It’s been a depressingly warm winter to this point, but we finally got a bit of snow, and I was able to get out cross-country skiing yesterday for only the third time this season. This involved a bit of a scramble— I had to be on campus until nearly 2pm, and there’s not a lot of daylight left after that— and was only possible because The Pip was home sick for the day, so I didn’t need to worry about making sure he got home from school at 3:30. But it was worth it— very cold and barely enough snow, but a great way to burn off some frustration and calories at the same time.
This represents a vast improvement over my other principal option for winter exercise, which is biking to nowhere. I’ve got an exercise bike in the basement, and a plasma TV with streaming services, and can go down there to get a bit of exercise and catch up on pop culture at the same time.
That’s a much less attractive option in a lot of ways, and in particular varies a lot based on what’s currently available. At the moment, I have an easy time getting my fake miles in on Friday or Saturday when there’s a new episode of Reacher on Amazon Prime, but outside of that I’m struggling to find something I want to watch enough to make biking-to-nowhere appealing.
I was thinking about this yesterday while I was skiing, and ended up coming back to something that was said on ex-Twitter a little while ago that has stuck with me well past the point where I could find the original source. (I think it was Rob Henderson or a retweet by him, but it was long enough ago that it’s hopeless to track down.) The tweet in question was something like “In a lot of situations, willpower is more important than motivation. Motivation is finding a way to want to do a thing, but willpower is making sure it gets done even when you don’t want to.”
I hadn’t really thought about that distinction before, but I think there’s really something to that, and it maps very well onto my experience with exercise. I enjoy cross-country skiing a lot, so I’ll go to some lengths to find ways to do that— squeezing ski runs in between classes and meetings, and that kind of thing. The same is true for basketball (it’s killing me that the only time that would work for the class I’m teaching this term precludes my playing in the regular faculty/staff/student pick-up game), and also actual biking on the streets and bike paths around here (to a somewhat lesser extent).
The exercise bike, on the other hand, is way more subject to a generalized feeling of “I don’ WANNA…” The motivation isn’t there to anything like the same degree, and it’s easy to start inventing excuses for not getting the fake miles in. I recognize the importance of doing it in both an intellectual and a practical sense— I really do feel better when I consistently get exercise than when I have an extended stretch of inactivity— but it’s not fun in the same way that the other activities are.
One of the most important factors for my general well-being over the last few years has been making the effort to exert some willpower in that direction. I’ve been way better about forcing myself to power through the “don’ wanna” days and actually do the things that need doing. Even when I just end up flipping through streaming services for ages before settling on some movie or show that really doesn’t work for me.
This also extends to a lot of other areas, where I’m somewhat less successful. It’s relatively easy to find the motivation to faff about on social media, or write noodle-y blog posts here, but not so easy to grade papers or prep lectures or do tedious administrative tasks. Those require a considerable effort of will, and I’m often failing to find the power to get things done.
And thinking about this more abstractly makes me realize that a lot of things we talk about as problems of motivation— finding ways to make people want to do necessary things— can also be understood as problems of willpower. Which in turn leads to thinking that our balance of these things has maybe gotten a little bit out of whack. That maybe some of the effort we’re putting into trying to increase motivation on the part of students or citizens in general ought instead to go toward inculcating a bit more willpower, and ability to confront tasks that are not intrinsically fun but still see that they get done.
But, as noted above, this is a hard problem, and one that I don’t always succeed in solving. Which is part of the motivation behind writing this: putting this down in public pixels as a kind of stake in the ground to remind myself that I need to get better at exerting the willpower needed to do necessary things that I don’t enjoy. I’ve managed it for exercise, and just need to get better at doing it in my various other areas of responsibility.
As long as it doesn’t conflict with getting out skiing. Not too much, anyway…
So, yeah, that’s a Thing, banged out quickly to allow time to actually force myself through some of those less enjoyable tasks. If you like this sort of thing, here’s a button:
And if you want to either take issue or offer encouragement, the comments will be open:
I heard a similar phrase at some point that's stuck with me, and that I repeat to myself often: "You don't have to WANT to do it... you just have to DO it." It's certainly been helpful for a serial procrastinator. On the other hand, I'll still sometimes reply to myself "no, I don't HAVE to do it." We'll see how this works when I HAVE to go for a run this weekend (temps of maybe -1F/-19C on Sunday morning).
Completely off topic, but I thought you would be interested to hear that Dave Mills passed away on Wednesday. I assume you're familiar with him, but this profile is pretty good if not:
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thorny-problem-of-keeping-the-internets-time