Imagine you wanted to be a Navy Seal. They tell you, show up here at 3 am every day and we’ll walk you through what exercises to do during the week and then you can do them on your own and report back.

No one yells at you or watches you. You do it all on your own.

When you fail to do the exercises, they ask you how you feel.

Well I’m just really tired after the first day…the exercises are very hard and starting at 3 am is too early because we don’t even finish the prior day’s workout until 2:45 am.

How could we modify the training to make it easier for you? Continue reading →

Write advice to yourself or other people.  Review it regularly.  Edit it.  Refine it.  It worked for Marcus Aurelius and it worked for Bruce Lee. I’ve started a list of advice or things I know.  Perhaps things I believe IContinue reading →

We all seem to have a very specific explanation for why we can’t do something or why we behave a certain way. Often it’s only this story which keeps us from moving forward. We find reasons for being unhappy insteadContinue reading →

Where does motivation come from and how can we get more of it?

A boy falls in love with a girl. There’s just one problem: this girl is currently dating the captain of the football team. So, our boy hatches a plan to steal her from his competition by becoming the captain himself. Surely then she will notice him and reciprocate his love.

To achieve this goal, there’s a lot of work to do. Our hero isn’t really much of a hero. He’s out of shape and doesn’t really play football. There are many practices, training sessions, sprints to run, and weights to lift.

So how do we determine if our hero will be motivated enough to do all this work? We can use mathematical modeling to predict how motivated our hero will be, and we can use those models to discover how we can find our own motivation.

First we start with an older, but simple model developed by Victor Vroom. Continue reading →