
Joy of Victory OR Fear of Failure.  What's driving you? - dottertrotter

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gyro_robo
A great question. I was watching a Charlie Rose interview with Peter Jackson
from after ROTK came out, before he won the various Oscars for it. He said his
big motivating factor was fear -- fear that he'd wasted hundreds of millions
of other people's money producing the most dreadful movie(s) ever made.

Being a big fan of the LOTR books myself, and feeling that the films'
screenplays and direction were both utter schlock, it occurred to me that this
particular motivation may not be conducive to doing your best work! I was a
fan of his previous films, which seemed to be done for the love of it.

We all try to gain pleasure and avoid pain. Most of us will work harder to
avoid pain, though, making it probably the more powerful motivator. However,
letting it take too large of a role in your life means your quality of life is
negatively affected because of living in constant fear. It becomes a habit,
which helpfully probably keeps you alive, but it does this by making you
extremely risk-averse which also precludes future success! You may not want to
do anything new.

One example of how letting pain-aversion become dominant affects you is that
you may become extremely lazy. Let's say you've already got enough money that
you don't have to do anything. Well, work requires effort, and effort requires
energy expenditure, and that may involve some pain!

Of course previously you may have been excited to do the same kind of work,
when doing it was about gaining pleasure. We tend to behave according to
habits, and I would suggest it's not good to let yourself accidentally become
habituated to using fear as a motivating factor, because it will creep into
all facets of your life.

So, very recently, I have consciously been trying to not react with fear and
panic in situations where I normally would. There are so many situations that
are really no big deal, except for the mental model we use which we have
trained ourselves to freak out over.

I'm getting to think that the majority of our large-scale behavior is due to
unconscious decisions, and that we decide very little of importance
consciously. So, in order to effect change, we may need to train and condition
our unconscious via emotional responses. Almost like Pavlov-dogging yourself,
do multiple things you already _like_ in conjunction with some other behavior
and you reinforce it: E.g. playing music and drinking Coke while hanging out
with friends at the same time you're coding will reinforce your love of
coding. Constantly think of negatives while coding and pretty soon you won't
want to code on that project anymore, and maybe at all for a while!

I know this sounds cheap and gimmicky but I think it's very likely to be the
case that our strings are pulled by our unconscious. See the Precognitive
Carousel: <http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1422464>

Also see this book on NLP (some of the formatting seems off from OCRing):
<http://www.scribd.com/doc/1984/Neuro-Linguistic-Programming-Using-Your-Brain-
for-a-Change-Richard-Bandler-NLP>

If you don't have a plan for your unconscious/subconscious drives, you can bet
others do -- advertisers, religious and political leaders, and random
authority figures will try to use pain (mostly) and pleasure to get you to
feel like behaving the way they want you to.

I'm aghast when I realize how much of my childhood was actually a job as a
field sales representative for Mattel. They recruited me via television
cartoons (ads) to direct my parents' income to their revenue stream, in
exchange for various "goods" now seen only on Robot Chicken.

(World of Warcraft is the new Mattel, and they are Skinner-boxing away years
of people's lives.)

By the same token, when you as a founder are rich enough to never have to work
again to maintain your previous standard of living, you'll find all sorts of
expensive toys pushed on you, playing on the same ingrained habits from your
childhood. You've been trained to be fearful so that someone can sell you a
temporary band-aid. (There are evolutionary reasons why it's easier to push
people toward fearfulness and pessimism -- ice age conditions were harsh! The
constant worriers didn't have much fun, but they stayed alive. We're the
descendants of people who got up and checked that the cave door was locked 57
times a night so sabretooth tigers didn't eat them.)

TV advertising now has two main themes: 1. "Look at these hot chicks -- now
buy our product!" And 2. "You're not buying our product? No wonder hot chicks
don't want you, fatass." Survival is a given in our society so the next most
monumental drive is reproduction. Watch how many people who want money from
you try to play on this. Don't be manipulated into fearfulness and insecurity.

If you're still young, try to be aware of when something is having an effect
on how you _feel_ about something. If you can see how your feelings are
_starting_ to change on something, you may be able to counteract it before a
pattern sets in. If you're older, you probably have to un-do a lot of stuff
that's conditioned you without you even realizing it.

~~~
juliob
This cognitive carousel thing is interesting, but the whole thing seems
flawed. Or at least there's not enough information on that page.

~~~
gyro_robo
Here's someone's summary from reddit:

"[They already had implants in their brains, and he] gave them a slideshow to
watch, with a button to push to advance to the next slide. But the button was
fake. What really moved the slide was a motor potential building in the brain
before they were aware of the desire to move it. It unnerved the patients,
because it seemed to them as if the projector was always advancing just before
they'd consciously decided to advance it."

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dottertrotter
A few months ago when I first got my start up going, it was the thoughts of a
successful acquisition or of building a profitable company that kept me awake
at nights programming. But now that the company is starting to get going and
I'm signing up users, I find myself more driven by the fear of failure than
anything else. I'm terrified that if it doesn't work those that supported me
in this venture will think I'm crazy when another idea pops in my head (and it
undoubtedly will). Anyone feeling the same way and if so which do you feel is
a better motivator?

~~~
madanella
It makes sense that hope would drive the desire to start a project and that
fear would drive the desire to complete it. I think hope is harder to rely on,
but it's better in the end. Fear tends to become negative in many ways.

I think all entrepreneurs exist with both motivations constantly in flux.

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cwilbur
Neither. Hope that I can build a career that doesn't suck.

I'm not in this to cash in the company. I'm in this to build a company I want
to work for. Maybe that counts as "joy of victory."

I'm not afraid of failure; the last time I tried this, I failed. I'm being
smarter about it this time.

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mattjaynes
When I ask myself that question, the only thing that comes to mind is freedom.
So I guess a bit of both - joy of secured freedom (a profitable company) and
fear of losing my freedom (having to get an office job again).

After experiencing the freedom of working exactly the way I want to (through
the night, sleep during day, days off if I need them), it feels me with huge
dread to think of going back to answering to a 'boss'. Ugh.

So I guess I'm more heavily weighted in the fear of losing my current freedom.

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johnm
"All of the above and more".

IMHO, it's much more critical a question as to how one deals with the
pressures that come up over time. I.e., do one's anxieties drive dysfunctional
behavior -- is the stress used as an excuse to assuage one's own anxiety to
the detriment of the play or is it used as indicators of factors that need to
be addressed or what?

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omouse
Ugh, I just lost my comment when I upvoted a comment.

...I'm driven by the joy of creating something that I can use on a daily
basis. Also a bit of a fear that I'll look like an idiot when I've already
told 15-25 people about what I'm working on. And now I've gone and told all of
news.YC. Crap...I guess I should get back to work then :P

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gyro_robo
4 comments and 2 points? C'mon, people, don't forget to vote up the _article_
so other people see it. The top comment has 5 points, which is what the
article should have, if it's worth commenting on!

