The Paradox of Effort
What’s your core motivator?
Where does the motivation come from to improve your life? At first glance, this seems like a strange question: why wouldn’t you automatically want things to be better? But the good life is hard work, so we often fail to do the things we know would make our lives better.
Cal Newport told me that, while in grad school, he noticed a lot of people became much better students after they had kids. This is paradoxical because children are time-consuming, and thus, it ought to be much harder to succeed academically.
I noticed something similar in myself, when I decided I wanted to run my own business. There were a lot of spillover benefits to other areas of my life, even though they weren’t related to entrepreneurship. I started reading books, exercising regularly and eating healthier, for instance.
The difficulty of the new challenge forces you to take things seriously. Cal’s observation was that, with fearsome time constraints, procrastinating is out of the question. Taking studying seriously pushes you to do better than you might have, absent those constraints. In my case, becoming my own boss was a difficult enough goal that it forced me to build better habits throughout my life.
