Like a lot of people, I struggle constantly with motivation. This is especially painful in the case of large goals, such as my goal to learn Japanese. There are plenty of us out there who did great in school but now find it impossible to finish projects that, considering the skills required, we are definitely capable of finishing. Why do people like me struggle so much to do big things?
A Trickle of Successes
School was designed to introduce modular topics one-by-one. This week, we do the chapter on set theory. Next week, we do the chapter on proof by induction. Things are laid out gradually so that often, we don’t even notice the synthesis of ideas occurring.
All the same, this chapterwise method of tackling problems provides a gradual indication of progress. The student sees the unread portion of the book get smaller. They have a stack of graded homework and exams, a series of milestones met and overcome. It may not feel like they’ve learned much of anything, depending on how gradually the class moves, but the increase in competency is there, and there are reams of tests and homework to prove it.
So when things like exams are removed from the equation—for example, when taking on a non-academic project, or studying a difficult subject independently—the indication of progress becomes more abstract. For students who did very well while receiving periodic feedback, the lack of any authoritative “grade” can be crippling.
Perhaps for some, it’s terrifying: trying to proceed through an unknown space with zero guidance in order to eke out some knowledge against all odds. For myself, it’s boring. On any given project, when the steady stream of small-but-important successes evaporates, I lose motivation to continue. How could I ever be good at this thing? I haven’t made appreciable progress on it since X days ago! There’s no way I’ll ever complete this.
It’s a crappy way to feel, and an easy trap to fall into.
Cheat Code: The Sunk Cost Fallacy
What we need is to combat this viewpoint that progress isn’t happening. One thing that can be weaponized in the fight against your pessimist brain is, oddly enough, the sunk cost fallacy. This is a slight tweak on some common advice that I learned from NaNoWriMo, which runs as such: tell all your friends that you’re making a thing so that you’re afraid to make excuses when you quit. If you’re the type who’s petrified of letting others down, that can be a pretty effective trick!
Sometimes though, you have a goal which transcends the notion of “being done.” Learning Japanese is one such goal. I will literally never know everything there is to know about Japanese, and that’s totally fine! But I can’t tell my friends when I’m done. I can’t fulfill that promise to anyone because that would be an insane goal to set.
This is when time-tracking can be your friend. I installed an app called Jiffy to help me track time spent on the things I want to accomplish. With a single tap, I start a timer every time I do a studying-related thing. Next time I’m feeling like maybe Japanese isn’t for me, I can look at the accumulated amount of time spent on this goal and say, “Andrew! You’ve studied for 7 hours so far this year!” Such reflection is, on the one hand, a pat on the back. I’ve stayed dedicated enough to track 7 hours of time learning kanji, reviewing vocab, and trying to wrap my head around the difference between これ and この. By the end of the year, I’ll be able to say, “Andrew! You’ve studied for 114 hours so far this year!” Then it becomes a challenge to yourself: you’ve been at it this long, spent hundreds of hours on your goal, are you really gonna be a sucker and quit now?
Same Cheat Code, Different Skin: Gamification
Okay, maybe seeing the hours of your life you’ve traded in pursuit of a learning goal isn’t convincing enough. Maybe you’d rather collect points and earn high combo modifiers or whatever rhythm game the kids are on about these days. I’m the kind of person who likes to keep study streaks going as long as I can, because that’s the only way to make something into a habit!
For this, I have a different app: Loop Habit Tracker. With this, I set up a variety of things I’d like to do on a regular basis. Right now, I’ve got reminders every day to learn 20 items on WaniKani, do all of my WaniKani reviews, learn some grammar, do all of my grammar reviews, and drill my kana handwriting (the Japanese syllabaries). My phone will pester me every morning: “🎵 do you wanna learn some graaaammar? maybe you could learn new woooords 🎵” If I want to keep my streak going, I need to fulfill the task set by my Habit Tracker so I can check the box!
It’s similar to the notion of having your friends keep you accountable, but you wouldn’t want to bug your friends with these tiny day-to-day things. Instead, you set a goal for how frequently you want to do these things, and use the checkbox to keep yourself honest.
There are certainly more involved apps for this, like RPG habit trackers, which may prove even more motivational. For some, watching the progress bars fill up with their imaginary XP is satisfying enough to keep them going. I personally find it hard to assign XP values for things, but others certainly have plenty of success with those sorts of things.
Test Your Powers
Finally, there’s a general piece of advice that doesn’t require an app or a life overhaul or anything like that. To put it simply: test yourself, and do it often. The only way to gauge whether your proficiency is increasing is to actually try and do the thing you’re learning! Reading theory in a vacuum, or in my case, learning a bunch of vocab without learning how to put it together, is dreadful for motivation. When I started actually trying to read Japanese sentences however, the satisfaction was tremendous. Even though I am still very early in my grammar learning journey, seeing my years of kanji studying put to practical use has done wonders for keeping me excited about the language.
So whether it’s learning a language, making a game, writing a book, what-have-you, it’s important to get out and find ways to assess your own progress. It doesn’t have to be concrete; just sitting down for a moment every week and taking stock of the knitty gritty things you’ve done since the start of your journey can make all the difference in keeping you motivated.
Finally
I’d love to hear how any of you deal with keeping up motivation, especially on long-running projects and tasks. Drop a comment below or check out my other modes of contact on the about page if you’d like to discuss strategy!
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