Motivation Boost: Stimulus

Be motivated or not be? That is the question. Had you ever thought about what stimulus in your life triggers your motivation?

Disclaimer:

Congratulations, you are here. At this point, you have to open your mind. Maybe some stuff here is personal and controversial. I will show you some related topics with things that usually motivates me.

To understant what is the firstRule you can check my prevous post.

What Is your space?

I noticed that it is very important to build a motivational space. Where comfort and inspiration flow.

For me, it was interesting to pay some attention to details. Pay attention to how your brain works, and how you react to all these different stimulus from your private environment.

Where do you sit? How long? Do you seat in the correct position? Should you be more time stand up? What is your background image? What do you have in your bookmarks? Does your computer setup motivates you? What about your keyboard? Or your screen? do you need more light? More ventilation? More silence? Should you separate that “special space” from your workspace? Have you decided how is this space allready defined, or the house owner has decided for you?

The more owner you feel of your experience, the freer you will feel and the more motivated you will be.Define your own experience, and build your own space.

The act to seat in your computer must go from:

• Mmmm…let’s turn on my computed and do some stuff…
  To:
• Well, I’m going to get on my fucking X-Wing to destroy the Empire.

Not only your space, your mind too!

Do you have the bed made? Do you have a clean space? Your car is clean? Do you have dishes to wash? Even if you like or not, our life is a reflection of our mind. If you keep your environment organized, you will feel more fullness. And feeling full and without the pressure of having pending background thoughts helps you think and see better.

This also applies to your commitments. Free yourself from them, only then you will move forward.

World Wide Web as a service

We live in an overclocked world. The x1.5 speed podcast era. Videos, live streams, opinions, stories… and we move faster and faster. We are under the big rain of the information, humans have never been affected by this rain before.
 
Do you remember when your parents told you: Do not be much time watching the TV or playing the console! You will burn your brain. They had no idea what was coming next. Their generation was the last that born “disconnected”. 

We go fast, and this rain will change us over the decades, but do not panic. You can make the information to be at the service of your purposes.

To focus on this topic, the firstRule: you have a short time to learn and discover valuable stuff. I decided to treat the time I decided to dedicate to my apprenticeship as a cyber cafe time, the price for each minute is paid.

Only you can decide if you want to waste it making scroll down or following and strategy.

Drop the box

You must get rid of your past self in other to move on.

In my case, this means: empty the cup. How many things you have annotated but you will never use? How many bookmarks? How many pocket stuff? How many Trello boards? Why do you have them if you never are going to read? Get rid of all that.

But, I had resources that someday will be useful to consult… Yeah, sure. How? making ctrl + f? Had you even read it?. I decided to centralize all my resources in a single store, in which I can search. And I decided that I only store really useful content, that had been processed first. You will potentially need these resources in the future to refresh something or to share with someone.

If you haven’t realized yet that you have digital diogenes syndrome, try to delete everything you got 🙂.

Take in mind that it’s different to have a pending queue of potentially interesting stuff to read than to store the processed one. This is the strategy I follow in the store part. In the queue part, I make other decisions and other flow based on my custom usage of GTD.

Technology interactions

Analyze every single interaction you make with the technology as a maniac.

How many times do you open the fridge? When I was younger, I was used to opening the fridge every time I was in the kitchen, and every time I arrive home. For what? Maybe to check the light inside correctly turn on, or to check if there are gnomes inside… Who knows? I had this bad habit, a waste of time, and energy.

So, How many times do you check your phone? And for what? Do you wait for some a gnome’s push notification? For me Its the same problem.

What apps do you have on your smartphone? For what? Wich ones are closed to your fingers? Do you know that the most expensive things in this world are the ideas? How many milliseconds do you need to write and Idea? How many distracting push notifications you have? How many you need? Make your smartphone experience ergonomic and useful to the firstRule. It’s a powerful tool that you have every time with you.

Take a minute to think about how many time you invest each day on the smartphone. You can use Google Digital Wellbeing to have real stats.

And know to think about smartphone free people, your grandfather for example. He was free at your age. He wasn’t forced to buy, constantly check, carry, transport, or charge a smartphone. He was not a slave of that technology, he was free. Do not be a hostage of the technology. Remember that you decided to include a smartphone into your life to add value, not to waste your time and energy. Treat it as a service, not as an obligation.

Native digital

You be supposed to be a native digital, you should master the information stream. If you do not know how, here are some tips:

Youtube

Do you know that people upload interesting videos? Not only memes and music but also interesting stuff. Do you know how much interesting information you are losing? each day… The solution here seems simple. Use the subscribe button. Ok. I subscribe to the content I want. But the Youtube feed. It’s too high, I was subscribed to more than 400 channels when I started this. Damm, that’s seems too much information.

Solution: Divide and conquer. I decided to create a account only for apprenship. This means that in that feed I only have potential interesting content from the learning channels I decided to follow. Developers channel, interesting companies, conferences, and so on. 
To keep the focus on this content, I use the https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions stream. This helps me to split this kind of stuff with the random stream of my previous account.

In future steps, I dedicated reducing my random stream of 400 channels to less than 40. This helps me a lot to only have the distractions and disconnections I want. On-demand and only with content based on my interest.

On the apprenship account. I fond that the streams give me the possibility to subscribe to a very interesting stream, in which I can get noticed to every single relevant tech stuff, daily. Of course, I do not reproduce all these daily videos. But Know I have the control, and I’m in touch with the tech world stream I had built based on my interest. I have the possibility to decide which Items are relevant and what to see but keeping the focus.

The Youtube algorithms:

There are two types of recommended feeds by the Youtube algorithm:

• First: The video related content, known as the “Up next” feed. This can be found on the right of the screen in each Youtube video. If you want to go in deep into a topic, you can find very relevant stuff here.

• Second: https://www.youtube.com/ recommendations. This is more based on your history and the types of content you consume. Some times you will find new channels and relevant videos here. This one can be easily corrupted if you do forget to change between personal/apprenship account. But It’s restored if you use it correctly.

RSS

This is very old and it’s very useful. I use Feedly to manage all my RSS feeds.

The idea is the same that the Youtube stream. Here The idea its to create your own custom information stream. Very useful to keep in touch with content from: companies, developers, publications, frameworks, languages, and newsletters.

The most value I get here is that you do not need to manually check for content. Is that content arrives at you.

Other streams

I do the same with other streams like Twitter, Github, Meetup, Goodreads, Courses platforms, communities, conferences, job offers, etc. There is a big world outside, create your own strategy to consume, and the possibility to get the information. Before that, you decide which information discard and in what to pay more attention to.

Motivation Stimulus at work

Make sure you are involved in challenging projects aligned with your goals. This is a big part of your life that drains much time and energy. It condition the majority of your happiness and your apprenticeship. This motivation pilar must be solid. Remember that your work is a deal, the balance between your obligations and efforts must be aligned with the outputs.

Friends/Community

Learn from others’ motivations, ask yourself: What motivates anyone? What is the purpose or their contributions? Should you do the same? or you just want to do whatever you want? If you feel aligned with other’s motivations, this can ve very interesting. Try to make synergy with them.