Motivation Unveiled: Effort, Dopamine, and Sustainable Drive

You can tell yourself that the effort part is the good part. It’s painful, it doesn’t feel good, but I’m focused on this. I’m going to start to access the reward. When we focus only on the trophy, only on the grade, only on the win, you undermine that entire process. The ability to access the pleasure from effort is the most powerful aspect of dopamine.

Hard work is hard. Generally, most people don’t like working hard. Some people do, but most people work hard in order to achieve some end goal. End goals are terrific and rewards are terrific, whether or not they are monetary, social or any kind. However, working hard at something for sake of a reward that comes afterward can make the hard work much more challenging and make as much less likely to lean into hard work in the future.

A Really Good Experiment

There’s a classic experiment done at Stanford many years ago in which children in nursery school and kindergarten drew pictures. They drew pictures because they liked to draw. The researchers took kids that liked to draw, and they started giving them a reward for drawing. The reward generally was something that a young child would find rewarding.

Then they stopped giving them the reward, and what they found is that the children had a much lower tendency to draw on their own. This was an activity that, prior to receiving a reward, the children intrinsically enjoyed and selected to do.

What this relates to is the so-called intrinsic versus extrinsic reinforcement. When we receive rewards, even if we give ourselves rewards for something, we tend to associate less pleasure with the actual activity itself that evoked the reward. If you get a peak in dopamine from a reward, it’s going to lower your baseline, and the cognitive interpretation is that you didn’t really do the activity because you enjoyed the activity, you did it for the reward.

This is the antithesis of growth mindset.

Growth Mindset

A growth mindset is the striving to be better, to be in this mindset of “I’m not there yet,” but striving itself is the end goal. And that delivers you to tremendous performance that’s been observed over and over again. People that have a growth mindset end up performing very well because they are focused on the effort itself. And all of us can cultivate a growth mindset.

The neural mechanism of cultivating a growth mindset involves learning to access the rewards from effort and doing. And that’s hard to do because you have to tell yourself — This effort is great, this effort is pleasurable — even though you might actually be in a state of physical pain from the exercise or just want to stop whatever you’re doing. But by forcing yourself again and again to do the thing, you find over time that you can evoke dopamine release from the friction and the challenge that you happen to be in.

You completely eliminate the ability to generate those circuits and that rewarding process of being able to reward friction while in effort if you are focused only on the goal that comes at the end.

Effort Is The Good Part

So if you say — I’m going to do this very hard thing and I’m going to push for that goal that comes later — you not only enjoy the process of what you’re doing less, you actually make it more painful while you’re engaging in it. You make yourself less efficient at it because if you were able to access dopamine while in effort — dopamine has all these incredible properties of increasing the amount of energy in our body and in our mind, our ability to focus — but also, you are undermining your ability to lean back into that activity the next time. But the next time, you need twice as much coffee and three times as much loud music just to do the thing.

You can tell yourself that the effort part is the good part. You will find the reward, meaning the dopamine release inside of effort if you repeat that over and over again. Then it starts to become reflexive for all types of efforts. In those moments of the most intense friction, you tell yourself, “This is very painful and because it’s painful, it will evoke an increase in dopamine release later, meaning it will increase my baseline in dopamine”. Also, tell yourself that you are doing it by choice and you are doing it because you love it.

Understanding the relationship between effort, dopamine, and sustainable drive is crucial for achieving long-term success. By embracing the process of hard work and finding pleasure in the effort itself, rather than solely focusing on external rewards, we can cultivate a growth mindset and enhance our performance. It is through repeated practice and reframing our perspective on effort that we can tap into the power of dopamine and develop a sustainable drive towards our goals. Remember that the effort part is the good part and embrace the journey of growth and self-improvement.

Huberman Lab