Intrinsic motivation is crucial for overcoming akrasia

One thing I've noticed is that framing the same task differently can make me either intrinsically motived to do it or not do it. For example, I have a text file full of blog posts I've identified as high-quality to read at some point. But reading blog posts from this file feels boring and forced in a way that browsing blog posts from Hacker News does not. I'm not sure how to explain this. However, one thing I do try to do is that once I notice myself conceptualizing some task that I endorse in a way that I find intrinsically motivating, I try not to destroy that conceptualization. For example, I don't force myself to do it if I happen not to feel like doing it at some point. I stopped using the Pomodoro Technique because I was afraid it was destroying my intrinsic motivation.

I did some reading of the literature on intrinsic motivation and came to a conclusion I hadn't seen anywhere else, which is that people are intrinsically motivated to complete tasks that raise their status. The reason "extrinsic" rewards don't work: the implicit message of such rewards is that you are lower status than the reward-giver. I don't remember all the evidence that lead me to my conclusion but I do remember that e.g. when the reward-giver hands out praise as a reward for good performance, people perform as well as they do when they are "intrinsically" motivated.

I suffer from severe case of Akrasia that makes me work at 10% of my capacity most of the time; here's something I discovered that made me believe problem is actually in me: my closest friend. I know her for many years, and I never ever saw her working at less than 110% of her capacity. She worked in groceries, online bookshop, sold LED bulbs and furniture, managed people, did customer relations and even social media marketing. She wants to be a writer; she hated almost every one of those jobs, felt they're hindering her development, and yet no matter how tired she was, how annoyed or abused by her bosses, she could always find the strength to focus and do her job at scary efficiency. And given all the people I ever worked with, who never had problems with focus or productivity in the ballpark of my own, I can't conclude otherwise that it's me who is just wired wrongly. I wish I had even 5% of professionalism of my friend, I could do so much more than I am able to do now.

This seems to me like a simplification which focuses on one part of the problem, and ignores another part. For some people it will work great (those who have the other part solved), for others it will not work (those who have problems in the other part).

It is not just how interesting or boring is the activity X for you, but also how much do the other circumstances in your life allow you to focus on X. Imagine that you intrinsically love X, but whenever you do it, you get punished by an external force. Gradually your mind will start associating X with unpleasant feelings, and after a while you will find you are no longer attracted to the idea of doing X. A different person starting with the same love towards X, but in a more supportive environment, would have it easier to persevere.

It is not necessarily the whole environment that has an impact on you, but people who matter most. If your parents disapprove of X, but your friends give you admiration and love for your X abilities, it will be relatively easy to emotionally overcome the disapproval of your parents.

Maybe it is my own specific problem -- I have no idea how frequent it is -- but I find it really difficult to find people (in offline world) who would encourage me in doing what I want to do. People around me either don't care about what I do, or don't care about my preferences but have their own ideas about what I should do instead.

Before "you should have fun" is "you should have an environment that supports you in having fun doing X". People are social animals.

If you find your work boring, it's very likely that you should be doing something else.

That's true, but that's, um, not the whole truth :-)

I usually express this as saying that your work should be at the intersection of three sets:

• Something that you love to do
• Something that you're good at
• Something that's valuable enough so that other people will pay you for it.

Steve Jobs created Apple, which owns ~0.1%+ of the world's wealth.

Apple does not own itself. Ownership of Apple may represent a thousandth of the total world wealth, but that's a different thing.

Their problems come from them spending their time trying to do work that they find boring. If you find your work boring, it's very likely that you should be doing something else.

Suppose that 1) I care about my personal satisfaction and fun while working, and 2) I care about the effects that my work has on the world. It's may be that the work you find satisfying--the part you could throw your whole self into and become truly great and exceptional at--is work that no one else cares about, and so won't get you anything in the way of status or sustenance or 'secondary satisfaction.'

If I can applaud the example of Ethan Dickinson, my impression is that the sort of work he finds innately most satisfying, and the sort of thing that he can't not do (as evidenced by his Facebook feed), is related to linguistics. But what he spends most of his time on is programming software, because that pays considerably more than linguistics, and then he can donate that money to MIRI.

I don't know how he feels about programming, but if he were to ask "hey, how do I do something despite not having innate motivation for it?", I would not want to advise him to quit what he does and do what he's innately motivated to do instead. I would point instead to the resources our culture has built up to enhance discipline.

So discipline is important, and indirect satisfaction are important. But I'm not arguing that direct satisfaction and raw enthusiasm are unimportant either; the moderate path is to simultaneously optimize for all four together, and figure out what the right tradeoff between them is.

I was astonished to find myself having ascended to the pantheon of those who have made major contributions to human knowledge

Is this your own evaluation of your work?

I fully agree with this. Here's a good quote I found on the web:

If you really deeply care about something, you will do it. You will do it without needing a list or a system or a reminder.

(Source)

Their problems come from them spending their time trying to do work that they find boring. If you find your work boring, it's very likely that you should be doing something else.

Because the market is marvelously set up so that for every single thing any human being may want to do, there are buyers. Allow me to stay skeptical here.

Finding likeable AND marketable things to do is an art in itself.

Here is how it tends to actually happen (esp. if you live in the more credentialist type of cultures): you study something because it looks like a good idea at that time. You are lucky and manage to get hired without experience, and gain experience. From that on, nobody will ever hire you for anything else, ever, because you are mentally boxed into that category.

For example there is this woman who went to gastro school and worked for 12 years as an industrial or breakfast cook, waitress, these kinds of gastro jobs and got really fed up with it. She always like plants, and she was the kind of rural girl who grew up gardening/farming so she figured she could work at that kind of company, raising flowers, it is just a generic skill every rural person can do. I even helped lied a bit on her CV - renamed her experience at her parents rural garden/farm as experience at a local flower and vegetable raising business. Still nobody hired her for a year, people just looked at the resume and did not find an agriculture school degree + they were like what does this cook/waitress want here after 12 years of doing that kind of job? There were not even answer after about 40 e-mailed applications (there weren't more of these business around) nor from the city (applying to take care of flowers in public parks) so she sighed, gave up the dream and went back to greasy world of industrial kitchens.

This is how it usually works. In most industries there are more than any capable people with proper degrees and even relevant experience. They will not hire a profession-hopper.

I mean, OK I would hire half of LW into an ERP software job even if their background is something like medicine because I know they are smart and would learn it in 3 months, but that is different, the difference is knowing they are smart, having this semi-personal knowledge. But the typical job application process does not convey it. It is just a name and credentials and list of experiences.

Formatting note: something seems to have deleted a couple of your time units:

I spent ~1500 working on genuinely original scientific research.

and

which subsumes the 100 old Poincare conjecture,

This matches my personal experience pretty well. Unfortunately, finding this low-hanging fruit in the area you are interested in, and make it pay bills, is a non-trivial problem. If there was someone really good in solving this particular issue for people, at a modest fee or commision, they would make a killer startup. Certainly this seems like a (meta-)low-hanging fruit.

I found my motivation to frequently depend much more on external factors than the task itself. For example, I worked on Math for essentially every waking hour at Berkeley (and completed all the Master's courses when I was 19 as a result), and I worked on programming/data science tasks 80 hours/week at one job. But I've had very similar types of tasks in different environments and found it quite difficult to put it anything near the same number of hours.

I've found that my motivation seems to be constraint-based: if I feel like I'm getting enough sleep, enough socialization, enough food etc. then I find it very easy to work a lot. But if any one of these is lacking then my motivation plummets. In particular, all the environments where I worked exceptionally hard were ones where I was surrounded by people who felt like part of "my tribe": simply being around people whom I like isn't enough.