Personal Development

Does an ad?s claim that a product will help you achieve instant wealth/weight loss/happiness instantly make you skeptical?

In a seminar with copywriting legend Gene Schwartz, one attendee asked Gene this question. After all, his company was called Instant Improvement. Was his claim that a product yielded instant results a credible one?

To this Gene replied: ?Almost anything that we do as publishers can be made instantaneous.? Applied to information products, this means the writer will identify a specific problem the reader has and then present a solution, thus helping the reader obtain instant gratification.

But this concept can be applied to just about anything.

Bob King, then of Phillips Publishing, added: ?No one goes to, say, medical school and says, ?Gee, what, I?m gonna work hard for ten years in school so I can be a doctor.? Instead, you think about ?Why do I do that today? Why am I doing that? I do it because it feels right to me today to do that.? If it didn?t feel right, there?s no way you?d work in the dark for ten years. So I think that you?re constantly doing things that give you instant gratification.?

I had never heard ?instant gratification? applied to choices we make not just because they feel good in the moment but also because they are right and necessary, choices that have an impact on our long-term well being.

Instead, I had long associated this phrase with wasteful actions?shopping on Amazon for hours, eating an entire cheesecake, reading about the latest developments on Brad and Angelina or Kylie Jenner?s lips?that give us temporary pleasure but derail us from our long-term goals.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, our culture tends to paint beneficial actions such as exercising, eating healthy, and building our business as necessarily grim and un-fun. ?No pain, no gain.?

For writers, this mentality is especially true. We approach our writing sessions like punching in the timesheet, driven more by obligation than desire. As Hemingway supposedly said, ?There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.?

But must our daily writing rituals (or working out, etc.) be devoid of pleasure by default? Can?t we learn to find instant gratification in everything we do, even those things that are ?good for us??

Which got me to thinking?even though I had found an intrinsic motivation for writing, been better about writing on a regular basis, and experienced fulfillment in my sessions, many days still felt like a slog, filled by instances where I hated my story, was bored to death by my characters, and could not wait until my hour (the length of time I had designated as the minimal acceptable) of writing was up.

So I looked for ways to make it more fun. What I found was that giving these routines an order and structure, and continually reshaping the parameters, made it feel less like work and more like a game.

For instance:

1) Using Mind Mapping software to chart out character and plot developments (I resurrected many character/plot points from my notes that I?d forgotten about!)

2) Setting a timer for 15 minutes and setting a goal of 250 words (I didn?t always reach my goal, but I definitely wrote a lot more than I normally would have in that span of time)

3) Writing 100 sentences about my characters without pausing to think or second-guess myself (courtesy of ?Outrunning the Critic? from The 3 A.M. Epiphany)

What I discovered from this experiment was that I began to enjoy these sessions more and take pleasure from the process, not just the end result. I also found that, ironically, I was way more productive.

Think of ?good for you? actions, then, as your favorite milkshake. If it?s lacking flavor, just add a few ingredients and put the blender on a different setting. Instant gratification can bring instant (and beneficial)?results.

10:30 PM. You know you should be doing something productive, but instead you browse Amazon for black pleated chiffon midi skirts.

11:45. You?ve moved on to blue-light blocker computer glasses. It?s time to get to work now, but you?re tired. Starting it now would be a waste. Better to wait until the morning, when you?ll have more energy.

As you go to bed two hours later, something?s tugging at your mind, but you can?t pinpoint what it is. Shame? Guilt? Depression? It?s pretty small, though, whatever it is, so you choose to ignore it.

Morning arrives. After checking and replying to your urgent emails, then reading your not urgent ones, then re-reading ones you?ve already read because you weren?t paying attention the first time, you realize it?s time to get ready for work.

Around 6 PM, that feeling from last night returns, only now it?s stronger. You know you really should do that thing you were supposed to do last night, for real this time. You?ll make sure of it.

After dinner, you?re ready to get started.

Instead, though, you find yourself, as if on autopilot, clicking on Facebook, reading status updates of people you barely know.

?What?s wrong with me?? you think. ?Why can?t I be more productive??

Now the nagging feeling of guilt has turned to full-on self-loathing. ?I?ll never amount to anything,? you think bitterly. And the cycle repeats.

Sound familiar?

Day after day, this would happen to me when it came to writing fiction. Not every day, though. For a while I?d get on a roll, where I did exactly what I knew I should be doing, for multiple days in a row. Then something would slip?one day I truly would be too busy to write?and it?d be back to Point A. My motivation depleted, I?d have to start all over again to rebuild it.

I hadn?t always struggled with motivation. In school, I was super-productive, often running on five hours or less of sleep a night to get everything done. This was true not only in high school, when I wasn?t distracted by social media and my Internet was too slow to warrant an appealing alternative to work, but also in college and grad school.

What had changed?

I?d always attributed it to the structure and deadlines that school provided me with. Post school, anything not work-related, that had no set schedule or deadline?namely, my fiction writing?had fallen to the wayside.

But then I dug a little deeper.

Was it really just the lack of structure? Or was something else missing?

And I realized that in school, my true motivating factor was not the deadline itself, but rather the fear of letting someone else down. Even in my writing workshops, where we didn?t receive grades for our work, I couldn?t stand the thought of turning in a subpar story that would be painful for my classmates and teacher to read, or worse, no story at all.

Now that nobody cared whether or not I turned in a story, the motivation factor was gone.

After all, literary magazines have deadlines, but unlike in a workshop, you don?t get a visceral, immediate reaction. It?s often months before you get any response at all, and when you do it?s only a simple yes or no, not a detailed analysis of your dialogue, pacing and character development.

So maybe it wasn?t that I was inherently lazy or unproductive or unmotivated.

Maybe I simply needed a new motivating factor, one that didn?t depend on the approval (or avoiding the disapproval) of others.

Of course, on a practical level, my mindset made no sense. Even the Stephen Kings and James Pattersons of the world, who do have readers who are super eager for their next book and will be disappointed if the book doesn?t live up to their expectations, were once non-famous, balancing fiction writing with their day jobs, and nobody cared if they stuck to a regular writing schedule or wrote something crappy that day. In order for me to get to that point, I?d have to go through that lonely phase where there was nobody to hold me accountable.

But in order to fuel myself to write everyday and look forward to it, I?d need something besides logic.

So my new motivating factor is to write in order to avoid the nagging sense of guilt that comes from not writing and to replace it with the surge of good feelings that come after my writing sessions, the sense of fulfillment and purpose I get from working toward my long-term goals. I?ve also found that starting as soon as I am able to, rather than delaying, helps create momentum and reduces the chance that I?ll find some excuse to get out of it.

So the next time you find yourself lacking motivation, ask yourself, ?What fueled me in the past?? If the answer is no longer applicable to your current circumstances, then find one that will serve you in the present.

?It?s the start that stops most people.?

This quote applies to just about every situation.

Take jogging, for instance. Before I?ve even made it two blocks, I?m already gasping for air, sore in all sorts of places, ready to turn around and go home.

Or reading a book. Two pages in, and my patience is wearing thin. Can?t the author get to the good part already, the one that?s supposed to be ?transformative? or ?haunting? or ?unlike anything you?ll read this year??

But two hours into jogging, the euphoria sets in and although my body may be tired, the ache fades to the background like white noise.

Several hundred pages into Moby Dick or House of Leaves, I?ve broken through several dimensions and everything, even the air around me, feels somehow altered.

For those of us in creative endeavors (writing, acting, painting, etc.) or starting our own business, or both, the period of acclimation is more protracted and painful, the reward more distant?not mere hours or weeks, but months, even years.

Progress can be slower than the flow of traffic on a gridlocked freeway at 6 PM?in other words, non-existent.

Some days it feels like I?m actually moving backwards. I?ll look at what I?ve written that day and think, ?Man, my fourth graders write better than that.?

But this idea of regression is largely illusory, and even if it were true, so what? Many millionaires, even billionaires, have experienced bankruptcy at some point in their life, a failed business venture. Just about every successful writer/actor/musician has had a flop, in many cases a mortifying one.

So did the flops and bankruptcies, the bad writing days, cancel out the successful ones? If we were to apply that same logic to other situations, why do the laundry? Why wash the dishes?

The truth is, meaningful progress always involves some degree of pain, frustration, even humiliation. As a kid, I didn?t get this. I watched all the Endless Summer movies, fantasized about being a pro surfer, rented a surfboard for the first time, got up, fell within two seconds, and decided surfing wasn?t for me. Besides, the movies didn?t show all the paddling to get to the waves, which was super annoying.

Since then, I have learned how to manage my expectations. Still, in my first graduate creative writing class, I wrote an ?experimental? piece that was largely inspired by my newfound discovery that I could fit blocks of text into different shapes. I was hurt when my classmates seemed puzzled by my display of ?abstract art.?

As I read more deeply and dedicated more hours to my writing, though, my stories went places I could have never imagined and writing, which was once painful (and can still be, when I?ve gotten ?out of shape?), led to hypnotic states where the words took on a mind of their own, kind of like the way it feels like you?ll never get out of the traffic and suddenly you?re home.

So yes, the starting is always going to suck a bit, but that just makes the not stopping, the pushing through, all the more rewarding.

Being an educator can be difficult, as there are so many circumstances you simply have no control over–a a student’s disposition, disabilities, learning environment, support system, etc. However, today was an encouraging one. First, a student who had been consistently a C student, at one point even failing math, is now making straight As. What makes the difference between then and now is not ability but attitude. He has discovered an intrinsic motivation that before was lacking and discovered that, in his words, “Not waiting until the last minute just makes everything easier.” Today, he asked me if his teacher would think it was weird if he asked for feedback on an assignment that wasn’t due for another two weeks. I replied, “No, I think your teacher would be thrilled.” It’s amazing to hear this from a 13-year-old, an age when abstract concepts such as work ethic and internal rewards are particularly difficult to grasp. Over the years I’ve heard the full spectrum?of excuses from students, everything from “my dog is sick” to “my crab ate my homework” to (my personal favorite) “just a second, let me look for it”…shuffles through backpack pretending to look…”can’t find it, I’ll bring it next week?”…repeats same action next week. Not that these are bad kids–they’re all fantastic–and sometimes life does get in the way, even (and especially) for adults. But it’s encouraging and inspiring to see this type of turn-around in mindset from a student at an especially vulnerable age. Second, another student who has consistently lacked confidence, who states every comment as a question (“the answer is 4?”) and precedes every math problem with the statement, “I don’t know if I did this the right way,” today missed only 7 out of 47 questions on a (very difficult) timed math test, while previously she had missed nearly half the questions. Her score was better than even my very best math students! Third, a high-school student sent me two essays filled with so many fresh insights that they caused me to reflect on and reexamine my own life.?None of these examples are meant to brag about my strengths as an educator. The kids did it themselves. What all of them show, though, is that anyone is capable of far exceeding expectations?and making significant changes given the right attitude and opportunities.

Yesterday I’d been planning to go for a hike. But one thing led to another and pretty soon I had less than an hour and a half until sundown. Since I don’t consider my hike complete until I get to the highest peak, which takes about two hours, I figured, “Why bother?” I’d just go the next day. But then I reconsidered–even just an hour is better than nothing, right? And maybe if I picked up my pace, did more jogging and less walking, took less breaks, I could still make it to the top. I did end up making it, and it turned out to be one of the most beautiful hikes I’d been on, as the setting sun cast the mountains in a red glow. I did end up getting caught in the dark before I’d made it home, but house lights and street lamps guided my path. The point of all this? Too often, we end up putting off something over and over because we think we don’t have enough time. This applies not only to exercise but creative pursuits like writing and making music and even just random items on our to-do lists. Even if you only have five minutes, at least do something. The only way we’ll fail to reach our goals is by doing nothing.