I watched the video.
I've heard this called your "
passion quotient".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passion_quotient
Slightly different, but I think it helps illuminate this whole area of motivation and drive a little better.
Here's the thing, if you want to get kids to focus more in school, you have to make them know on an emotional level, that what they are learning is valuable, and the rewards are high.
Drive is in large part the anticipation of reward instilled deep in someone's emotional brain. Even in the face of harsh obstacles, that goal in their mind releases
dopamine, a reward chemical that gets released in huge amounts when you take crack. The anticipation of reward is like crack. What is ADD medication? All it is is Dopamine reuptake inhibitor.
So if you don't believe you have any hope, that you are talentless and that the future is bleak, you won't have that internal vision that leads you forward and gives you the impetus to push through the challenges.
Likewise,
our brains conserve energy unless we show our brain on a deep emotional level that there's a
payoff for expending the energy.
I read a couple books that were similar, one was called The Talent Code, the other was Talent is Overrated. In one of them they tried to answer the question of what gives someone an internal drive to do something. Just as Angela Duckworth says in the above video, she doesn't really understand what gives someone that deeply instilled drive to achieve.
In one of the talent books they talk about children who are raised last in families are often more driven, because their
environment during childhood was more harsh, sending a signal to their emotional brain that life is tough, and they must work hard to survive.
They also talk about very successful schools for tennis, and other specialties. The really good ones tend to be in dilapidated buildings, and crappy environments. Essentially, when we are in a crappy environment, the argument is that we will work harder to get out of it. Our brains look around and realize that thing suck, so we expend energy and are very driven.
This is probably the opposite impulse of dopamine. It's an away-from emotion.
another pearl I gleaned from reading these books is that the most important thing for children is identifying with a group they want to become a part of. This is one of the single biggest triggers in the brain for drive. An example of this
There is another concept called "
the holy shit effect" when someone from your same background, geographical area, culture, and maybe age, makes an immense achievement. What happens then is the person seeing this goes "holy shit, I could have done that!". And then tons of people start working towards that goal and many succeed. An example of this is a small island in the carribean where one person from that island made it into the major leagues in america.
Guess what happened? A few years later a bunch more kids from that island were in the majors in America as well. Because they knew they could do it, identified their group as being talented, and worked their ass of to get there because they
perceived the reward to be high.
The "holy shit effect" also occurred after the first person to run a four minute mile. All of a sudden, many others were running a four minute mile, but before nobody did it.
On a similar note I was reading a book about ADD, and the author took a totally pro-medication stance. He had many case studies of people who had ADD. One example was of a highschool boy who excelled at ice hockey, yet was doing terrible at school. Even if he tried to focus he would fall asleep in class, and his mind could barely stay on topic.
But when it came to ice hockey the kid was absolutely obsessed. He would make sure all his gear was perfectly cleaned, treating them like ritual objects, he would also obsessively study the moves of hockey players on film, and he practiced all the time.
The author of course saw it as a disorder and thought that they should pop pills into the kids mouth....
But lets think about this as rational adults. Our brains have limited resources. This is why they conserve energy.
The KEY in all of this is to somehow tap a button that unleashes our brain's energy reserves. But our brains aren't stupid.
This kid loves hockey. And from an evolutionary perspective, hockey resembles hunting/tribal warfare much more than sitting in some stupid class reading Maya Angelou's "I know why the caged bird sings".
If his emotional brain could talk it would say something like "If I get better at hockey, my tribe will be more safe, and I will have a greater chance of inseminating the neighboring tribe's women we conquer, and also taking their livestock and precious jewels."
His cognitive resources are going to hockey, not schoolwork that has no relevance to his current or future life. Plus the kid may not have a high aptitude for most school work. Even if he did spend 4 hours a night studying, would he still compete with the nerdy kid who can buzz through calculus no sweat?
And that's one of the problems with the above video is that it assumes that everyone should graduate college, that everyone should be able to complete x. Maybe it was a good thing those people quit, so that they could pursue something that was more valuable. Why waste time in college if you can work somewhere abroad and score ten times more pussy?
We should have
RVF talks, where the perspective is that of a cash and pussy minded man raging with testosterone and masculinity.
What you should really ask yourself is "
what is worth my sustained effort? What will give me the biggest pay off?" Don't just assume that your current course is correct. Perhaps it isn't. If it is, then you need to re adjust the way you look at it. Most men want lots of sex with hot females. Fame and money are the two main avenues to this.
Being in an adverse environment may also provide that away-from "stick" type motivation to propel you forward. Don't get fat and satiated like the average american.
