Why willpower fails and how to actually get motivated without relying on it. Small, manageable steps reduce the activation energy needed for action—letting you keep motivated and build momentum without the crash. Learn how behavioral activation transforms how you approach goals and helps you find motivation when it’s nowhere to be found.

⏱ CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro
2:14 Motivation Gap Example: Running Shorts in Closet
5:28 Breaking the Activation Energy Barrier
7:40 Behavior Equation and Activation Thresholds
16:04 Making Tasks Small Enough to Overcome Resistance
29:36 Reducing Temptations and Increasing Accessibility
32:16 Dividing Goals into Manageable Tasks
47:03 Establishing Frequent, Smaller Incentives for Motivation

If you’re looking for insights on how to get motivated and stay motivated, Peter Hollins dives into the nuances of behavioral science, self-discipline, and mental performance in his channel. From tackling procrastination and finding your motivation gap to mastering small steps and building habits that stick, Peter offers practical tips and strategies to help you activate your goals and track progress effectively.

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Check it out at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Z8J5LFJ
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWFnONPWH9KovyVXBsGSB-g

Imagine you’ve been meaning to get back into shape for two years.
Every Sunday night you tell yourself, Monday.
And every Monday, something gets in the way.
But what if all it took was putting your workout shoes on once a day and nothing else?
And here we’ll give you the fix right up front.
You don’t have to hang on until the end of the video because it really is this simple.
You don’t need more motivation.
You need a first step so small it fits below the motivation you already have.
That space between wanting to change and actually starting is called the motivation gap.
And it almost never closes because you want it harder.
It closes when the first step gets smaller.
In this episode, we’re going to provide you with three things.
A pair of shoes, 20 seconds, and a pile of pebbles.
And you’ll leave with a simple test to find your own version tonight.
Everything in this episode comes from Peter Hollins.
The first piece is from his book, Discipline Over Dopamine.
And the central idea here is worth having in your head before you hear the story.
Dopamine, contrary to what you might have heard, isn’t really the pleasure chemical.
It’s the wanting chemical.
It pulls you toward whatever is easiest and closest every time.
That means that discipline isn’t a trait you either have or don’t.
It’s something you engineer by making the thing you actually want to do the easy, close thing.
Chapter 6 from this book puts that to work on a mom named Priya and a pair of running shoes with last spring’s mulch still in the dreads.
Here’s how he tells it in the book.
Priya has been going to start working out again for two years.
She ran track in high school, and she still carries the body memory of someone who used to be in shape.
In her closet sits a pair of running shorts, with last spring’s mulch caked into the treads.
Every Sunday night she runs the same private ritual, telling herself
Monday morning, I’m going.
Monday morning is always a problem.
The kids need lunches.
The youngest woke up at 4.30, for no reason.
The babysitter texts at 8.11 about whether she can come early next Thursday.
By the time Priya has handled the first morning, the working out window is closed.
She tells herself, tomorrow, I’ll go tomorrow.
This has been the pattern for two years, and she’s not worked out for a single day of them.
She does not need a better workout plan.
She’s read several.
When she talked about it, she said the same sentence most people say in this situation.
I just need to actually do it.
She has a goal, thirty minutes a day, three days a week, the standard one.
The goal has been on her list for so long that the list itself feels accusatory now.
Looking at the list is part of the problem.
The list reminds her that she is not the person who works out.
The thing she doesn’t yet know is that the goal is the problem.
The goal itself is perfectly fine.
The trouble is that the goal is the very thing she keeps failing to start.
What she actually needs this week is not a goal.
What she needs is a door.
The challenge for the week was this.
Don’t work out.
Just put the shoes on.
That was the whole thing.
Once a day, sometime, she had to put on the running shoes.
She didn’t have to leave the house.
She didn’t have to stretch.
Didn’t have to do anything else.
She just had to be a person who, for two minutes, had the shoes on her feet.
Priya laughed when she heard the challenge.
That’s not even trying.
That’s the whole point.
She did it on Tuesday.
She put the shoes on after lunch, intending to take them off in a minute.
Then she got distracted, folding laundry, and forgot about them entirely.
They were on her feet for 20 minutes.
She did six squats in the kitchen for no reason when she walked through.
She did it again on Wednesday after dinner, and the same accidental thing happened.
12 minutes on her feet, 10 squats while the dishwasher ran.
By Friday, she was putting the shoes on without being reminded.
By Friday, she’d done somewhere between 30 and 40 squats over the week.
Add a half block walk to the mailbox in the shoes, plus one minute of jumping in place while she waited for the kettle.
She hadn’t worked out, not by any honest definition of the phrase, but she had started, and starting was the move that had refused to happen for twenty-four months.
What had broken open was not her motivation.
It was about the same as it had been on the Mondays when nothing happened.
What had broken open was the gap between no shoes on and working out.
The gap had been too big for two years.
Every Monday she was being asked to leap from a standing start into a 30-minute workout.
The leap had been too far for every single Monday for two years running.
Once the gap got small enough, the leaping stopped being required.
The shoes were the door.
Walking through it, not the workout, was the whole point of the week.
She didn’t know it yet.
By the third week, she’d be wearing the shoes on actual walks around the block.
By the sixth week, she’d be doing something that from the outside looked an awful lot like working out.
Nobody had told her to do any of that.
The shoes had.
Why activation energy is everything?
Most things you fail at, you fail at the start.
Not in the middle, not at the end.
You fail at the start.
That hair-thin moment between not doing the thing and beginning to do the thing.
In physics, this gap is called activation energy.
Every reaction has a threshold below which nothing happens at all.
Light a match.
The heat from your fingers isn’t enough to start the fire.
The friction of striking the head is.
Below the threshold, nothing.
Above it, fire.
Your discipline runs on the same kind of curve, with the same hard cutoff.
Below a certain activation threshold, the task doesn’t start at all.
Above it, the task starts and often runs cleanly to completion.
Most people lose this fight at the beginning, not the middle.
They sit down to write and the document doesn’t open.
They tell themselves they’ll work out and the shoes don’t go on.
They mean to call their mother, but the phone stays face down in their hand for 45 minutes.
The behavior from the last chapter, BJ Fogg’s behavior equals motivation times ability times prompt is the same math written a different way.
When ability is high and the task is easy, you don’t need much motivation.
When ability is low and the task is hard, you need a lot of motivation.
Motivation, unfortunately, is not a thing you can summon on command.
Ability, on the other hand, is something you can engineer.
You engineer it by shrinking the task until activation energy is below your motivation floor.
Whatever motivation floor you have right now, the task has to fit underneath it.
On most days, the floor is low.
That’s a feature of being human, not a flaw.
But for two years, Priya’s motivation floor was below workout for 30 minutes, so nothing happened.
The week she changed the task to put the shoes on, the task fit underneath even her worst-day motivation, so the task happened.
Then the next task happened, and then the next.
That’s the whole mechanism.
Chris, the warehouse counter guy who games until one in the morning, had the same wall, the certification course that would land him a better-paying job set unopened for months behind the controller and an energy drink every night.
So the task got shrunk past study for the cert into something almost laughable.
Open the course and watch a single video.
One slide before the game.
On the nights, even that felt like too much.
The threshold for one video is low enough that his tired, end-of-shift self could clear it.
The cert was a campfire he kept failing to light.
One video was a match.
It is not motivational and it is not inspirational.
It’s a piece of physics dressed up as a life lesson.
The lesson is older than every self-help book ever printed.
The reason this matters is that almost every plan dies at the activation step.
The 5 AM alarm doesn’t fail at 5.01.
It fails at 5 exactly when you decide whether to get up at all.
The novel doesn’t fail at the third page.
It fails before page 1 with the document unopened.
The diet doesn’t fail at the third meal.
It fails at the grocery store where the wanting machine picked the closer thing and the lentils stayed on the shelf.
You might recognize the move in smaller forms you already half-attempt.
You open the laptop telling yourself, you’ll just write one sentence.
Somehow a paragraph appears.
You lay tomorrow’s gym clothes out on the chair tonight, so the morning version of you has almost nothing left to decide.
Each of those is the same instinct, reaching for a first move small enough that resistance can’t get a grip on it.
Move the threshold down low enough and the wanting machine has nothing to push back against.
It cannot resist a task that is too small to register as a task.
Resistance needs something to grab.
If there’s nothing to grab, the resistance never fires and the task happens almost by accident.
This is the opposite of how most people are taught to think about discipline.
The standard advice is to want it more, to dig deep, to push through, to find the inner fire.
That advice works for some people on some days, and it gets sold as universal, but for most people on most days, the inner fire is a low blue flame on the kitchen stove.
The task they are trying to do is the size of a campfire, the two will never meet.
The fix is not to grow the flame, the fix is to make the first move tiny.
Consider how the choreographer Twyla Tharp describes her own mornings in The Creative Habit.
By her account, the celebrated dancer’s real routine isn’t the brutal workout that follows.
It’s the cab.
Every morning, before dawn, she hails a taxi to her gym across town.
Once she’s climbed in and named the address to the driver, she considers the ritual complete.
The workout then follows almost automatically.
A world-class professional, in other words, shrank her keystone habit down to a single instruction, get in the cab.
She defends the tiny first move with everything she has and lets the workout take care of itself.
There’s a quiet second benefit hiding inside this move, and it’s worth naming.
Every time you cross your activation threshold, even on the most trivial version of the task, you collect a small piece of evidence about who you are.
The evidence stacks weighted toward the recent entries.
After three days of putting on the shoes, Priya was no longer the person who had been failing to start for two years.
She was the person who, for three days running, had put the shoes on.
That identity shift is doing more work than any of the squats.
The wanting machine starts to update the file it keeps on you.
The older record fades into background noise.
The file is what it consults next time you stand at the edge of a task.
That’s why even an embarrassingly small version of the activity still counts as evidence.
The brain isn’t grading the size of the act, it’s logging whether the act happened at all.
A two-minute version of the task and a 30-minute version both check the same box in the file.
That’s the box marked Did It.
The size of the act matters for the world, but the size of the act barely matters for the file.
What matters for the file is the streak of diddits.
A streak of tiny diddits writes itself into the record just as cleanly as a streak of big ones.
The brain’s accounting here is dumber than yours.
Use it.
The file you want to be writing is the file of someone who keeps showing up, regardless of the size of the showing up.
You will not feel this happening.
You’ll just notice around day four or five that the resistance is quieter than it used to be.
The door is easier to walk through than it was on Monday.
That isn’t motivation showing up.
That’s the threshold dropping and the file rewriting itself underneath you.
Notice what didn’t change for Priya, her motivation.
And Holland’s in his book is explicit about it.
It was the same on that first Tuesday as it had been every Monday that went nowhere.
What changed was the size of the jump.
For two years, she’d been asking herself to go from standing still straight into a 30 minute workout on a morning full of lunches and babysitter texts.
That jump was almost always too far.
The shoes shrank that to almost nothing.
And once they were on, the squats in the kitchen had been on their own.
And that’s what Holland’s means in his book by activation energy.
Think about a match.
The heat in your fingers will never light it, but one quick strike will.
Every task has a threshold like that.
On a normal tired day, the motivation you’ve got is the only thing available to clear it.
Chris is the same story with a different task.
Study for the certification.
That sat untouched for months on his to-do list behind the controller.
Watch one video before the game happened because his end of shift self could actually clear it.
So the move isn’t to grow the flame, it’s to make the first move small enough that even your worst day motivation gets over the top of that.
Now there’s a second thing happening in that chapter that’s easy to hear and then forget, like so many other things.
And it might matter more than the squats.
Every time Priya put the shoes on, her brain logged it under one heading, did it.
It doesn’t grade the size, two minutes in the shoes, and a 30 minute run.
Check exactly the same box in your brain.
So by day three, she wasn’t someone who’d failed to start for two years anymore.
She was someone who’d put her shoes on three days running.
That’s a different file.
And the next time she stood at the edge of the task, that’s the file her brain checked.
That’s also why the tiny version isn’t cheating.
It’s doing the real work, which is changing what your brain expects from you.
You won’t feel it happening.
You’ll just notice around day four or five that the pushback is quieter than it was.
So that’s the first lever.
Shrink the step until it fits under your motivation.
But there’s a second lever and it doesn’t touch the task at all.
It’s the space around the task.
How far away the thing is and what’s sitting between you and it.
In the book and the chapter right before Prius, Hollins tells the story of Devon, who couldn’t stop grabbing his phone in bed every night.
He tried telling himself to stop, but that didn’t work.
What worked was moving his phone charger to the kitchen.
That’s the whole intervention.
Same Devon, same restless knights, but the phone wasn’t within reach anymore, and the habit faded.
That sounds almost too simple.
Holland knows that and he appreciates that in the book.
So it goes back to the same equation Priya and Chris were running on and shows why it works.
And we have another excerpt from still discipline over dopamine.
This is chapter five.
You’ll hear the equation Hollins mentioned in Priya’s chapter laid out in full, a researcher who ran the experiment on himself and an old Greek story about the fastest runner alive losing a race she should have won.
Here’s how Hollins explains Devin’s Charger.
But the reason the charger move worked has a name.
A Stanford guy, B.J.
Fogg, boiled behavior down to a simple looking equation, B equals M.A.P.
Behavior happens when three things show up together, motivation you want to, ability you can, and a prompt.
Something reminds you.
All three have to be present for a behavior to happen.
If any one of them goes low enough, the behavior doesn’t fire.
The interesting variable for our purposes is ability, which fog uses to mean roughly how easy it is to actually do the thing.
If the behavior is hard to do, you need a lot of motivation to do it.
If the behavior is easy to do, you barely need any motivation at all.
This is why the charger moved worked for Devin.
He didn’t change his motivation, and he didn’t change his prompt.
He changed his ability.
Specifically, he made the phone grab harder.
Same brain, same wanting, same nighttime restlessness, just less ability, and without ability, the behavior didn’t fire.
Here’s a way to feel it.
Imagine your day as a hill, a slope.
Behavior rolls downhill toward whatever is easiest in the moment.
You don’t outmuscle gravity by wanting harder.
Nobody wins that fight for long.
You regrade the hill, so the thing you want becomes the downhill thing, and the thing you don’t becomes the climb.
A researcher named Sean Acor tested almost exactly this on himself.
He wanted to watch less TV and work out more, so he made each one about 20 seconds harder or easier.
He took the batteries out of the TV remote and stuck them in a drawer across the apartment, and he slept in his gym clothes so the morning workout was already half started.
That’s it.
20 seconds of friction moved to the right side.
The TV habit faded, and the workout stuck.
Not because it got stronger, but because he regraded his slope.
He calls it the 20-second rule.
It holds at larger scales too.
In cafeteria studies, simply moving the junk food out of easy reach or lifting the water bottles up to eye level sharply changes what people pick.
Same people, same hunger, different hill.
The Greeks knew the move thousands of years before there were cafeterias to study.
There’s a story about a woman named Atalanta, who was the fastest runner alive.
She’d agreed to marry only the man who could beat her in a foot race.
And the losers were put to death.
Some don’t even try.
No one could outrun her, and everyone knew it.
A man named Hippomanese knew it too, so he didn’t try to win on speed.
He went to Aphrodite, who gave him three golden apples, and he carried them onto the track.
Each time Atalanta pulled ahead, he rolled an apple across her path.
Each time, she stooped to pick it up.
Three small pauses, three shiny things in her lane, and the fastest runner alive lost the race.
read it, and you want to say she lost her focus or wanted it less.”
She didn’t.
She wasn’t beaten by a faster opponent or a weaker will.
She was beaten by three bright objects dropped in front of her while she ran.
You are at Alenta.
You are fast enough.
The apples are the buzz of the phone.
The tab left open.
The snacks sitting on the counter.
And the lesson the story keeps trying to hand us is the lesson of this whole chapter.
The fix was never to run faster.
The fix was to keep the apples out of the lane, to clear the path before the race starts, not to outmuscle the temptation mid-stride.
You can regrade in both directions, and that’s the part most people miss.
Direction 1.
Add friction toward the thing you don’t want to do.
Move the charger, delete the app, sign out, and let the password live in your password manager.
Think about the snack on the counter versus the same snack in the back of a high cupboard.
The one on the counter gets eaten.
The one in the cupboard mostly doesn’t.
And it’s the same you deciding both times.
Each piece of friction lowers the ability score for the behavior you’re trying to starve.
At some point, usually a small point, surprisingly small, the score drops below the level where the behavior fires and the behavior just stops.
Direction 2.
Remove friction from the thing you do want to do.
Put your running shoes by the door.
Lay the gym clothes out the night before.
Open the document you want to write before you close your laptop so it opens to the right place tomorrow.
Put the book you want to read on top of the phone charger you no longer keep in the bedroom.
Each piece of removed friction raises the ability score for the behavior you’re installing.
Both directions are doing the same math.
Whatever you call it, friction, commitment device, environmental design, the move is the same.
You put the future urge in a slightly worse position when it arrives.
The charger in the kitchen does that.
The picture of Priya’s kids does that.
So does signing yourself out of a website, deleting the app, and asking a friend to hold you to something or paying for the year in advance.
Here’s the part that surprises people.
The friction doesn’t have to be heroic.
It rarely takes a locked safe or a new app or a deal with your spouse.
20 extra seconds is usually enough.
That was the size of Ikor’s remote battery move, and it’s roughly the size of yours.
You don’t need more wheel power.
You need 20 seconds of friction on the right side.
The wanting machine is impatient by design, and 20 seconds is long enough for the wave to break before it crests.
Try it on something small this week.
Bury the candy bar at the back of the cupboard.
or sign out of the streaming service.
Take the social media app off your home screen and leave it three swipes deep.
Then watch what your urge actually does when it has to wait that long.
Most of the time, it just wanders off.
The reason small frictions work so well is something worth sitting with for a second, the wanting machine is a creature of the next two seconds.
It doesn’t weigh costs and benefits in any honest sense, it just reads the path right in front of it.
When the path is smooth, the next two seconds say yes, easy, do it.
When the path requires a chair, a key, a password, or a walk to another room, those same two seconds say, not yet, maybe later, something else.
You haven’t increased the real cost of the behavior by much.
You’ve increased the cost inside that two second window, which is the only window the urge ever actually looks through.
Picture a friend of yours who lives alone and works from home and keeps a half gallon of ice cream in the freezer.
Every night around nine, the freezer pulls on her like a small moon.
One Sunday, she does something almost embarrassingly simple.
She stops buying the half gallon, and instead, she buys a single ice cream sandwich from the corner store on the walk home.
On the nights, she actually wants one.
The behavior hasn’t been banned.
The dessert hasn’t been demonized.
She’s put a sidewalk between her and the freezer.
And the sidewalk did the work the willpower had been failing to do for years.
That’s friction in her favor.
The treat is still available.
It just isn’t there.
Notice that she did not have time to think harder, want it less, or become a different person.
She only had to rearrange one decision so that the easy option matched the option she actually wanted at 9pm.
That’s the pattern under every version of it.
You’re not asking the future you to be braver than the present you.
You’re asking the present you to set the future you up to be lazy in the right direction.
That’s enough.
Here’s how these two chapters fit together.
Fogg’s equation says a behavior needs three things at once.
It needs motivation, it needs ability, and it needs a prompt.
Priya’s shoes raised her ability by making the task smaller.
Devin’s charger or the water bottles at eye level, those raise or lower ability by changing the path to the task instead of the task itself.
Neither approach asks you to want it more, and Hollins actually says it in there.
Put your running shoes by the door.
That’s Priya’s story from the other side.
She shrank the step.
The shoes by the door shrink the distance to it.
Holland’s picture for all of this is a hill.
Behavior rolls downhill toward whatever is easiest in the moment, and nobody out muscles gravity for long.
So you regrade the hill until you think you want is the downhill thing.
It doesn’t take much.
20 seconds is usually enough because the urge only ever looks a couple seconds ahead.
Make the right thing 20 seconds easier and the wrong thing 20 seconds harder and most of the time the urge just kind of wanders off.
Now that second half making the wrong thing harder is the part most people skip.
And that’s what the Atlanta story is really about.
She didn’t lose because she was slow or because she stopped caring during the race.
She lost because three shiny things landed in her lane at the exact moment she was running.
Your apples are the phone buzzing on the desk, the tab you left open, the snack on the counter.
So whatever you’re trying to stop,
20 seconds between you and it.
The charger goes in the kitchen.
The streaming app comes off your home screen and lives three swipes deep.
The snack goes to the back of the high cupboard.
You’re not banning anything.
The friend in his store still gets her ice cream on the nights she actually wants it.
You’re just making sure the wrong thing isn’t sitting in your lane when the urge shows up.
So, that’s how you get started.
A step small enough to clear on a path with nothing in the way.
But, you know, starting is not the whole problem.
Think about Priya in week three or week six.
The shoes aren’t new anymore.
The kitchen squats aren’t some fun surprise.
The thing she’s really after, feeling like she’s back in shape, is still months away.
That’s a problem for exactly the reason Hollins gave at the start.
The wanting machine pulls towards what’s close.
Rewards six months out, barely registers.
So the question becomes, how you keep going when the real payoff is that far away?
And funnily enough, he answers it in a different book.
That book is neurodiscipline.
It’s looking at the same problem from your brain’s side.
His answer is to stop treating the goal as one big thing you either finish or you don’t.
Break it into pieces small enough that each one is a finish you can feel today, not months from now.
And he uses an example you’ll recognize from Pierre, getting in shape.
Here’s how this book goes.
Self-discipline is often seen as a large boulder that you have to overcome with no respite.
What if we did three things to it?
As the title of this section suggests, we broke it down into tiny components, we created the feeling that we were progressing and moving quickly, and then we also visualized how close we were to the finishing point.
Coincidentally, these three tactics create small, consistent spikes of dopamine to keep us engaged and chugging along toward our goals without even realizing it.
We’ll begin with breaking larger tasks down into tiny components.
When we’re faced with huge tasks that feel insurmountable, it’s such an obstacle that everything feels impossible and pointless.
We drag our feet, discourage ourselves, and bitterly complain the whole time.
More likely, we’ll just never get started, and our attempt at self-discipline will fail before it even begins.
For instance, a single huge task, such as finish the 200 page report, can certainly sound imposing if not impossible.
It’s just so discouraging to try to get started on something like that, because you feel that it will never end, and you’ll never make any progress.
To some extent, that’s true, because even writing 10 pages is only completing 5% of the task,
Imagine how hopeless you would feel.
However, what if you were to break that monumental task up into tiny, easy, individual tasks you could get to work on immediately, as well as see instant progress?
For example, preparing the template, finding the first three sources, creating a bibliography, outlining 500 words of the first section, and so on.
Actually, it can go much smaller yet, choosing the fonts, writing the chapter titles, organizing the desk, formatting the document, or writing just one sentence.
It can go even smaller still, but you can use your imagination for that.
The smaller the better.
When you break up the tasks that require self-discipline into as tiny pieces as possible, you’re doing two things in particular.
First, as we’ve mentioned, you’re making it easy to simply get started.
The lower the boundary to entry the better, and if you break your tasks down enough, you may not feel any resistance at all.
For instance, turning on your computer and opening your word processing program.
Second, you’re providing a multitude of opportunities for dopamine spikes because as you cross each little task off your list, you experience a sense of achievement and pleasure.
This often becomes self-perpetuating and encourages you to keep going.
Anything difficult is only a series of easy things.
Make your to-do list as long and articulated as possible with as many small tasks as you can list.
Instead of boulders, think in terms of pebbles.
A pebble is something you can do instantly without any effort and even with little thought.
Can you start a fire only with big logs?
You might be able to, but it would be difficult.
It’s much more preferable to start with kindling, paper scraps, and small pieces of wood that burn easily.
Small steps can take you to the top of the hill and let you roll down the other side to seize momentum.
They help you break the inertia that leads you to passivity and inaction.
Let’s take an example that we’re all familiar with, working out.
You want to lose 100 pounds, a hefty goal.
If you go into the gym every day thinking that you want to lose 100 pounds, you’re going to fail.
It’s a huge, enormous boulder of a goal.
It might sound grand to proclaim, but in reality, it’s going to be very hard to stick to because of how unbelievable it sounds.
In terms of daily actions, it’s going to require an enormous lifestyle change, and that’s nearly impossible to adhere to right out of the gate.
You won’t see much progress on a daily or even weekly basis, and you’ll understandably become discouraged.
What if you approach your weight loss goal by breaking it into small manageable increments, goals, and tasks?
This might look something like setting a reasonable weekly weight loss goal, creating daily goals of eating specific foods and not eating others and drinking water every hour.
Eat 100 fewer calories per meal.
Go on walks after each meal.
Drink only half your soda.
Eat five fewer fries each meal.
Cook once a week.
Buy the low calorie version of snacks.
Substitute water for fruit juice.
If you hit your weekly weight loss goal and successfully drink water every hour, it’s far easier to stay motivated and focused.
Meeting your smaller weekly goal will give you a sense of accomplishment, dopamine, whereas making an insignificant dent in your total goal, 100 pounds, will only make you feel discouraged and as if the task ahead is too great to achieve.
These are small tasks that, if done consistently and correctly, will lead to your overall goal of losing 100 pounds.
These tiny steps and frequent victories will encourage and motivate you to take action.
Does your first tiny step still feel like moving a boulder?
One way to get the ball rolling, no matter how you feel, is to change your phrasing.
I’m going to finish that, turns into, I’m just going to get started on that.
Just like with tiny steps, you make your threshold for starting as low as possible.
In fact, you want to make it as low as possible so that it’s nearly indistinguishable from the laziness of not acting at all.
Next, we move to how the feeling of progress also creates dopamine spikes and keeps us on track.
Remember that what is immediate is always more satisfying than something abstract and far off in the distant future.
But we can trick our brains into thinking that far-off goals are actually more immediate than they are.
By making our brains feel the constant churn of progress, we satisfy our emotional need for gratification in the present.
Your immediate urges can be sated and your emotional brain kept happy even though the actual fulfillment of the goal is still far off.
The progress principle is a little trick you can use to keep yourself motivated and on task.
Essentially, you want to be conducting any work toward a goal so that you can see the progress you’re actually making, day by day, hour by hour.
Record each period of work you achieve toward your goal.
Rather than focusing on an uncompleted to-do list or some big goal far away in the future, you instead give yourself the opportunity to experience many smaller instances of progress.
Anything you can do that brings your self-discipline behavior and ties it to what is actually being achieved helps.
Otherwise, you can feel like you’re just acting for acting’s sake.
What could be more motivating?
Harvard professor Teresa Amable popularized this concept with her research.
She analyzed work diaries of knowledge workers and was fascinated by how people structured their perceptions during a workday.
The study asked 238 people in different organizations to keep daily experience diaries.
The researchers analyzed over 12,000 separate entries on these people’s inner perceptions, motivation at work, emotions, and performance levels.
It was found that the biggest factor behind motivation and positive emotion at work was feeling as though one was making progress toward a meaningful goal.
People who consistently took small steps toward meaningful projects ended up being more productive, creative, and engaged with their work.
They also had better work relationships and overall better performance.
Recognizing and celebrating little achievements in service of a large achievement kept people on track, in other words.
Of course, experiencing the end result of a completed goal is marvelous, but it seems to be all the more powerful when broken into smaller, more readily available chunks in the present.
Ammobile found that the more frequently people gave themselves the opportunity to experience progress, the higher quality their work overall, the better their performance and the greater their satisfaction.
There are endless ways to make your progress feel more current and tangible.
Write down your achievements and small milestones.
Give yourself credit for completing hourly or half-hourly chunks.
Thus, motivation and reward work in tandem to keep you on track and focused.
Without pausing to tally up how much you’ve already done, the mind can come to believe that no achievement has been made.
After all, the major end goal feels just as distant as it did at the start of the workday.
The progress principle biases your experience toward the present and gives your emotional brain something to celebrate.
That means it’s less likely to sabotage you later on with doubts, fears, laziness, or procrastination.
Remember, what gets rewarded gets repeated.
The behavior you take the time to become aware of and encourage is more likely to happen in the future.
So using the progress principle is one way to train your brain into a positive feedback loop, working consistently toward your goal rather than resisting it or procrastinating.
Teach yourself to associate self-discipline with reward.
The focus is always, however, on the process.
An end result is never guaranteed, but we have a lot more control over the everyday processes right now.
Whatever happens, you can look at your work at the end of the day and know that you’ve achieved.
Turn toward progress and not outcome, and you engage yourself in the present and give yourself a chance to notice and reward hard work, even if it’s hard work that may seem minuscule in the grand scheme of things.
As you figure out how to use this principle yourself, remember to mark your progress in as tangible of a way as possible.
Make sure you’re not only visually seeing your progress, but take the time to stop and actually feel that progress.
Let those feelings of achievement and satisfaction sink in.
It’s this emotional component and the corresponding dopamine hit in the brain of achievement that will keep you motivated, focused, and performing well.
You can do the classic technique of writing a to-do list and watch as you cross things off as the day progresses.
Or you can make a chart that you actively color in or tear strips off of.
If you’re trying to reach a savings goal, use a clear jar to collect a penny for every $10 you save.
The ritual of placing the pennies inside every day will give you a deep sense of satisfaction and movement toward your goal.
Consider pausing at the end of every day to record and tally up the hours spent on working toward goals and the small milestones you’ve achieved.
Actively tell yourself, I’m closer to achieving my goal and appreciate the feeling and associated dopamine hit.
Finally, let’s talk about the last way that we can trick our brains, the feeling that you are close to your end goal, even if you aren’t necessarily.
This is known as the goal gradient hypothesis.
Behaviorist Clark L. Hull was the first to express this principle.
Hull determined that human beings are much more motivated to reach their goals if they’re closer to their completion.
A series of studies published in the Journal of Marketing Research bore this truth out.
One study observed people taking part in a very common coffee shop reward plan where you receive one free espresso drink after you buy a certain number of them, usually 10 from my experience.
It’s that plan where the cafe tracks your purchases on a card, which they stamp every time you buy a drink.
After you get 10 stamps, you get your freebie.
In the beginning of the cycle, say the first five or so, customers took more time between purchases.
But the closer they got to that free beverage, the more frequently they came to buy coffee.
The researchers found that over the course of the 10 drinks cycle, the time between coffee purchases decreased by about 20% at each step.
Their motivation and taste of completion grew the closer they got to the completion of a goal, no matter how insignificant.
Furthermore, if the customers saw visible cues representing their goal, they moved even faster.
Some customers got cards with two pre-existing bonus stamps at the end of their 10-drink purchase.
Others just got cards showing the 10 purchase stamps with no spaces for the pending free drinks.
Those who had cards with the pre-filled bonus stamps collected their 10 drink purchases faster than those who didn’t, in terms of average rate and speed, not just because they had a two-stamp head start.
Another study in the same series involved visitors to a music rating website.
The site initiated a rewards program in which users receive a $25 online gift certificate once they rated 51 different songs.
Each song contained about 50 different rating scales that the user used to judge the music.
For example, if the music was more peaceful or aggressive, more mellow or upbeat, and more sad or happy.
The average user spent four minutes rating each song, not an eternity, but not a quickie either.
Some visitors finished all 51 songs in one visit, and some failed to meet that goal at all.
The remaining participants, who completed the program in two or more visits, exhibited results that echoed the Coffee Shop rewards card experiment.
The closer they got to their goal, the longer they stayed on the site, and the more rapidly they went through their song ratings.
The tangible feeling of progress and motion were motivating in their own right, perhaps even more so than the task or rewards themselves.
In both the coffee shop and song rating trials, once the participants reach their goals and receive their free rewards, they reset and slowed down their participation in each program.
The attainment of the goal and receipt of the reward brought their engagement back down to early stage levels.
The gold gradient hypothesis holds true even when one is offered a greater reward at a later time.
For example, if the song graders above were offered a $200 gift certificate after rating 408 songs, most wouldn’t have been quite as motivated at the beginning stages as they were when the deal was $25 after 51 ratings.
The incremental offerings of rewards worked better because they’d get their prize much sooner, even if the payoff was smaller.
The earlier the award is given out, the more motivated people will be to act.
This behavior has strong implications for how we might approach increasing self-discipline and adherence to our best intentions.
The primary finding is that people are motivated by things that are coming up soon.
If those free coffees came after 7 purchases rather than 10, chances are the customers would flood the cafe.
It’s just a matter of moving the goalposts.
We know that people are motivated by progress, ticking off boxes, and getting closer to any arbitrary finish line.
So instead of focusing on a huge goal that’s far away, try establishing a series of goal posts with smaller incentives so you can harness that feeling on a consistent, frequent basis.
Track as many steps as possible to be able to feel the progress and feel a constant sense of motion.
For example, instead of focusing on losing 40 pounds in 8 months, you might set a goal of losing 10 pounds in 2 months.
It may have also been a good idea to stagger the goal amounts as time progressed.
5 pounds in the first month, 6 pounds in the second, 7 pounds in the third, and so on.
To feel sure about his efforts, he might track his efforts between each smaller goal, how many miles he completes on the treadmill, how many reps he does on each step of the circuits, his daily caloric intake.
Keeping himself aware of how much progress he’s making on a daily basis toward a smaller goal will make him more motivated to gradually increase his efforts.
Moving goalposts also lessens the probability that you’ll procrastinate.
It’s tough to get worked up for a grand or goal that’s a long way off when there’s no sense of impact from any of your actions.
If a writer gives themselves a goal of finishing a 135,000-word book in six months, they may feel that 500 words here or there will make no difference to such a huge sum, and thus, they won’t work for the day.
Or they might even figure that the number is too lofty and put off starting.
But taking the cue from the gold gradient hypothesis, what if the writer were to break things down into finishing 6,000 words in a week or even 750 words in a day?
What about 375 words in the morning and 375 words at night?
That’s almost unavoidable.
You’d really have to try not to meet that if you were a professional writer.
It’s much easier to visualize and to accomplish right now, so chances are that writer would be more willing to start chasing that goal immediately.
Again, it’s about a sense of constant motion and progress.
The converse, standing still or even stagnating, is decidedly not motivating.
Finally, having more frequent, slightly smaller goals also does wonder for our sense of personal achievement.
If we’re meeting multiple short-term goals over a certain period of time, we’re giving ourselves more positive reinforcement more often.
We’re continually giving ourselves affirmation that we can accomplish things.
One of the biggest hurdles to self-discipline is looking at tasks as huge, inseparable boulders.
It’s intimidating and discouraging, and when those emotions arise, it’s tough to avoid procrastinating because tackling a boulder is a tough sell.
Unfortunately, this is a habit that plagues most people.
They see only massive boulders and allow themselves to get emotionally thrown off track.
Meeting more recurrent, lesser goals more often sends our psyche a positive message.
And the closer we get to the goal, while also breaking it down into tiny sub-goals and harnessing the feeling of progress, the more quickly we’ll work to finish it.
This constant reaffirmation and reassurance help us break the cycle of apathy.
Takeaways
It turns out that we need to trick the brain and work with it instead of directly battling its natural tendencies and trying to change them.
Good luck with that.
We need to treat the brain like an angry and grumpy infant.
You can’t just tell to stop crying.
You need to be strategic.
The first strategy to trick our brains into self-discipline is to proactively consider tomorrow.
In other words, your future self and how today’s decisions will impact him or her.
We’re usually too stuck in only the present.
But just like we have two brains, we have two selves we should keep in mind.
So imagine and visualize your future self’s life when you’re faltering or struggling with a decision.
It will help keep you focused on what needs to be done for your ultimate happiness.
behavior chains, or if-then statements, or implementation intentions, are another method to tricking the brain.
They work because they remove the choice from your hands, and thus, self-discipline behavior is almost the expectation.
It works simply as, if X, then Y, where X is an everyday occurrence, and Y is your desired action.
The more concrete you make your intentions, the more likely they are to happen.
Temptation bundling tricks the brain because it gives the brain the dopamine and pleasure it seeks, but ties it to a self-discipline act.
Yes, this is using carrots as motivators or simply bribing yourself to set yourself into motion and stay on track.
It’s as easy as it sounds.
As the brain wants pleasure as soon as possible, there are a few ways we can simulate that feeling.
First is to break your desired tasks or behaviors into the smallest components possible.
This allows you to reduce the barrier to getting started and also feel a constant sense of victory.
Second, we can keep track of all victories and notice how much progress is constantly being made.
Third, we will also feel more motivated and disciplined if we sense that we are relatively close to completion.
Now those pebbles solve the week six problem.
If the only win is back in shape, your brain has nothing to want for months.
If the win is walked today, you get one every day.
Close enough for the wanting machine to actually pull you toward it.
Each small finish becomes the reason to do the next one.
So here’s the whole loop the three pieces make.
The shoes shrink the first step until there’s nothing for resistance to grab onto.
The 20 seconds clear the path.
So that step is the downhill thing instead of the uphill thing, and the pebbles give you a finish every day.
So you keep going after the newness wears off.
None of it depends on one big burst of motivation.
you’re building a chain of small ones, one finish at a time.
Now, let’s turn that into something you can actually use, because an idea you agree with doesn’t put your shoes on.
Let’s find yours, not someday, tonight.
Three questions.
First, what’s the thing you keep meaning to start and don’t?
Pick just one.
Say it’s the side project you’ve been circling since spring.
Second, what’s the very first physical move it takes?
Not work on it.
The actual first move.
Open the laptop.
Open the file.
Third, does that move fit under your worst day motivation?
Picture the night.
You’re exhausted.
The couch is winning.
If opening that file still feels like a fight, shrink it again.
Just open the file and read the last paragraph you wrote.
Keep shrinking it until the honest answer is, yeah, I could do that.
Even tonight.
Then clear the path.
Leave the laptop open on the table with the file already up.
So starting tomorrow is 20 seconds easier.
and count every day you do it, no matter how small, because each one is a pebble and another did it in the vial.
That’s your shoes.
Do just that once a day and let whatever comes after it happen on its own.
So here’s the whole thing in one breath.
The motivation gap doesn’t close because you want it more.
It closes when the first step is small enough to fit under the motivation you already have
when the path to it is 20 seconds shorter and when every small finish keeps the chain going.
Now, here’s a challenge for you for this week.
Pick one thing and do only its shoes version once a day for seven days.
Now these two books, Discipline Over Dopamine and Neurodiscipline, both go a lot deeper, and they’re both linked below.
If you want to see how ideas like this connect across other authors, that’s what I do over on my main channel.
And of course you can subscribe here for a new Peter Hollins episode every week or so.
We’ll leave you with this quote from cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
When a problem is complex, you become tense.
But when you break it down into basic components, you can approach each element without stress.