Happy Friday! I’m sending this on time this week, huzzah. Got a new article out:
Where Does Motivation Come From?
This post had been kicking around in my mind for a while, so I finally coughed it up because the topic arose in a coaching by email engagement.
It’s so frustrating when motivation leaves, or never really kicks in, contrary to our expectations.
To understand motivational failures, we have to figure out where it comes from in the first place.
Here, I analyze “motivation,” gesture towards its origins, and explain how to troubleshoot motivational failures when they (inevitably) arise:
Where Does Motivation Come From?
Solving for Enough
This piece about “Enough” from Paul Jarvis makes an important point:
If you don’t know what (literally or metaphorically) “enough” means relative to you, then you can’t make good decisions about when to push forward towards more and when to pull back.
That’s a big part of why a focus on minimizing and cutting back tends to annoy people who are pre-enough, whereas strive-y rhetoric encourages post-enough people to overshoot their goals faster.
Whole thing is worth a read: Enough
Information Overload is a Fake Problem
There’s something really correct in this Scott Young blog post, but also something fishy.
Scott’s right that many pieces of info are semi-redundant. The “overload,” then, is largely just a matter of finding the versions that are appealing to you - and you don’t need to worry about the rest.
At the same time, people certainly feel overloaded (I think even when they realize that redundancy is common). The issue of info overload has been our radars for years now, but it doesn’t seem to be going away.
—> Do you feel info overloaded? Why or why not? What do you do to manage it?
And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
I’m not super into poetry but oh boy, this Robert Frost poem really grabbed me:
(via Andrew Taggart)
ICYMI: Trauma for Skeptics
I recently wrote about how to think about trauma without thinking about “trauma,” check it out.
Very curious to hear if this framework is useful (or not) to you.
Congrats on almost having made it through January,
Pamela
2020: issue 5 of 52