goals must be valuable and within reach (be on the right side of sunk-cost fallacy); action increases commitment P40 “According to the dilution principle,” the more goals, including incentives, a single activity serves, the more weakly we associate the activity with our central goal and the less instrumental the activity seems for this goal.” Rewards and punishments motivate action by creating immediate mini-goals to your main goal. Let’s go and grab a coffee at your favorite coffee spot for this little example. How much is your latte these days, or your flat white or whatever else you like? Does your inside voice tell you: this is too much? And so, here’s a little advice from the book: if you’re new to or uncertain about a commitment, try to stay motivated looking at it with a glass-half-full mindset. around others: you will conform without your knowledge; identify desirable and undesirable behavior

Get It Done (2022) turns the spotlight on the person that’s often hardest to influence: you. Drawing on anecdotes and research from motivation science, it shows how modifying your circumstances can propel you forward both personally and professionally – even when you feel lost at sea. Genres great goals: are not proxies/means to other goals, are specific, have potential to fail, great incentives, intrinsic There are ways to dial up the intrinsic motivation factor on goals that are important to you. For example, when it comes to exercise, you can choose a workout that is fun. Fishbach described a study in which she had asked a group of people in a gym to choose an exercise based on how much they enjoyed it and asked another group of gym-goers to choose one based on how important it was that they do a particular exercise. She found that those who chose based on enjoyment worked out longer. I mean it wasn't as heavy on the theory part, but towards the end, there was a lot more examples of this type of motivation than this other one and they just became like a numeration and not quite a manual on how to get motivated.Daca pentru a atinge un obiectiv este nevoie sa faci ceva ce nu îți face plăcere este foarte puțin probabil să rămâi consecvent până la îndeplinirea obiectivului; I want to say I learned something from this book but it was just so heavy-handed with the numerous theories in the end that I doubt I will remember hardly anything coming month or two. And few pearls of wisdom I decided to commit to memory were pushed out by the heavy-handed serving of superfluous information later on. So I think if this book aimed to teach long-term it missed the goal on this. About the Author Ayelet Fishbach, PhD, is the Jeffrey Breakenridge Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and the past president of the Society for the Study of Motivation. So how do you motivate yourself to pursue your dreams and desires when life is in full swing? It all starts with choosing the right goal. A refreshing read and reminder of ways to get things done. Start with motivational methods and incorporate adequate support. “Trying to stay motivated and make serious progress in whatever you’re trying to achieve in life can sometimes feel like an impossible task. But it doesn’t have to be. There’s a simple fix – and it just so happens to be in your control. It all starts with changing your circumstances. Most importantly, you need to define your goals. You need to pay attention to maintaining momentum, stay focused when you’ve got a billion other things on your plate and get your friends and family involved. And when you make your behavior and environment work for rather than against you, your goal of getting that raise, or that strong healthy body, or that tax return form sorted, or that new language learned, will be yours in no time!

P78 cognitive dissonance helps explain why we abandon goals that are a mismatch for our past actions Neither strategy is necessarily better or worse – but it is useful to be able to know when to implement one over the other. P74 “all-or-nothing goals” i.e. a college degree vs. accumulative goals” i.e. working out 5x per week or reading 20 books this year While making progress is important, how you monitor it also matters. The question is: Should you focus on how much you’ve already done, or how much you still have left to do? The short answer is: both.There are many problems with this book. The short review is that if you’d like a long lecture from a dishonest, uncreative, Liberal, Jewish-Puritan, this is the book for you. In her insightful new book Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation (debuting January 4 from Little Brown Spark), Fishbach takes on the questions that plague us most:

P57 “If you only feel calm through meditation, you might struggle to keep your cool when you can’t fit meditation into your busy schedule. Flexibility, such as having more than one way to feel calm, can be important in reaching your goals.”The final, crucial ingredient to goal-setting is fun. I know. I just basically talked you through a bunch of homework you should do to get stuff done. And now I’m telling you to have fun, too?Bear with me. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain’s titular character notes that “work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” That is basically another way of defining intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is when you do something just because. Because you want to. Because you have fun doing it. Because it’s your dream. Because. Maybe there isn’t even a proper reason. It just feels good. P62 “Do you think that you care about how interesting your work is much more than the average person, but that you care about how much you’re paid only somewhat more than the average person? Turns out, that’s generally the case. The tendency for almost everyone to see themselves as above average is more pronounced for intrinsic than extrinsic motivation.”

And it just so happens that it’s one of the main things I need help with. And you probably need some help, too, right? Because, seriously, why does it take so much effort to start a new habit or actually finish a project. Tell me I’m not alone, and that boring life-admin tasks stay on your to-do list for months, too, because you think they will probably take hours. And then when you actually sit your butt down and do them, it’s all done in an hour. To reach the finish line, set compelling, specific goals – and have fun! Fishbach explained that goals are more likely to be successful in the long term if they’re intrinsically motivated (a concept many misunderstand). Intrinsic motivation means that an activity feels good as you’re doing it and you’re pursuing the task as its own end. In other words, you’re doing it just to do it.Achievable goals are framed positively, as a behavior to do, rather than as the avoidance or suppression of a behavior (which is harder). When I was a fencer, my coach explained how we should encourage our teammates from the side of the strip in a similar way: shout "Keep going!" rather than "Don't stop!"—because for the latter, they'll only hear "stop!" Pentru a face un anumit lucru, încearcă să gândești că o persoană care face acel lucru în mod normal; Finally, think about times that you’ve been successful and unsuccessful in achieving your past goals. Thinking about successes is kinda easy, right? But we’ve all messed up at one point. I know I have. I’ve tried, I’ve failed, I’ve tried, I’ve failed again. So, how about learning from those failures? If you’re someone who struggles to lean into your mistakes, you’re not alone – but you are missing out on a bunch of important information. When I first studied behavioral economics 30 years ago, I often thought, “This is just economists trying to figure out what we already know in advertising.” Today, I think behavioral economists have gotten further away from understanding people how think. Economists have become a lot like mathematicians studying string theory. They spend more and more of their time talking about things that only matter to their academic colleagues, with little application to the real world, and with experiments that don’t prove a thing but are only interpretive events, a sort of intellectual dancing.