Hacking Your Brain to Achieve Things
You have to finish things.
There’s a burst of dopamine that comes when we start things and we’re excited about them.
Then, sometimes, this novelty and excitement starts to die down the longer amount of time we spend with an idea…
It starts to settle in how much it’s actually going to take to see results, and you don’t know when that next hit of Dopamine is going to come…
So what a lot of us do, is pivot. To something new and shiny.
Prematurely.
“the artist may only evolve by completing the work.”
— Rick Rubin
I read a few pages of The Creative Act today while having lunch in my car - and I got to the chapter on “crafting.”
The pivot from the artist phase of exploration and experimentation into the crafting phase. a stage he describes as “less glamourous,” because:
Now comes the labor of building…
This quote yelled at me a little bit.
Which, it’s cool and all. I hear you, but like…
relax.
I have a supernatural ability to be ridiculously ambitious at the front end of a process…but the endurance to sustain it after that initial rush…that was hard.
I’ve found a solution that works for me.
The Solution
Shifting the point and changing the value system that you have.
Finding ways to manufacture quick dopamine hits throughout the process through gamification.
Shifting the Point
Shifting the point means: Not being so proud of yourself just for starting…
Hear me out - instead giving yourself goal posts that exist down the road, further along in the journey.
You’re shifting your values, from applauding yourself for starting, to more of a place of, you’ll applaud yourself for sustaining to a certain point.
It’s leveling up the standard you have for yourself and raising the bar.
I need you to listen to me for a sec:
It is healthy to, over time, raise the bar for yourself. That’s growth. That’s development. Once you’ve been at a certain level for a while, or you’ve been operating in one way - it’s important to push yourself and begin holding yourself to a higher standard.
Just like as your child gets older, you begin to have higher expectations of them. Our expectations of ourselves should be increasing with the years, in a lot of ways. Even if just mentally/emotionally. We should be trying to elevate.
Gamification
The second way is by manufacturing quick dopamine hits:
Gamifying the process, it’s important to inject dopamine hits throughout the process, so that the whole process is full of little wins.
It’s like you have to dangle some cheese in front of yourself , but it’s way down.
You know those cartoons where someone leaves a candy trail down a pathway to get someone to follow it? You have to do this to yourself.
Set up mini-goal posts, and actually follow-through in celebrating them. You can literally gamify going through the motions. Finding ways to enjoy the journey, and the time spent with yourself as you’re going. You know what this will look like from the outside?
Resilience. Stamina. Endurance.
In Summation
For the things that are hard to do, i.e. staying focused, putting in deep work, and finishing the things we start,
instead of running from them, we should try to get as creative as we can, to essentially trick/manipulate ourselves into succeeding.
