Beyond a good night’s rest, making your own schedule also lets you work in accordance with your circadian rhythms. Extreme larks, the technical term for very early risers, want to get down to business at 4:00 A.M., while night owls like to start their day at 4:00 P.M. But if we get out of sync with our innate biology, the penalty is reduced attention and alertness. Thus, schedule autonomy allows people to get the sleep they need to be most effective and allows people to work when they’re most alert in order to maximize that effectiveness.
Patagonia’s other rule, the freedom to surf, provides two additional benefits. First, it prioritizes exercise; second, it amplifies flow.
We’ll take them one at a time.
Exercise is a nonnegotiable for peak performance.11 You could fill a textbook with its benefits—health, energy, mood, and so on—but most critical here is nervous system regulation. Chasing any impossible can be an emotional roller coaster. If you can’t regularly calm your nervous system, you’ll crack up or burn out or both. And exercise doesn’t just reduce the level of stress hormones in our system, it replaces them with mood boosters like endorphins and anandamide.12 The calm optimism that results is critical for long-term peak performance.
Yet surfing isn’t only about prioritizing fitness. For reasons that we’ll explore in the last section of this chapter, the sport has a high likelihood of driving participants into flow. The added push in feel-good neurochemistry the state provides is the real turbo-boost. It’s what shifts drive into overdrive, amplifying intrinsic motivation to optimal levels.
So there’s our answer. To get the boost in drive that autonomy provides, you need the freedom to control your sleep, work, and exercise schedule. You also need the autonomy to chase flow via an activity of your own choosing on a regular basis. Ideally, your work time will be devoted to activities that further your purpose, and the flow-producing activity is similar to surfing—meaning it’s actually a break from work. If this isn’t possible in your life today, start with the 3M plan: devote 15 percent of your time to a project that aligns with your core passion and purpose. Fifteen percent is about an afternoon a week, though you can easily split this into a pair of two-and-a-half-hour blocks and get similar results.
And exactly how to spend those hours to get the very best results is where our last intrinsic driver comes into play.
OUR NEED FOR MASTERY
After Deci and Ryan discovered the power of autonomy, they next wanted to know if this was our main intrinsic driver or if other factors were equally important. Trying to answer this question led them deep into the archives of psychology, where they uncovered a then relatively unknown 1953 paper by Harvard psychologist David McClelland.
Titled “The Achievement Motive,” McClelland’s paper has since become one of the most well-cited in the field.13 In it, he suggested a second intrinsic motivator that might be as powerful as autonomy, maybe more so. Initially, Deci and Ryan borrowed McClelland’s original term for the driver, competence, but we now know it as mastery.
Mastery is the desire to get better at the things we do. It’s devotion to craft, the need for progress, the urge to continually improve. Humans love nothing more than stacking little victory atop little victory atop little victory. Neurochemically, these victories produce dopamine. Scientists used to believe that dopamine was simply a reward drug, meaning this neurochemical showed up after we accomplished a goal as a way of reinforcing goal attainment. We now know that dopamine is actually the brain’s way of encouraging us to act—meaning the chemical doesn’t show up after we take a risk, to reward our risk-taking. Rather it arrives right before we take that risk, to encourage our risk-taking. In other words, dopamine is the biological basis of exploration and innovation.14
When we work hard toward an important goal—that is, when we pursue mastery—dopamine levels spike. But the real victory is a series of these spikes, day after day after day. Emotionally, this series feels like momentum, which many peak performers describe as their very favorite sensation. “The single biggest motivator,” explains author Dan Pink in Drive, “by far, [is] making progress in meaningful work.”15
Of course, the opposite is also true: when progress is missing, the cost is steep. The sensation of being stuck in the mud, wheels spinning and not getting anywhere, is the single largest drain on motivation that scientists have discovered. If momentum is a peak performer’s favorite feeling, then lack of momentum is their least favorite.
Yet it’s almost impossible to talk about mastery, momentum, and why this driver may be our “single biggest motivator” without discussing flow. And to aid in that discussion, it’s helpful to meet psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and learn a little bit more about the history of the science of the state.
FLOW TRIGGERS
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is considered the godfather of flow psychology.16 In the years between 1970 and 1990, while first a professor in the University of Chicago psychology department and later its chairman, Csikszentmihalyi conducted a worldwide inquiry into flow and optimal performance. It was through this research that he determined that flow is a global phenomenon. The state is universal, showing up in anyone, anywhere, provided certain initial conditions are met.
Originally, Csikszentmihalyi called these conditions “proximal conditions for flow,” but this has since been shortened to “flow triggers,” or preconditions that lead to more flow.17 To date, researchers have identified twenty-two different flow triggers—there are probably more—yet they all share one thing in common. Flow follows focus. The state can only arise when all of our attention is directed at the present moment. So that’s exactly what all these triggers do: they drive attention into the now.
From a neurobiological perspective, these triggers drive attention in one of three ways.18 Either they push dopamine and/or norepinephrine, two of the brain’s main focusing chemicals, into our system, or they lower cognitive load, which is the psychological weight of all the stuff we’re thinking about at any one time. By lowering cognitive load, we’re liberating energy, which the brain can then repurpose for paying attention to the task at hand.
This is where curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery come back into this story. Our five most powerful intrinsic drivers do double duty as flow triggers. All of these motivators can drive dopamine into our system. Many of them do the same for norepinephrine. And when all five are properly aligned, they lower cognitive load as well.
From an evolutionary perspective, none of this is surprising. Drive is the psychological fuel that pushes us to obtain resources. We have the greatest chance of obtaining those resources if we have a plan for chasing them (curiosity, passion, purpose), the freedom to chase them (autonomy), and the skills required for that chase (mastery). If all these intrinsic drivers are not properly stacked, their misalignment becomes a persistent form of anxiety, which is the psychological weight of not doing exactly what we came here to do.19 When we get this motivational stack right, that weight lifts. Now, we have way more energy with which to attack the task at hand and a much greater chance of getting into flow along the way.
Even better, almost all of this happens automatically. When we’re curious, passionate, and purposeful, cognitive load lightens and dopamine and norepinephrine flow into our system. The same is true for autonomy. But this is not true for mastery. While curiosity, passion, purpose, and autonomy alter our neurobiology automatically, both increasing drive and—as a result of the changes in neurochemistry that produce that increase in drive—increasing our chance of getting into flow, mastery requires some additional fine-tuning.
As a flow trigger, mastery is referred to as the “challenge-skills balance.”20 The idea is relatively straightforward: Flow follows focus, and we pay the most attention to the task at hand, when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. We want to stretch, but not snap.
When we are pushing on our talents and advancing our abilities, we are walking the path to mastery—and the brain notices. It rewards this effor
t with dopamine. And because dopamine enhances focus even more, this increases our chances of getting into flow, and the cycle continues.
An example might be helpful.
I’m a skier. I started skiing when I was five years old and have never stopped. As a result, every time I head into the mountains, I am making a choice (autonomy) that is aligned with my passion and purpose. As a result of this result, simply laying edge on snow will lower my cognitive load and produce a little dopamine and norepinephrine.
If, when I’m out skiing, I decide to go explore a part of the mountain I’ve not seen before, now I’ve layered curiosity atop those other motivators and added a little more neurochemistry to the equation. While I might not yet be in flow, enough of my attention is focused on the task at hand (the skiing) to be moving me in the right direction. To push myself over the top, what I need to do is something that drives me into the challenge-skills sweet spot. I could head into the terrain park and start practicing a new trick, perhaps, or I could find that steep, skinny chute that, on my last trip through, required five turns to ski down, and today I’ll try to ski it in four turns. By doing either, I’ve upped the challenge level a little bit, and my brain rewards that risk-taking effort with even more dopamine. Suddenly, there’s enough neurochemistry in my system to push me into flow.
Yet, this isn’t the end of the story. The state itself produces an even greater cascade of feel-good neurochemistry. Thus, my deep love for skiing gets even deeper, and the next time I head into the mountains, my desire to repeat these actions and try to improve my skills yet again is significantly amplified—with no extra effort required. If I do this a few times in a row, what used to require energy and exertion begins to happen automatically. Seeking out that challenge-skills sweet spot has become a habit. Now, I’m automatically walking the path toward mastery—which is also the only path that can lead us to the impossible.
Finally, all of this translates into some extremely practical advice. To really harness mastery as a motivator, take the 15 percent of your life that you’ve carved out for yourself—call it your autonomy time—and spend it pushing on that challenge-skills balance, trying to get a little better at something that’s aligned with curiosity, passion, and purpose. Start chasing the high of incremental improvement. Get hooked on the dopamine loop of advancement. Try to get a little better today, try to get a little better tomorrow.
And repeat.
And repeat.
And there’s really no choice in the matter.
Earlier, when I said these five intrinsic drivers were biologically related, I meant that they are all designed to work together as a sequence. This is also why, when properly sequenced, these drivers so reliably produce flow. We are all designed for optimal performance. This is how the system wants to work, and there are serious consequences for trying to buck the system. Both disconnection from meaningful values and disconnection from meaningful work are major causes of anxiety and depression. Disconnection from meaningful values is a lack of curiosity, passion, and purpose in your life. Disconnection from meaningful work is about being forced to do work (a lack of autonomy) that is boring or overwhelming and does not advance core skills (a lack of mastery).21 This is yet another reason why it’s so crucial to get our biology to work for us rather than against us: because the failure to do this work carries serious psychological penalties.
But if we can align these five major intrinsic motivators, the result is amplified motivation and increased flow, which means, on the long road toward impossible, we’ll go farther faster. Yet, since we’re now going to be moving through our lives at greater speeds, it’s increasingly important that we know exactly where we want to go—which is why we need to turn our attention to the topic of goals.
4
Goals
GOAL SETTING 101
If intrinsic drivers are about creating the psychological energy required to push us forward, goals tell us exactly where we want to go. We started the process of identifying our goals in chapter 1 when we created our massively transformative purpose, or what could be considered a mission statement for our lives. Here, we want to break that mission statement down into smaller chunks, dividing up the impossible into a long series of difficult but doable goals that, if accomplished, render said impossible much more probable.
This is not a new idea. Over two thousand years ago, the philosopher Aristotle noticed that setting goals—that is, the establishment of a desired outcome or target—was one of the primary motivators of human behavior.1 He called goals one of the four foundational “causes” or big drivers of change in the world. It was a groundbreaking insight but one that’s taken us a very long time to understand.
The issue is complexity. Simple as the idea of goal setting might seem, there’s trouble in the particulars. What the research shows is that not every goal is the same, nor is every goal appropriate for every situation and—most important—the wrong goal in the wrong situation can seriously hinder performance and actually lower productivity and motivation.
Let’s start with the science.
During the late 1960s, University of Toronto psychologist Gary Latham and University of Maryland psychologist Edwin Locke, considered the godfathers of goal-setting theory, fleshed out Aristotle’s notion and gave us an idea that we now hold as truth: the establishment of a goal is one of the easiest ways to increase motivation and enhance performance.2
Back then, though, this was something of a surprising finding.
Latham and Locke came at this topic organizationally—they were interested in what companies could do to motivate employees to work harder. Prior to the 1960s, the general consensus was that happy workers were productive workers.3 Thus, putting more stress on employees by establishing performance targets (that is, goals) was considered bad for business. But Latham and Locke did something other theorists had not: they conducted experiments. And the idea that more stress equals less work was definitely not what their data showed.
Latham and Locke started with lumberjacks, a ferociously independent bunch of study subjects.4 The lumberjacks were divided into teams. Some teams were told to work smart and fast, but no pressure, do your best. Others were given quotas. This much wood for a good week of work, this much wood for a great week. It’s important to note that there was zero financial reward given for meeting these targets. The goals were simply set, and that was the end of it.
Yet, time and again the lumberjacks who had been given targets to aim for ended up gathering far more wood than the controls. And it’s not just lumberjacks. In dozens of studies in dozens of fields, Latham and Locke found that setting goals increased performance and productivity 11 to 25 percent. That’s a fairly extraordinary boost. At the upper end, if an eight-hour day is our baseline, that’s like getting two extra hours of work for free simply by building a mental frame—that is, a goal—around the activity.
Another way to think about Locke and Latham’s ideas about goal setting is as a subcomponent to Ryan and Deci’s work. As Richard Ryan later wrote: “Human needs [such as autonomy, mastery, and purpose] provide the energy for behavior; people value goals because the goals are expected to provide satisfaction of their needs.”5 In other words, the need for autonomy is what drives people to start their own business; goals, meanwhile, are all the individual steps required to actually be in business.
To understand the power of goals, we also need to understand how they impact brain function. The brain is a prediction engine.6 It’s always trying to predict what is about to happen next and how much energy will be required by that situation. To make those predictions, three systems come into play: information acquisition, pattern recognition, and goal direction. We take in information, find connections between this information and prior experience, and then filter those results through our goals to decide what to do next. And since that decision is an action and actions require energy—how much energy exactly?—that is precisely what the brain is always trying to predict.
And all
of these systems work in concert. Give the goal direction system a goal and you give the pattern recognition system a purpose and the information acquisition system a target. And why does this target matter so much? Because consciousness is an extremely limited resource.
Every second, millions of bits of information flood into our senses. Yet the human brain can only handle about 7 bits of information at once, and the shortest time it takes to discriminate one set of bits from another is one-eighteenth of a second.7 “By using these figures,” as Csikszentmihalyi explained in Flow, “one concludes that it is possible to process at most 126 bits of information per second.”8
That’s not a lot of information.
To understand what another person is saying takes about 40 bits. If three people are talking at once, we’re maxed out. All other incoming information is invisible to us. But it’s not just other people talking that we miss noticing. The vast majority of everything happening in the world falls into this category. The system is constantly overloaded, so much of reality is constantly invisible.
Much of what remains visible is simply the stuff that scares us. Evolution shaped the brain for survival, so anything that could threaten that survival always grabs our attention. But what else is important for our survival? Our goals, and anything that can help us achieve those goals. Because the brain is a prediction engine and consciousness is a limited resource, fear and goals are the basic building blocks of our reality.
This is the foundational neurobiology, but what Deci and Ryan discovered is that there’s an order to this process.9 For goals to be most effective at shaping perception, there’s a requisite first step. We need to know our needs—that is, our intrinsic motivations—before we can utilize goals as a way of fulfilling those needs. That’s why this book started where it did. With passion and purpose properly stacked atop autonomy and mastery, we’re now positioned to get the maximum benefit from goal setting.
The Art of Impossible Page 5
