Motivation by Preemptive Commitment

All of us have tasks we want to complete and goals that we want to reach that involve some tough times and hard work to achieve.

Whether you want to get a degree, start a business, make it big in a sport, or learn a new skill; trying to brute force your own will power into training/practicing each day is not easy. And brute forcing certainly isn’t the only, or even the best way to accomplish what you need to.

One thing I have found very effective, as have others I know, is to commit yourself to achieving your goal before you think you are prepared to do it. A concrete example is helpful:

This summer, I decided that I wanted to complete a marathon. For a few months, I did sporadic training runs of 3-5 miles, but never really pushed myself to improve. After all, I could train as long as I needed to. When I was ready, I would sign up for a race. Under this mindset, it was not very troubling to push off a run, or to quit early while on the treadmill. I could just put another day’s effort in.

I realized this was getting me nowhere fast, and changed strategies. While the training required for a marathon is grueling, difficult, and hard to motivate oneself to do, signing up for a race online is comparatively painless. So I did. This did several things:

• Put a finite time limit on my training; I signed up (in late August) for a race in late November. Twelve weeks. This makes every run seem more important, a subconscious (or conscious) clock in the back of my mind.
• I sunk some costs into it. Registration fees for the race cost me $92.00. This is money I would lose if I decided to quit.
• It made my goal public. I now was telling people that I would be running the Northern Central Trail Marathon in Maryland on November 28th. People know exactly when I’m supposed to run that race, and will expect me to finish.

I know that many personal development websites and gurus out there champion the belief that intrinsic motivation is much more important than extrinsic motivation, I find this incomplete.

If you don’t have intrinsic motivation for a goal, it will take a large amount of extrinsic motivation to get you to reach it. However, intrinsic motivation itself is not always (ever) enough either. Using, even constructing (as I did here) extrinsic motivation can be vital to getting through difficulties in reaching your goals.

I know my training has significantly improved since the clock started ticking (up to a half-marathon now). Since I’ve just told all of you about it, I’ve got even more motivation to finish!