Why you never go on spontaneous adventures

Hint: It’s not a lack of motivation

When you get tetanus, the tetanus toxin permanently bonds to your nerve endings. You can have spasms so severe that your spine fractures.

So yeah, tetanus is pretty bad, and in 1965 it was a lot more common than it is now.

Unsurprisingly, the Yale administration wanted to vaccinate all their students.

So Yale professor Dr. Howard Leventhal designed four different “get vaccinated” pamphlets and tested them with a sample of students:

Each student read a pamphlet, indicated their intent to get vaccinated, and went on their merry way. Little did they know the experiment had just begun.

Levanthal didn’t just want to know how the pamphlets affected the students’ intent, he wanted to know how often the students actually followed through. So he also checked-in with the medical center to see who got their vaccines.

The results

Unsurprisingly, the “high fear” pamphlets were highly motivating. Roughly twice as many students who saw those pamphlets intended to get vaccinated.

But despite this difference in their attitudes, their behaviors were the same. Their rates of actual vaccination were no different.

What shocked administrators was what they saw when they looked at the low vs. high specificity groups. 3% of the low specificity students were vaccinated compared to 30% of the high specificity students, regardless of whether their pamphlet was low or high fear.

In other words, taking away the tiny amount of investigation and planning required caused their behaviors to line up with their attitudes 10x more often. You can motivate people all you want, but if there is not a clear path they won’t follow it.

What does this mean for spontenaity?

We’ve found the exact same thing happening with how people spend their free time.

Those who actually do make the most of their free time — those life artists who seem to be constantly out and about — they are the 3% of Yale students who got vaccinated without the specificity. They don’t mind the research and planning. They actually enjoy it.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, we don’t enjoy the good old cycle of Google searching, Yelp cross-referencing and Google Maps plotting. So any way we can increase the specificity of our plans will greatly increase our odds of actually doing them.

We make one solution at Livday, but there are plenty of other resources out there. Yelp is great if you’re just going to dinner, and TripAdvisor is the gold standard if you’re sightseeing.

If you remember one thing from this article, remember this: Motivation is worthless if your path isn’t well defined.

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