The Progress Principle

QUOTE OF THE DAY

PROGRESS = MOTIVATION

As humans, we need the feeling of constant progress. In our lives, even if we aren’t making progress, we need to feel like we are. A good example to illustrate this is a post that went viral on Reddit, which was a picture of a girl in an airport with a huge space between her and the person in front.

Someone posted this picture, and as usual, everyone was outraged at the fact that she was holding everyone up, yet her argument was that “it doesn’t make anything quicker" and “it’s the same if I move now or later”.

The matter of fact is that it's true. In theory, she wasn’t holding anyone up at all, but the principle behind it is that we as humans need the feeling of progression; we need to feel that for every 3 steps we take, we are getting closer to the end of that journey, not realising that it's not up to us but the person in front to move.

This is the same in every aspect of life.

Studies show that people in the workplace feel the most motivated when they feel like they are making progress in their job.

Even if they aren't, but their manager is making them feel like they are, that's enough to massively increase motivation.

But what’s the point of reading this? It’s interesting, but how does it help you?

Well, using this principle of ‘progress = motivation & enjoyment’ means that you now have a way to enjoy the process that you’re on.

The journey of improving yourself, growing your own business, trying to implement new habits, or getting rid of bad ones is a long and treacherous one with no real ending.

It’s more of an ever-long process, and because of that, you need to find ways to enjoy the journey.

Because times will come where you burn out, all you want to do is give up because the mundane life seems easier, and so the way to get around that is to give yourself the feeling of progress.

Some people do this by rewarding themselves, and others by creating milestones, but whichever one you choose to do, just make sure that you reward yourself for the progress you’ve made.

You must do this because otherwise you’ll slowly fall out of love with the journey.

ACTIONABLE NEXT STEPS:

Your actionable next step is to create a system where you can appreciate your progress. If you create milestones for yourself that, once you hit them, you get rewarded, you start to create a loop of cognitive bias in your own head where you instinctively do more of that thing in order to get more of the reward.

Some would call this self-manipulation, others hacking the mind—whichever it is, it works.

LESSON OF THE DAY ⤵️

‘Self-improvement’ is a social construct, which means that there is no real meaning; it only means what others have assigned to it.

The process of improving yourself is on a person-by-person basis; some may consider it climbing out of a mental pit, and others may consider it growing their calves at the gym. You can only truly improve yourself if you are doing it by your own standards and improving what you deem important.

What you deem important will change over time, which means that as time goes on, you will improve various aspects of yourself.

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