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I do not derive intrinsic enjoyment from the act of composing tweets. All enjoyment comes from the effects.
What motivates me to increase my effort and volume is seeing it carry over into increased ability and traction.
I do not wake up in the morning and think “woohoo, I can’t wait to play around with language and thoughts, I wonder what kind of interesting things I can come up with today.”
I like looking at metrics and like seeing them go up. I find competition motivating, so much that I made a “leaderboard” list of familiar accounts ordered by followers, and I enjoy overtaking them.
Most people in most situations are the same way so it makes sense to design upskilling/education programs around that setting.
Too often, programs focus primarily on fostering intrinsic enjoyment, which is nice to have but is not necessary nor sufficient to increase performance and reach a serious level.
Ultimately, intrinsic enjoyment and performance training are completely separate axes. Personally, I have experience with both in isolation and both together. How it’s gone for me is this:
$T + E > T \ggg E$
- $T=$ training specifically centered on improving performance
- $E=$ enjoying the activities as a result of intrinsic interest
I’ll provide an example of each, going from right (worst outcome) to left (best outcome).
$E:$ I experience intrinsic enjoyment from consuming, analyzing, and producing music.
- I used to play around with instruments and music production. It resulted in acquiring some skills here and there along the way, I can do some basic riffing on guitar and make a song that sounds pleasant, but I am not actually good in a serious capacity.
- I have gaping holes in my musical foundations and whenever I pick up the guitar I end up playing around instead of actively engaging in performance-improving activities. My intrinsic interest got me into music, and I have allowed it to prevent me from doing the work to become good.
- I recently started engaging in serious lyrical study (retrieval practice, spaced repetition, the whole ordeal) of an artist that I would not normally listen to, so I could better connect with my sister-in-law who is a big fan. I can already talk coherently about that artist even better than most of the artists I have listened to for years out of intrinsic interest. (Funny enough, the music has started to grow on me as I’ve developed competence and gotten some skin in the game.)
$T:$ As I described at the beginning of this post, I do not derive intrinsic enjoyment from the act of composing tweets. All enjoyment comes from the effects. Yet, because I focus my time specifically on improving performance, I have come much further here than in music.
$T+E:$ I have intrinsic enjoyment for math education and the study/practice of talent development, and math itself (or at least some subfields) to a large degree, and coding to a lesser extent. I have also focused much of my time in these domains specifically on improving performance. Obviously and unsurprisingly this is where I have come the furthest.
The overall takeaways:
- Training focused specifically on improving performance will take you much further than unstructured play, provided that you stick with it, and incentives can help you stick with it.
- Intrinsic enjoyment is nice to have but is not necessary nor sufficient to increase performance and reach a serious level.
- However, whatever you want to be your “main thing” in life, what you spend the vast majority of waking hours doing and aspire to become world-class in, you want to try to align with what you find intrinsically enjoyable. Otherwise you will spend your life on something that doesn’t speak to your soul and you will be at a competitive disadvantage.
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