Unlocking the Secret to Motivation: The Surprising Truth About Dopamine

I will suggest a protocol by which you can achieve a better relationship to your activities and to your dopamine system. In fact, it will help tune up your dopamine system for discipline, hard work, and motivation. However, because of the way that dopamine relates to our perception of time, working hard at something for sake of a reward that comes afterward can make the hard work much more challenging and make us much less likely to lean into hard work in the future. When we engage in an activity let's say school or hard work of any kind or exercise because of the reward we are going to give ourselves a receive at the end the trophy the sundae the meal whatever it happens to be we actually are extending the time bin over which we are analyzing or perceiving that experience and because the reward comes at the end we start to dissociate the neural circuits for dopamine and reward that would have normally been active during the activity and because it all arrives at the end over time we have the experience of less and less pleasure from that particular activity while we are doing it. Now this is the antithesis of growth mindset my colleague at Stanford Carol Dweck as many of you know has come up with this incredible theory and principle and it actually goes beyond theory and principle called growth mindset which is this striving to be better to be in this mindset of I'm not there yet but striving itself is the end goal and that of course delivers you to tremendous performance has been observed over and over and over again that people that have growth mindset kids that have growth mindset end up performing very well because they're focused on the effort itself and all of us can cultivate growth mindset.