Developing Intrinsic Motivation: Using The Rule Of Fractions

There are individuals out there who have a certain discipline to them that keeps them going. Nobody is telling them what to do. Whether its self-improvement habits such as making time to read, goal oriented like working out to be fitter and stronger, or developing a spiritual practice to be a better human – its all done on their own accord. There doesn’t appear to be any direct competition or external factor that’s pushing them to do what they do.

How do they find continual motivation to keep the ball rolling?

Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Motivation

Motivation as a standalone concept can be a powerful tool that enables us to get what we want. It is something that has evolved with us as a species, drawing its power from biopsychosocial forces. Some things in life we already have hardwired into us as motivators. Intrinsic motivation to seek food because we need to survive. Intrinsic motivation that pushes us to make friends or find a community, because we are a social species.

Extrinsic motivators occur all around us. It pushes us to want to try new things – potentially leading to the development of new interests. We look externally for forms of validation or acknowledgement. We like to know that whatever it is that we are doing is valued by others. When we see somebody doing something we want to be great at, or living a life that we dream of, we are motivated in the moment. We see the reward – it’s not ours to own yet. The physical manifestation of it gives us a push to want to bring fantasy into reality.

Why Extrinsic Motivators Can Fail Us

Problem is, if we rely purely on extrinsic motivation to achieve goals, it becomes subject to factors outside of our control. It’s important to examine how our reward system is wired.

You are doing it for somebody else, but this individual doesn’t really care about your potential achievement, so there is less incentive to continue the work.

Or perhaps you are having a bad week. Your temperament leaves a damper on the progress you have made. You refuse to do anything that is difficult. All of a sudden a week, maybe a month passes by – now you have fallen out of your routine. You’re back at ground zero. Whatever progress you have made on moving towards your goal is seemingly pointless.

What I Mean When I Say Intrinsic Motivation

I think there is more to intrinsic motivation than doing something out of the desire for some sense of self-satisfaction. Yes, we do things because the sense of gratification from our accomplishment is desirable. Yet somehow, this understanding seems to fall short. We are more than just our biological wiring – we want more than what evolution has wired us for. The journey of practising to be a better individual definitely extends beyond the realms of a reward system.

There is a spiritual component to self-actualization that cannot be contained by an outcome based approach to advancing our desire for improvement. From the ultra-marathon runners who seek to complete races of more than 100 miles, to the inventors who seek to change the world for the better – do they really just do it for the accolades or self-congratulatory feelings?

It seems to me that beating records and accomplishing the development of major concepts are just a part of the journey. A fortunate byproduct of what they set their mind to. This may be an oversimplification, but when they engage in the act of doing because they know if they don’t do it, nobody else will – the motivation there seems to supersede the motivation for a reward.

Intrinsic motivation to me is an amalgamation of all these things and probably more:

• Doing things out of discipline
• Knowing that it’s the right thing to do
• Doing for the sake of self-actualization
• Doing for the pleasure of self-improvement and gratification
• Having a goal to steadily work towards
• To be better than who you were yesterday

Adopt A Mindset Of Moving Towards Better, Developing Intrinsic Motivation

Chasing greatness can sometimes transcend linear understanding. There are days where you seem to make monumental improvement, only to fall backwards the day after. Improvement is not a linear progression.

In order to maintain an upward trajectory of growth, your mindset matters and here’s why: the only opponent that you’re up against is yourself. If your mindset is set to the mode of self-doubt, where you diminish your potential for whatever reason (maybe you think other people are already so much greater than you, that it’s not even worth it to try, or you’re not talented enough) it really won’t take much to “improve.” As long as you are taking small steps towards the right direction, you are still improving! But if you want to make leaps and bounds of improvement – be sure that the you that you’re going up against is an opponent worthy of your effort.

What you believe you can do, and what you believe you cannot do are both true. You set the parameters for your reality. The fact of the matter is, if you don’t make an effort towards doing, nothing will get accomplished. Your beliefs dictate the quality of your experience as you move towards your goals.

Practice Introspection, Know Your Current Capabilities

Learn what your limiters are – it will allow you to recognize your psychological blocks that are stopping you from improvement. Often times, your psychological limiters are the things that take energy away from what you envision yourself to be capable of.

Be careful here, you might dig up some things that won’t make you very happy to look at. Try your best to hold a perspective of self-compassion. Whatever emotion or quality that you have attached to your personality or habits, remind yourself that it was something that was necessary to serve you in the past.

Moving forward, try to be honest with yourself. Maybe you have fears that feed your excuses for not doing the thing that you dream of. Or you have shortcomings that make it difficult for you to mesh well with a team. Perhaps you have zero skills that help at the task or goal that you’re hoping to master. It’s okay! Everybody has something that they are inadequate at. The work is to build up determination to push beyond comfort and take a leap of faith.

This is why having a mentor can be beneficial. They can help you fast track the potential you hold, because they have been where you currently are. Their high beams are on and they can see the extended road ahead. If you haven’t had the luck of meeting the right mentor, know that you can still continue to push yourself to be better on your own. Keep up with the mindset of doing what you are capable of doing, to the best of your ability. Right now is the moment where you have to do your own work in preparation for the right opportunity to grow exponentially.

Goal Setting

Achieving a goal means moving beyond a realm of familiarity – how do we maintain a consistent stream of motivation that will allow us to push past those boundaries? There are minimal psychological rewards when we do things we suck at. When a situation becomes difficult we can find thousands of reasons for not doing it. The immediacy of experience doesn’t give us the hit of dopamine in the form of accomplishment or gratification. Instead we get the feeling of being insufficient or a fistful of humiliation and/or failure.

The fascinating thing about setting goals and making an effort to move towards it, is that there should be a mix of fear and excitement. Goals are new. The experience of achieving it, and the new standard you live by after you have achieved it is something that is foreign territory. New is exciting. New is also different, and different can be scary!

If you don’t have a healthy dose of both fear and excitement as you are progressing, either your goal is not much of a goal, or you’re undermining the quality of work required to achieve it.

Goals Without Fear

Let’s say you’re gunning for a new personal best doing squats. The weight you’re going for is heavy, but you don’t recognize that. You attempt to do it without any thought put into the ramifications of failure, and you injure yourself.

The double edged sword of goal setting that instills fear through humility is this: if there is none, perhaps your goal isn’t much of a goal after all – it’s within the realms of what you’re capable of doing. Your goal doesn’t challenge you enough to push your boundaries.

Too lofty of a goal however, can be a major turn off. The difficulty of the task seems too Herculean – you’ve set yourself up for failure, and the mental venues for possible contingency measures to protect your ego are now in place. “It’s okay if I give up, the goal was impossible anyway.”

Establish a goal that instills just enough fear in you that you can still taste the excitement of tackling the challenge.

Accomplishing Using Rule Of Fractions

A fun way of spinning my mindset in order to break my own personal limiters is to utilize a rule I call accomplishing in fractions. Let’s explore this rule a little bit.

Diving into the realm of athletics, we can look towards world records as being the apex of what’s humanly possible. I also like to use athletics as an example because the metrics are easily understood with physical performance. However, this method of thought is applicable to all realms of self-improvement!

Push Ups

Did you know that the world record for the most amount of push-ups done (non-stop) is 10,507? Don’t believe me? Google it. The record is absolute insanity. Let’s break it down like this: the record holder did 1 set of 100 repetitions of push-ups, and proceeded to do that again for another 105 more sets – without stopping!

To me that’s absolutely incomprehensible, so lets take a look at the record for most push-ups done in an hour: 2,220. Still an insane amount, especially within 60 minutes.

Now let’s spin it like this: if there is a human out there who can accomplish this many push ups in an hour, why am I not able to do a fraction of what they can do? A fraction. At 1/10th, I’ll be asking myself to do 222 push-ups. By any standard, that’s actually still quite impressive!

Most people can’t even do 30 push-ups in a row before gassing out – however if I’m comparing to the average person, I’m setting myself up to be average. I’m chasing greatness – and greatness is a standard set by people who stand in the zone of outliers. So the next time I choose to workout, the goal I set for myself is to accomplish 222 push-ups before I leave the gym.

Running

Let’s take another example using runners. The average individual may run anywhere from 0-20 miles a week. World class marathon runners when training for their events can run anywhere between 90 – 140 miles a week.

Let’s take an even 100 miles a week as an example. If we break that distance down by the day, that would be about 14.3 miles of running a day!

I know I am nowhere near the endurance level of marathon runners, but if they are living proof that it’s humanly possibly to run that much a week, and do that consistently, why am I not able to do a fraction of that?

Reframe Your Mindset

Using the rule of fractions allows us to gain perspective. We are actively flipping the script on our belief system. We leave behind a competition mindset of doing something for the reward or accolades.

Our internal dialogue is reframed:

Old: “The best in the world are capable of doing things completely out of reach so we shouldn’t even try.”

New: “People are out there proving that it is possible, therefore I should strive to taste a fraction of that collective greatness.”

Remember: moving towards better is a gradual process of small wins.

Knowing that others are out there doing amazing things can and should be very motivational – use it as fuel for your fire. Understanding and acknowledging that they are doing amazing things because they are pushing the boundaries of our collective human potential – includes you into the equation!

Accomplishing using the rule of fractions will help you reframe your mindset from impossible to improbable. The impossible was a mental limiter that you just broke – you acknowledge that the precedence for what’s humanly possible has been set.

This way of thinking has allowed me to mute the extraneous details of the why for my efforts. I find that when I’m working towards being better because I’m aware of the possibilities, it gets me excited. I move outside the mental realm of doing it for myself or others. The effort I exert seems to be a lot less shallow in nature. I’m motivated to shift my goal orientation – to chase after a fraction of the collective human potential!