PDF Summary:The Motivation Myth, by Jeff Haden

Is there something you’ve dreamed of doing, but never have? Are you waiting for the right motivation to move you toward your goal? If so, then you’re going about it all wrong. In The Motivation Myth, Jeff Haden argues that you shouldn’t wait for motivation to start you down the road to success. Instead, you make your own motivation by creating a plan, breaking it into achievable steps, celebrating every win, and persevering through disappointments. Motivation isn’t a push—it’s momentum that you generate yourself.

In this guide, we’ll explain Haden’s approach to kickstarting your path to success and creating a cycle of positive reinforcement that builds motivation as you go along. We’ll compare Haden’s suggestions with those of other productivity experts with practical tips on managing time, avoiding distraction, and maintaining mental focus. We’ll also explore what wellness experts say about chasing ambition versus finding contentment in everyday life.

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And now a word of caution: Hard work and repetition don’t guarantee success, but they do improve your probability of success. More than that, Haden explains that if you stick with your program long enough, you’ll be able to calculate the odds of your efforts paying off in a way that will tell you how much work you have left to do. For example, if you’ve been job-hunting for some time, you may find that one in every ten applications results in a call-back from a potential employer. Therefore, if you’d like a call-back every day, that tells you how many jobs to apply for. Random chance is still a factor, but if you act as if your success is completely under your control, you can minimize your reliance on luck just through simple mathematics.

(Shortform note: One way to put yourself in the mindset Haden advises is to model your thoughts and behavior as if you’ve already achieved your goal. In The Success Principles, Jack Canfield suggests you imagine how your life will be different once you achieve your ambitions. Perhaps you’d be more self-confident and comfortable with taking risks. Canfield argues that envisioning or even role-playing your future success can influence your behavior in ways that can bring your goals to fruition. Though this goes against Haden’s cautionary advice not to celebrate your end goal too soon, Canfield presents anecdotal evidence of people who shaped their future success by acting as if they’d achieved it in the present.)

The Feedback Cycle

Repetition is also important for providing you with quick and accurate feedback. For one thing, you’ll certainly make mistakes, each of which is a learning experience. The more you repeatedly push toward your goal, the more mistakes you’ll make and the more you’ll improve. Of course, this requires keeping the proper attitude—view mistakes as training, not a sign of failure. They’ll also teach you how to adjust your efforts. Perhaps you set your daily goals too high or too low and your program needs refinement. Just make sure to evaluate your progress and setbacks in relation to your daily objectives and not your end goal, which may still be months or years away.

(Shortform note: If anything, Haden understates the value of making mistakes on the way to your goal. In Limitless Mind, educator Jo Boaler explains that making and correcting errors is a vital part of the process of cognitive growth. Neurological research has shown that students who struggle to master a skill engage and build more neural connections than students for whom the skill comes naturally. As a result, people who make mistakes and struggle through the learning process create stronger and longer-lasting neural pathways in their brains than those who don’t, and they end up outperforming the “quick learners” in the long run.)

You should also be mindful that whatever program you devise won’t be perfect, and the feedback you get from your mistakes will tell you how. For example, you might try to work out every morning before discovering that certain muscle groups need more recovery time between sessions. Nevertheless, Haden advises not to make changes to your program too soon. Instead, wait until the program you’ve devised has the chance to provide you with actual feedback as to whether your efforts are producing results. If not, then feel free to try a new approach. There are always different paths to achieving your target.

(Shortform note: In Ultralearning, Scott Young gives more information than Haden about how to differentiate good feedback from bad. Some forms of feedback are like grades on a report card—they tell you how well or poorly you performed without providing guidance on how to improve. Corrective feedback—such as a colleague’s review of your grant proposal—includes both information on where you stand as well as directions for growth. Young lists pitfalls to avoid, such as overreacting to feedback, not applying it properly, or giving too much weight to feedback that pumps up your ego.)

Over time, as you move toward your goal, you’ll inevitably reach a point where it feels as if your progress is slowing, and it may seem like you’ve hit your limit. However, Haden insists that this feeling of diminishing returns is an illusion created by comparing yourself to your past self. This may seem counterintuitive, but it’s just math—if your goal is to do five more pushups every time you work out, then the percentage increase in your number of pushups will steadily diminish even if your actual rate of progress never slows.

This is another reason why having a professional example to strive toward comes in handy: If you compare yourself to your professional exemplar, you’ll see what is actually possible to achieve and not merely the distance you’ve covered to date. Such comparisons can be useful to recalibrate your inner limitations.

The Downside of Comparison

Not everyone agrees with Haden’s advice about comparison. In The Gap and the Gain, Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan define “gap-thinking” as self-comparison against your ideal, whereas “gain-thinking” is when you compare your progress against your previous self. Unlike Haden, Harden and Sullivan argue that forward-looking gap comparisons are unhealthy because the ideal you compare yourself to will always leave you wanting just a little bit more. Backward-looking gain comparisons, however, are based on concrete measurements and thus provide an objective assessment unclouded by emotional thinking.

Many wellness experts, however, argue that you should eschew comparison altogether. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz says that comparing your experiences and choices to those of others can lead to poor decision-making and overall unhappiness. Likewise, in The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown says that comparing yourself to others is emotionally damaging and prevents you from being your full, authentic self.

Resilience

Even with the motivation cycle that comes from repetition and incremental improvement, that by itself may not be enough to keep you going. Therefore, it’s important to develop resilience, which Haden defines as the ability to persevere through difficulties and disappointments. Such resilience doesn’t come from being stronger, smarter, or more energetic but from learning to make the most effective use of the abilities you already have. Haden gives two specific suggestions for efficiently using your time and energy, which we’ll cover in a moment:

1. Conserve your resources by saying no to things that distract from your goal.
2. Dedicate an entire day to focusing your efforts on one specific task.

In general, though, resilience (like motivation) is a mental construct that arises from making a deliberate choice to ignore distractions and focus on your goal.

(Shortform note: In addition to helping you overcome hard times and disappointments, resilience is also necessary to overcome a third productivity killer—boredom. In Atomic Habits, James Clear warns that boredom is a natural side effect of skill-building repetition, a cycle in which the activities that once excited and challenged you eventually become routine. Once this happens, boredom can test your resilience just as much as fatigue, so you should keep ramping up the difficulty level of your program so that whatever skill you’re practicing remains slightly beyond your current abilities. For instance, if you’re working out with weights, gradually increase your number of reps or the amount of weight that you’re lifting so it can remain a challenge.)

The Power of No

Saying no to yourself is hard, and saying no to other people and external commitments can sometimes be even harder. To stay resiliently focused on the tasks and goals that matter most, evaluate anything that diverts your time and energy by whether it serves your primary goal. This includes your habitual distractions, work obligations, and even opportunities that may look appealing but are wasteful in the long run.

One tool that Haden provides to strengthen your resilience against losing focus is to reframe “I can’t” statements as “I don’t.” For example, if you’re spending an afternoon making calls to build your client base (toward your goal of being a freelance public speaker) and you’re frequently tempted to quit this task early, don’t tell yourself “I can’t stop until I’ve made my daily quota.” Say instead, “I don’t stop until I’ve made my daily quota.” The word “can’t” opens the door to resentment—as if the stated task was imposed from outside—while leaving room to negotiate with yourself. Rephrasing as “I don’t” makes completing the task a part of who you are and has been shown to bolster resilience and motivation.

(Shortform note: Tapping into your sense of identity is a powerful way to enact change, but it can be more complex than simply changing “I can’t” to “I don’t.” In Switch, Chip and Dan Heath point out that identity can serve as a barrier to change if you have a “fixed mindset”—the belief that your identity is hard-wired in your brain and therefore immutable. To leverage your identity as a tool for change, you’ll have to adopt a “growth mindset”—the belief that change is possible through consistent effort. Thankfully, you can develop a growth mindset by pushing through challenges and setbacks while accepting them as part of the process toward your goal.)

Setting up boundaries at work is also vital. Odds are that you spend a great deal of time not focusing on the tasks that you’re best at or pushing yourself forward to your goal. If you’re already a high achiever, this is likely because you’ve said “yes” too often and have taught your colleagues that you’re always available. Haden suggests dialing back on this habit so that the people you work with won’t use you as a crutch. Don’t be afraid to deflect and delegate jobs that don’t support your main goals. Setting boundaries isn’t dismissive—to the contrary, it can foster productive relationships and help your colleagues to be more self-reliant.

(Shortform note: It can be hard to set boundaries as Haden suggests because telling someone no feels like a flat-out rejection that might be reciprocated in kind. However, it needn’t be that way. In Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss and Tahl Raz argue that “no” is merely the first step in a process of negotiation resulting in more personal autonomy. The word “no” can change a conversation from “please interrupt your work and do something for me” to a solution-based discussion to determine what best supports the goals of both parties.)

This also involves saying no to things that may seem like opportunities at first glance, such as a request to mentor someone, plan a party, or accept additional work responsibilities. Haden argues that you should look at each offer and ask if it will help you on your way to your goal and if it will do so better than the plan you’re following now. If the answer is no, then as much as it pains you in the short term, turning down an opportunity can be a choice that saves energy and time.

(Shortform note: In Essentialism, Greg McKeown goes into more detail than Haden about setting criteria for when to say no. For unexpected opportunities that arise, McKeown suggests a way to give them serious thought: List three minimum criteria the opportunity would have to meet to serve your goal. If it doesn’t meet all three of those criteria, reject it. If it passes, think of three more critical criteria it would have to fulfill for you to take it on. McKeown suggests that to be worth your time, an unexpected opportunity would have to meet two out of your three additional criteria. Otherwise, it’s not your best use of time and energy.)

Productivity Marathon

Another way to make the most of your resilience is to occasionally concentrate your efforts in a day-long session to complete a major task toward your goal. A work marathon (or, in Haden’s words, an “extreme productivity day”) can knock a major step off your to-do list, motivating you to keep moving toward your goal while reducing the need for resilience by completely shutting out distractions. Haden lists steps for setting up a marathon session, how to stay energized and focused, and how to apply similar principles to an entire week or more.

(Shortform note: Though Haden discusses productivity marathons as solitary ventures, they don’t have to be. In Sprint, Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz explain how to implement a productivity marathon for an entire team. The steps involved in setting up a group productivity sprint are very similar to those described by Haden below, although they need to be formalized and documented when applied in a business setting.)

First, it’s vital to let people know you’re going to be unavailable. Schedule your concentration time as you would a vacation and dedicate yourself to working those hours. Also, make sure to book a long stretch of time. Haden says that spending long hours on a task is paradoxically easier since it frees you from having to monitor your schedule. He also suggests not beginning your marathon at the same time you’d normally start work. This session is meant to be a break from your habits, and one way to make sure that happens is to break from your routine. Also, by accomplishing more in a day than you normally would over several, a marathon recalibrates your expectations of how hard or how much you can accomplish at once.

(Shortform note: The sort of concentration Haden describes is what Cal Newport discusses in his book Deep Work. Newport defines deep work as focused, uninterrupted, undistracted work on a task that pushes your cognitive abilities to their limit. While deep work is hard to carry out, it’s also much more fulfilling than the shallow tasks that normally fill your day. Whereas Haden focuses on secluding yourself as the best way to carry out deep work, Newport offers several alternatives, such as making it a regular part of your schedule or squeezing it in whenever the opportunity presents itself.)

While embarking on your productivity marathon, you balance taking care of your mental and physical energy needs with not letting yourself drift too far off task. Haden suggests eating snacks before you're hungry and getting up to stretch your muscles before you start to feel tired. By the time your body sends you those signals, its reserves are already flagging.

(Shortform note: To maintain productivity, momentum, and motivation, self-care must be more than just an afterthought. In Make Time, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky describe it as one of the essential pillars of time management, especially in a modern, sedentary workplace for which the human body isn’t designed. In addition to Haden’s suggestions to eat right and periodically stretch, Knapp and Zeratsky recommend methods to use caffeine strategically as well as ways to rest that maximize your energy.)

However, Haden also says to delay taking breaks (to reward your progress) longer than you normally would and to stop work in the middle of a task so that you know exactly where to pick up when you start going again.

(Shortform note: Haden’s advice to take your breaks in the middle of a task is a recommendation often given to writers—that you should stop in the middle of a chapter, or even a sentence—to make it easier to get back into the flow. The idea may have originated with Ernest Hemingway, who always quit work at a point when he knew what had to happen next in his stories. The idea has gained wider popularity as a tool to help reduce procrastination.)

Long-Term Productivity

Once you’ve felt the success of blocking off a day to accomplish one major step toward your goal, you can make use of similar tactics to optimize your motivation and resilience throughout the week. Begin by mapping out your weekly schedule, setting aside times for each task while being realistic about how long they’ll take. Don’t try to multitask, but make room to focus on one individual step at a time. Blocking out a whole week as you did for one day can help you identify where your slack times are and help you find more productive ways to use them.

(Shortform note: Haden skips a step in blocking out time, which is to build in protective buffers to keep tasks from conflicting. In Essentialism, McKeown describes buffers as a way to protect your mental space. A time buffer keeps travel delays from throwing you off schedule. Building time for questions into a presentation prevents you from speeding through important points you’d like to make. “Planning buffers” such as packing lists for trips reduce the risk you’ll forget something important, wasting precious mental and emotional energy as well as the extra time you’d need to readjust your plans.)

Nevertheless, you can’t stay busy 24/7. When mapping out a productive week, be sure to schedule time to turn your productivity off. Spend time with your family, go hiking in the woods, or have fun at the movies. Haden affirms that you should respect your leisure and family time so that it doesn’t get eaten away in your quest to pursue your overarching goal. It’s great to excel, but you must also live your life.

(Shortform note: In 168 Hours, Laura Vanderkam goes into more detail about how to block out and balance a productive week that maximizes time for your work and private life. To do so, she suggests recording your typical week in detail to better understand how you’re spending time already. Once you’ve done that, you can plan your time at work to focus on tasks that play to your strengths. At home, she recommends scheduling more time to spend with your loved ones and delegating time-consuming housework and chores if it’s cost-effective to do so.)

Success

Suppose you’ve done everything that Haden's recommended. You’ve created a program for success and followed it, celebrated every improvement you’ve made, and learned to endure all the bumps and roadblocks. How do you know when you’ve finally “made it,” and what do you do next if you find the success you’ve been after?

Defining what success means for you is crucial to living a balanced, healthy life. Haden offers guidelines on how to realistically measure success, why you should aim for it in multiple parts of your life, and why personal goals should be just as important, if not more important, than professional ones.

He begins by pointing out that any goal you pursue comes with a cost. Chasing professional goals will often mean neglecting the rest of your life while devoting yourself to personal goals will usually mean not making the most of your career. Therefore, Haden says it’s unrealistic to believe that you can maximize both. Instead, you need to be honest with yourself about how you define “good enough.” If you wish to be among the top 1% in any field, whether that’s sales, photography, or weightlifting, it will take a lifetime of single-minded dedication. However, being counted in the top 10% is eminently rewarding and much more achievable.

What Does “Success” Really Mean?

Despite all the literature on how to achieve success in life, a true definition of personal success is elusive. In general, authors agree with Haden that individual definitions of success will vary, and instead, they focus on the characteristics of success. In The Success Principles, Canfield links personal success to identifying and following your purpose in life. In The 10X Rule, Grant Cardone explains that success isn’t something with a limited supply, but instead, it’s something you can work for and achieve again and again.

Philosophers and wellness experts take a different view. In Happy, Derren Brown argues that chasing after achievements will keep you trapped on a neverending treadmill of desire, brief rewards, and disappointment. In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor also denies that success leads to happiness but says that instead, the reverse is true—finding happiness is what leads you to success. In The Book of Joy, the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu discount any connection between striving for accomplishments and finding joy in life, instead arguing that looking for external sources of fulfillment is inherently detrimental.

On the spectrum between these differing opinions as to what degree success leads to personal fulfillment, Haden’s approach to qualifying success may be seen as more measured than the extremes on either end.

With that in mind, Haden lays out the following rules:

1. Before setting out on an ambitious project, make sure that you’re mentally, physically, and financially sound. If you can’t meet your basic human needs of food, shelter, community, and relationships, then that’s what you have to take care of first.

2. When you set a long-term goal, choose one that fulfills you in more than one aspect of your life. It’s easy to give up on goals that only serve one facet of yourself, such as your job or your health. A goal that brings together more than one ambition—such as becoming a freelance writer to further your career and your creative drive—will be more closely tied to your identity and less likely to get dropped by the wayside.

3. Define your goal in a way that’s quantifiable. Your ambition can start as a nebulous dream, but as you set your course it should grow more concrete. Quantifiable goals let you know if you’ve achieved them—you’ll know for certain when you’ve finished hiking the Appalachian Trail, just as you’ll know you’ve scored an acting role in the latest television sitcom. Solid goals are based on more than just a feeling.

Goals to a Balanced Life

The path to fulfillment that Haden describes is a relatively recent human invention. In The One Thing, Gary Keller recounts that for most of human history, your work was your life, and all your daily activities were governed by the struggle to meet your basic needs. Once technology started freeing people from the endless daily drudgery of living, people started to seek the perfect balance between work, family, leisure, and achievement. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg argues that some degree of balance is possible, but realistically it’ll never be perfect and will require making compromises in various aspects of your life.

In Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans offer a practical approach to getting your life in order before moving on to greater ambitions. The first step is a self-assessment to determine where you stand in terms of physical and mental health, your career, and overall happiness. Once you’ve done that, you can identify what areas need improvement and set goals to bring your life into alignment.

Finally, in First Things First, Stephen R. Covey makes the point that achieving a goal you’ve worked long and hard for can actually be painful—if it was the wrong goal all along. According to Covey, it’s not enough that long-term goals be measurable and touch on various aspects of your life, as Haden suggests. They should also tap into the deeply human traits of creativity, willpower, and morality, as well as the self-awareness to change your ambitions if life and circumstances demand it.

Your Goal Isn’t the End

Haden makes clear that any goal you set for yourself isn’t going to consume the rest of your life. Because of that, you should expect to have multiple goals—just not all at once. Instead, once you’ve achieved success as you define it in relation to one specific objective, you should set your sights on the next one, and the next. Think about musicians who branch into acting, actors who become directors, and directors who write books. Consider athletes who open up restaurant chains, or restaurateurs who become travel writers. These are only the most well-known examples, but if you truly wish to have a well-rounded life, you should be open to following your dreams in however many directions they take you.

(Shortform note: Haden is basically arguing in favor of becoming a polymath—someone who’s well-versed in many skills and fields of knowledge. The most famous example of a polymath was Leonardo da Vinci, who was skilled as a scientist, an engineer, and an artist. As opposed to specialists with narrow expertise, people with skills in a variety of areas can combine them in innovative ways peculiar to their own unique sets of knowledge. Adaptability, flexibility, and having a wide range of interests are going to become more and more valuable, both for the workforce and for mental health, as people live longer lives in the future.)

Most of all, when you begin a cycle of improvement, repetition, and self-motivation, you need to be sure that the goal you’ve picked is something you’ll enjoy. Also, your goals don’t have to be aspirations that send your life in a whole new direction—they might simply be new skills to add to what you already do. Haden suggests that the most fulfilling goals are things you’ll regret if you don’t ever try. More likely than not, those goals won’t have anything to do with your profession, but they’ll be no less rewarding for having been followed.

However, nothing’s ever as rewarding as a dream. So define what you want, build a program to achieve it, create a positive cycle of reinforcement, persevere through the hard times, and enjoy every win along the way.

(Shortform note: By arguing that you should pursue success in multiple fields that you’re passionate about, Haden implies that happiness and fulfillment should be your objectives, and not just success for its own sake. But is happiness something you can achieve by design? In The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin says it is. She set herself the year-long goal of improving her life in several key areas, including work, relationships, parenting, and play. At the end of her experiment, she concluded that happiness is a goal you can work for, agreeing with Haden that it’s the work that counts and that you don’t need to wait around for motivation.)