Skip to main content

The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work

The way to maintain motivation and achieve peak levels of desire is to work on tasks of “just manageable difficulty.”

The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty. If you love tennis and try to play a serious match against a four-year-old, you will quickly become bored. It’s too easy. You’ll win every point. In contrast, if you play a professional tennis player like Roger Federer or Serena Williams, you will quickly lose motivation because the match is too difficult. 

Now consider playing tennis against someone who is your equal. As the game progresses, you win a few points and you lose a few. You have a good chance of winning, but only if you really try. Your focus narrows, distractions fade away, and you find yourself fully invested in the task at hand. This is a challenge of just manageable difficulty and it is a prime example of the Goldilocks Rule.

The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.

FIGURE 15: Maximum motivation occurs when facing a challenge of just manageable difficulty. In psychology research this is known as the Yerkes– Dodson law, which describes the optimal level of arousal as the midpoint between boredom and anxiety

When you’re starting a new habit, it’s important to keep the behavior as easy as possible so you can stick with it even when conditions aren’t perfect.
Once a habit has been established, however, it’s important to continue to advance in small ways. These little improvements and new challenges keep you engaged. And if you hit the Goldilocks Zone just right, you can achieve a flow state.
A flow state is the experience of being “in the zone” and fully immersed in an activity. Scientists have tried to quantify this feeling. They found that to achieve a state of flow, a task must be roughly 4 percent beyond your current ability. In real life it’s typically not feasible to quantify the difficulty of an action in this way, but the core idea of the Goldilocks Rule remains: working on challenges of just manageable difficulty—something on the perimeter of your ability— seems crucial for maintaining motivation.

Improvement requires a delicate balance. You need to regularly search for challenges that push you to your edge while continuing to make enough progress to stay motivated. Behaviors need to remain novel in order for them to stay attractive and satisfying. Without variety, we get bored. And boredom is perhaps the greatest villain on the quest for self-improvement.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maximizing Your Profits with Scoring

SETTING YOUR MAXIMUM INTRADAY TRADING LOSS First things first: set a max intraday trading loss. There will be days when you just do not have it. Why do you think coaches pull their players when they are not playing well? They are more harmful on the field than off. When you are underperforming, you are hurting your team and your trading business. You need a system to yank yourself over to the bench. A stop loss is your answer. TRADING BASED UPON THE TIME OF DAY A good trader makes note of what time of day it is, when he trades most profitably, and adjusts his trading to fit such times. Your numbers at the end of the month will not reflect your true trading potential. Make the most trades with the most size during the trading periods that statistically are most profitable for you. Money saved during your weaker trading periods is money earned. Consistency The fact is that most trades you make will start working for you right away. But the new traders also hold stocks that are trading ag...
Post a Comment
Read more

Self-Discipline

One must gain mastery over self the person who is not master of himself can never be master of others. Lack of self-mastery is, of itself, the most destructive form of indefiniteness. By mastering the three appetites responsible for most of one's lack of self discipline. The three appetites are (1) The desire for food, (2) The desire for expression of sex, (3) The desire to express loosely organized opinions. When a man becomes master of these three appetites, he has developed enough self-discipline to conquer easily those of lesser importance. Self mastery contempates sufficient control over the appetites to enable one to feed them what they need and withhold food not needed. Take the desire for physical food, for example. The majority of people are so weak in self discipline they fill their stocmachs with combinations of rich food which please the taste but overwork the organs of digestion and elimination. They pour into their stomachs both quantity and combinations of food which...
Post a Comment
Read more

Blessing In Disguise

I used to hate my enemies. But that was before I learned how well they were serving me by keeping me everlastingly on the alert lest some weak spot in my character provide an opening through which they might damage me. In view of what I have learned of the value of enemies, if I had none I would feel it my duty to create a few. They would discover my defects and point them out to me, whereas my friends, if they saw my weaknesses at all, would say nothing about them. ACCEPT FAILURE AS A NORMAL PART OF LIVING. VIEW IT AS PART OF THE PROCESS OF EXPLORING YOUR WORLD; MAKE A NOTE OF ITS LESSONS AND MOVE ON.  -Tom Hobson  There can be no failure for the person who "still fights on:' No one has ever failed until they accept temporary defeat as failure. I am convinced that failure is Nature's plan through which she hurdle jumps those of destiny and prepares them to do their work. Failure is Nature's great crucible in which she burns the dross from the human hear...
Post a Comment
Read more