Motivate Yourself With The Goldilocks Principle
How can you follow your dreams and stay motivated? Jamens Clear, a famous entrepreneur, has a simple and scientific answer. Everything you need to know to be motivated can be found in the Goldilocks principle.
Even though you still have a lot to learn, Clear says the best way to stay motivated is by working on difficult tasks.
He believes that if you work on a very simple task, you will get bored. If you are working on an extremely difficult task, you will feel helpless.
You need a challenge that is bigger than what you have accomplished so far, so that it can keep you motivated and not take the courage away from you. It is the Goldilocks principle, which is a term coined by the very same James Clear.
It will not just keep you motivated if you find the perfect balance of difficulty. It will also make you happy.
This is how you stay motivated with the Goldilocks principle
An example of this might be playing tennis with someone who has the same skills as you. As the game progresses, you will gain some points and lose others. If you make a bet, you can win the match.
It’s because you’re completely focused. There are no distractions and you are fully immersed in the task at hand. You can handle it. Victory is not guaranteed, but it is possible.
Clear explains that these types of tasks keep you motivated in the long run.
This is why Clear says that working on assignments with the Goldilocks principle is crucial to staying motivated for longer at a time. Feeling down can be due to a tedious or extremely difficult task.
To stay motivated, it is crucial that you find a way to use your skills, almost to the point where you feel challenged, but at the same time, you are able to do so.
Measure your progress
The combination of joy and maximum performance is known as flow, says Clear. As a state of optimal motivation , flow is the state of mind you are in when you are so focused on the task you are doing that the whole world disappears.
Researchers have found that the flow is strictly related to the Goldilocks principle. If you work on a difficult but achievable task, not only will you stay motivated, you will also have a stream of joy.
To achieve maximum performance, however, you need to measure your progress in addition to working on a task with the right level of difficulty. The psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, explains that one of the crucial things for having flow is knowing what you are doing.
To sum things up, we have a fun fact. The Goldilocks principle has its name from history, Goldilocks and the Three Bears . In this story, Guldlok breaks into the bears’ home and tries everything that teases her interest until she finds something she really likes.
She does not make an effort to eat the soup because it is too hot, sit on the chair because it is too big, or lie in bed because it is too hard. Although the story does not have much to do with the Goldilocks principle, its basis is interesting.
