How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work?

This article is based on the book Atomic Habits, which The New York Times listed as a bestseller.

Note: This article is based on the work of James Clear, who tells us about the rule of moderation, which encourages choosing tasks that are appropriate to our current abilities.

In 1955, while Disneyland was preparing to open in Anaheim, California, a 10-year-old boy came in and asked to work there. With lax labour laws at the time, the boy managed to land a job selling guidebooks for $0.50 apiece.

After a year, he started doing magic shows at Disney, where he picked up techniques from more seasoned staff members and tried out small skits and jokes on guests. However, he soon realised that his true passion wasn't doing magic; it was becoming a comedian.

So, since his teenage years, he started performing at small clubs around Los Angeles, where crowds were small and his acts were brief. He rarely stayed on stage for more than five minutes, and most of the audience was more focused on drinking and chatting than watching the show. He even performed in an empty room once.

His work could have been better, but his skills improved steadily. His first acts lasted only a minute or two, then expanded to five minutes in high school. By the time he was nineteen, he had performed weekly for twenty continuous minutes, and his skills were continuously advancing.

He spent another decade experimenting, adjusting, and practicing until he landed a job as a TV writer. Gradually, he moved to appearing on talk shows, and finally, after nearly fifteen years of hard work, the boy became famous. He toured most American cities and states, gaining a significant audience and becoming one of the most prominent comedians of his time. By the mid-seventies, he had secured his spot as a regular guest on "The Tonight Show" and "Saturday Night Live."

That guy was Steve Martin.

How to Stay Motivated?

I recently finished reading Steve Martin's wonderful biography Born Standing Up, which offers great insights into committing to habits in the long run.  A shy person can't be a comic, and there aren't many situations that make people more nervous than going on stage by themselves and getting no laughs. Yet Steve Martin faced this fear every week for eighteen years, saying, "I spent ten years learning, four years refining my skills, and four years in outstanding success."

Why do some people, like Martin, commit to their habits while most of us struggle to stay motivated? How do we design habits that attract us instead of those that fade away?

Scientists have been examining this question for years. While there's still much to learn, one of the most consistent findings is that maintaining motivation and achieving high levels of desire come from working on manageable challenging tasks.

The Goldilocks Rule

The human mind loves challenges, but only when it's within the optimal difficulty range. Playing tennis against a four-year-old, even if you love the game, can quickly bore you due to the match's extreme ease. On the other hand, if you challenge a professional tennis player like Roger Federer or Serena Williams, you'll lose motivation quickly because the match is too difficult.

Now, think about challenging someone at your skill level, where you win some points and lose others but still have a good chance of winning if you try hard. Distractions vanish, and you become entirely focused on the work at hand.

This represents a challenge of just the right difficulty level, an excellent example of the Goldilocks Rule, which states that humans feel peak motivation when working on tasks that are just within reach of their current abilities.

Martin's comedy career is an excellent real-life example of the Goldilocks Rule. He gradually extended his comedic act every year by just a minute or two, always adding new material and keeping some jokes that guaranteed laughter from the audience. He had enough wins to keep him motivated and enough mistakes to push him to work harder.

Measuring Your Progress

If you want to learn how to stay motivated to reach your goals, there's another piece of the motivation puzzle to understand—the perfect mix of hard work and happiness.

Working on optimally challenging tasks isn't just motivating; it's also a primary source of happiness. Psychologist Gilbert Brim said, "One of the important sources of human happiness is working on tasks that have an appropriate level of difficulty—not too hard and not too easy."

This combination of happiness and peak performance is sometimes referred to as "flow," experienced by athletes and performers when they are in complete focus. Flow is the mental state you enter when you're fully immersed in a task, oblivious to everything else around you. You must work on tasks that are challenging enough for you to reach this peak performance state and be able to track your progress in real-time. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains, "One key to achieving flow is getting immediate feedback on what you're doing at every step."

Seeing yourself make progress in the present is motivating. When Steve Martin told a joke, he could tell immediately if it would work depending on how much the audience laughed. Imagine the addictiveness of eliciting a roar of laughter—positive feedback from just one joke could be enough to overcome fears and inspire weeks of work.

Measurement varies in other areas of life, but achieving a mix of motivation and happiness is no less important. For example, in tennis, you get immediate feedback based on whether you win the point or not. Regardless of the measurement method, the human brain needs some way to evaluate our progress to maintain motivation. We need to see our gains before anything else.

Two Steps to Motivation

To simplify the puzzle of how to stay motivated in the long run, we can simply say:

• Embrace the Goldilocks Rule and work on controllable tasks.
• Measure your progress and get instant feedback whenever possible.

Wanting to improve your life is easy, but sticking to it is another story. If you want to stay motivated forever, start with a manageable challenge, measure your progress, and repeat the process.