to surface. A community is a great way to provide a constant stream of relevant information to make the goal fresh on your mind.
Apart from these two reasons, a productive community also helps make your work or practice more efficient (learning from experts, avoiding tunnel vision, etc.) which yields more progress, which is the true goal of acquiring higher motivation.
Actionable Advice
- Be proactive in joining productive communities or make your own, on the topics you want to work on.
- You don’t have to let your existing communities/circles dictate what you do.
- Be part of multiple communities, each for a goal you want motivation for.
- Also means you should leave counterproductive communities as they motivates you on “bad” things.