How to persist

#每日写点# cognition improvement#《精进》# can't do persistence, then start with concentration

Many friends who see me will say that your willpower is really strong. Can keep writing a little every day. It seems that as long as there is enough willpower, it will be easy to accomplish one thing for a long time. Personally, I don’t think so. Willpower is important, but willpower alone is not enough for the motivation to do one thing for a long time, because willpower is like a rubber band. It has an upper limit. Once it exceeds this If the upper limit is reached, the rubber band will break. Therefore, you will encounter situations where you persist for a period of time and give up.

So how can we persist in doing one thing for a long time?

Psychologist Edward Deci found through experiments that driven by the internal motivation of interest, people perform better in completing the same task than driven by material rewards. In other words, interest and passion are what drives us to persist in doing one thing for a long time.

For example, the reason why I can keep writing a little bit every day (of course I don’t write well) is because doing this can motivate me to continuously learn new knowledge, and mastering new knowledge can expand my cognitive boundaries. I output by writing a little bit to strengthen my learning effect. This process makes me happy.

Maybe some friends would say, I also want to know what my interests are, so I tried a lot, but what if I can’t find it?

Is there any way to help me find my real interest?

One is to give up the obsession with "interest" and do not regard "interest" as a prerequisite for doing things. As mentioned last week, learning accumulation usually presents the characteristics of an S-shaped curve.The same is true for the search for interest. I would rather do something that I don’t particularly like but seem challenging, or do something that few people do but seem meaningful, and gritted my teeth for a while. , May be able to break the closed loop of the infinite loop and open a new virtuous circle. The embodied cognition in psychology tells us that actions can affect our thinking. Therefore, we can adjust the order. It is no longer asking to be interested first and then working hard, but working hard first and then having fun and love in the process of working hard. .

The second is to increase the depth of "infiltration": try to fully immerse yourself in what you are doing, and stimulate interest with warm emotions and good psychological experience. In the book "The Elephant and the Elephant Riding Man", the ideal brain is described as an elephant rider and an elephant is used to describe the perceptual brain. When the elephant functions, the elephant rider cannot control it. So you can stimulate interest by bypassing the elephant rider and directly stimulating the elephant.

The third is to give space for autonomy and turn passive into active. There is a well-known theory in psychology called "self-determination", which says that people have three basic psychological needs, namely, the need for autonomy, the need for ability, and the need for belonging. If these needs are met, then people will become more Work and study proactively, actively and happily. Among them, autonomy is very important. The stronger the autonomy, the more interest can be stimulated. But in the real work and life, we will find that many times we have very little space for autonomy, and we may also be constrained and constrained everywhere. Then even if we are interested at first, this passion may be slowly worn away. If you want to change this situation, the best way is to use the spirit of exploration to find free space outside the bounds, so as to expand your own new territory.

When doing something, do not ask if you are interested, but do it first, and do it with a lot of commitment and concentration, and turn a passive thing into an active one, then you may do more and more There is a taste, and stick to it without pain at all. You don’t need willpower to drag you away, you just go forward,I ran a long way.