I read the introduction and Part 1, and am going to save the rest for later once I have more time. Really interesting stuff so far! It mirrors my experience (even the timing of when you experienced a sudden jump in intrinsic motivation) to a T. I've had times where I've worked for 3-4 months, 7 days a week for upwards of 14 hours a day on a project, and others when I can't bring myself to spend more than an hour or two (even on the same project).
As far as reading (something I never did outside of compulsion until I was 18), somehow I've become very intrinsically motivated to become an avid reader of extremely dense, and culturally important texts. I wouldn't at all be surprised if I found an exact description of what happened when I return to this article.
This is great! I really enjoy this sort of post where someone shares what they've learned in an earnest but humble way.
As I was reading through the sections on autonomy and competence, I was thinking to myself, "but I have high autonomy and competence, yet I have terribly low intrinsic motivation these days"...then I got to the part on relatedness and it made sense. The most social connectedness I ever felt was during school and the early days of social media. These days, although I still have friends, I feel less truly connected to people. It's a hard problem to fix. I know a lot of other people these days have the same problem.
Nice, please do more literature reviews. This adds to the flow state literature, I think. If the task itself is painful, you can't submerge yourself in it. If you do, it hurts - because in the flow state you forget about all the external stuff by definition, so you're left with the inherent pain of the task.
I think what things exactly one develops intrinsic motivation for is not clear based on this. You kind of passed over this point, but you said you studied because you were good at it. But people are passionate about things they aren't good at, e.g. dancing or painting, just because they find them rewarding. So reward must come from somewhere else, at least in part. Maybe it's just to do with one's natural neural structure or whatever; some people like highly systemizing thinking, or problem solving, or thinking about relationships or whatever, because they're just wired like that. And then maybe the skill follows from the association between dopamine and learning.
(This implies you can discover natural talents, even after you previously disliked them, by finally getting good enough to breach that skill barrier where you feel rewarded. Of course, few people pursue things long enough for that. Although many passionate people seem to have felt passionate from the beginning, they may just be the only ones who stuck with it long enough. Maybe that's why people start to like things after doing them for a while and getting good; not because of the skill, but because the skill enabled them to learn, and somehow they ended up tapping into that hard-wired enjoyment of that kind of activity. I studied something quantitative in college and really disliked it; I hoped it would get better as I developed my skill at it; I ended up graduating with honors, but still hating it. And not because of burn-out, I'm fairly confident. This probably isn't a very satisfying theory, if what you enjoy is just random. But maybe that's the case.)
I read the introduction and Part 1, and am going to save the rest for later once I have more time. Really interesting stuff so far! It mirrors my experience (even the timing of when you experienced a sudden jump in intrinsic motivation) to a T. I've had times where I've worked for 3-4 months, 7 days a week for upwards of 14 hours a day on a project, and others when I can't bring myself to spend more than an hour or two (even on the same project).
As far as reading (something I never did outside of compulsion until I was 18), somehow I've become very intrinsically motivated to become an avid reader of extremely dense, and culturally important texts. I wouldn't at all be surprised if I found an exact description of what happened when I return to this article.
This is great! I really enjoy this sort of post where someone shares what they've learned in an earnest but humble way.
As I was reading through the sections on autonomy and competence, I was thinking to myself, "but I have high autonomy and competence, yet I have terribly low intrinsic motivation these days"...then I got to the part on relatedness and it made sense. The most social connectedness I ever felt was during school and the early days of social media. These days, although I still have friends, I feel less truly connected to people. It's a hard problem to fix. I know a lot of other people these days have the same problem.
Nice, please do more literature reviews. This adds to the flow state literature, I think. If the task itself is painful, you can't submerge yourself in it. If you do, it hurts - because in the flow state you forget about all the external stuff by definition, so you're left with the inherent pain of the task.
I think what things exactly one develops intrinsic motivation for is not clear based on this. You kind of passed over this point, but you said you studied because you were good at it. But people are passionate about things they aren't good at, e.g. dancing or painting, just because they find them rewarding. So reward must come from somewhere else, at least in part. Maybe it's just to do with one's natural neural structure or whatever; some people like highly systemizing thinking, or problem solving, or thinking about relationships or whatever, because they're just wired like that. And then maybe the skill follows from the association between dopamine and learning.
(This implies you can discover natural talents, even after you previously disliked them, by finally getting good enough to breach that skill barrier where you feel rewarded. Of course, few people pursue things long enough for that. Although many passionate people seem to have felt passionate from the beginning, they may just be the only ones who stuck with it long enough. Maybe that's why people start to like things after doing them for a while and getting good; not because of the skill, but because the skill enabled them to learn, and somehow they ended up tapping into that hard-wired enjoyment of that kind of activity. I studied something quantitative in college and really disliked it; I hoped it would get better as I developed my skill at it; I ended up graduating with honors, but still hating it. And not because of burn-out, I'm fairly confident. This probably isn't a very satisfying theory, if what you enjoy is just random. But maybe that's the case.)
Sorry, I'm stoned and rambling.