The juice-water-sips experiments
Imagine being connected to a bunch of electrodes measuring your pleasure center (nucleus accumbens) reaction to getting a juice or water drink through the tube.
One group gets juice and water in a predictable pattern.
Another one gets them in a totally random pattern.
Guess which one had a much stronger reaction in the pleasure center? Obviously, the one that kept being surprised.
(McClure SM, York MK, Montague PR. The Neural Substrates of Reward Processing in Humans: The Modern Role of fMRI. The Neuroscientist. 2004;10(3):260-268. doi:10.1177/1073858404263526)
Watch out for the surprise you chose
Our brain reacts stronger to surprise. It triggers learning.
It says “look! Something new! We need to actually think about it to ensure it is not a treat!”
When you are expecting failure but getting positively surprised, it triggers a huge amount of happiness all around your brain's chemistry.
The opposite works too, unfortunately.
Expecting to win, all pumped up, only to see the “treat” pass away. This hurts.
Uncomfortable adaptation to success
Objectively, people who think lower about their achievements, and lower about their effects, reach further in life. Why?
It is an unconscious adaptation to life as it is.
Being unhappy about their results, and thinking low about their achievements puts them in an environment of expecting failure, but experiencing success.
A strong addiction often ends up in psychotherapy with the words “Why I feel so low, even though I should be happy with where I am”.
I guess we can’t have everything.
Your brain can’t stand the silence
If you stop pumping yourself up and trying to be as motivated as possible, you may end up in a weird spot, when you know you “WANT” to do this, but can’t encourage yourself as you always did.
The human brain (and generative AI like ChatGPT) are not rational, they are rationalizers.
Your brain will think of a better source of “why” when you will stop lying to yourself.
Stop lying to yourself
Self-comforting thoughts are a drug, that gets you nowhere nice.
Instead, be realistic. Try, but expect that today, as the last 400 days, is not the day of seeing success. Expect only hard work, only struggle, only minimal progress - if any.
Once in a while, when you actually succeed at something, it will boost your motivation for a long long time.
Fingers crossed!
Personally, I am part software-engineer, part behavioral psychology enthusiast, part entrepreneur with experience bootstraping 7-figure businesses. I've spent most of my life programming computers and running IT projects, but the biggest challenges I found were in understanding the nature of human behavior and its triggers.