Here’s a great video from Andrew Huberman on how to access greater focus in everything you do.
The Problem with Only Focusing on Rewards
- Many people work hard only to get rewards (like grades, money, or trophies).
- This can make hard work feel harder and less enjoyable.
- If we only care about rewards, we lose motivation to keep working hard in the future.
The Experiment with Children
- Kids who loved drawing stopped enjoying it when they were given rewards (like gold stars).
- Without the rewards, they drew less, even though they used to love it.
- This shows that focusing on rewards can take away the natural joy of doing something.
Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation
- Intrinsic motivation: Doing something because you enjoy it.
- Extrinsic motivation: Doing something for an external reward.
- Focusing too much on external rewards can lower the joy of the activity itself.
Growth Mindset
- A growth mindset is about enjoying the process of learning and improving.
- It means saying, “I’m not there yet, but I’m getting better, and that’s the goal.”
- People with this mindset often perform better in the long run.
How to Enjoy Effort
- Tell yourself: “This hard work is good for me. It will make me stronger and better.”
- Learn to enjoy the challenge itself, even if it’s uncomfortable.
- Over time, your brain will release dopamine (a “feel-good” chemical) from the effort, making it more rewarding.
Tips to Train Your Mind
- Avoid giving yourself rewards before or after the work.
- Focus on feeling proud of your effort while you’re doing it.
- Remind yourself: “This challenge is making me better, and I choose to enjoy it.”
The Power of This Mindset
- Learning to enjoy effort helps you stay motivated and push through challenges.
- It gives you more energy, focus, and a long-lasting desire to keep improving.
- You can train yourself to feel good about hard work—and that’s a superpower!
Transcript
The effort part is the good part. I know it’s painful. I know this doesn’t feel good, but I’m focused on this. I’m going to start to access the reward.
When we focus only on the trophy, only on the grade, only on the win, we undermine the entire process. The ability to access this pleasure from effort is without question the most powerful aspect of dopamine, and the beautiful thing is it’s accessible to all of us.
Hard work is hard. Generally, most people don’t like working hard. Some people do, but most people work hard in order to achieve some end goal. End goals are terrific, and rewards are terrific, whether or not they are monetary, social, or any kind. However, working hard at something for the sake of a reward that comes afterward can make the hard work much more challenging and make us much less likely to lean into hard work in the future.
There’s a classic experiment done at Stanford many years ago in which children in nursery school and kindergarten drew pictures because they liked to draw. The researchers took kids that liked to draw and started giving them a reward for drawing. The reward was generally a gold star or something that a young child would find rewarding. Then they stopped giving them the gold star, and what they found is that the children had a much lower tendency to draw on their own. No reward now. Remember, this was an activity that, prior to receiving a reward, the children intrinsically enjoyed and selected to do. No one was telling them to draw.
What this relates to is so-called intrinsic versus extrinsic reinforcement. When we receive rewards, even if we give ourselves rewards for something, we tend to associate less pleasure with the actual activity itself that evoked the reward. If you get a peak in dopamine from a reward, it’s going to lower your baseline, and the cognitive interpretation is that you didn’t really do the activity because you enjoyed the activity. You did it for the reward. Now, this is the antithesis of growth mindset.
My colleague at Stanford, Carol Dweck, as many of you know, has come up with this incredible theory and principle, and actually goes beyond theory in principle, called growth mindset, which is this striving to be better, to be in this mindset of “I’m not there yet, but striving itself is the end goal.” And that, of course, delivers you to tremendous performances. It’s been observed over and over and over again that people that have a growth mindset end up performing very well because they’re focused on the effort itself, and all of us can cultivate a growth mindset. The neural mechanism of cultivating growth mindset involves learning to access the rewards from effort and doing, and that’s hard to do.
Because you have to tell yourself, “Okay, this effort is great. This effort is pleasurable, even though you might actually be in a state of physical pain from the exercise, or I can recall this from college, just feeling like I wanted to get up from my desk but forcing myself to study, forcing myself, forcing myself.” What you find over time is that you can evoke dopamine release from the friction and the challenge that you happen to be in.
You completely eliminate the ability to generate those circuits and the rewarding process of being able to reward friction while in effort if you are focused only on the goal that comes at the end. So, if you say, “Oh, I’m going to do this very hard thing, and I’m going to push and push and push and push for that end goal that comes later,” not only do you enjoy the process of what you’re doing less, you actually make it more painful while you’re engaging in it. You make yourself less efficient at it because if you were able to access dopamine while in effort, dopamine has all these incredible properties of increasing the amount of energy in our body and in our mind, our ability to focus. But also, you are undermining your ability to lean back into that activity the next time. The next time you need twice as much coffee and three times as much loud music and four times as much energy drink and the social connection just to get out the door in order to do the run or to study.
So what’s more beneficial is to attach the feeling of friction and effort to an internally generated reward system. You’re not just pursuing the things that are innately pleasurable. So you can tell yourself, “The effort part is the good part. I know it’s painful. I know this doesn’t feel good, but I’m focused on this. I’m going to start to access the reward.” You will find the rewards, meaning the dopamine release, inside of effort if you repeat this over and over again. And what’s beautiful about it is that it starts to become reflexive for all types of effort.
When we focus only on the trophy, only on the grade, only on the win as the reward, you undermine that entire process. So how do you do this? You do this in those moments of the most intense friction. You tell yourself, “This is very painful, and because it’s painful, it will evoke an increase in dopamine release later, meaning it will increase my baseline in dopamine.” But you also have to tell yourself that, in that moment, you are doing it by choice and you’re doing it because you love it. And I know that sounds like lying to yourself, and in some ways, it is lying to yourself, but it’s lying to yourself in the context of a truth, which is that you want it to feel better. You want it to feel even pleasurable. Now, this is very far and away different from thinking about the reward that comes at the end, the hot fudge Sunday for after you cross the finish line. And you can replace hot fudge Sunday with whatever reward happens to be appealing to you.
We revere people who are capable of doing what I’m describing. David Goggins comes to mind as a really good example. Many of you are probably familiar with David Goggins, a former Navy SEAL who essentially has made a post-military career career out of explaining and sharing his process of turning the effort into the reward. The ability to access this pleasure from effort is without question the most powerful aspect of dopamine in our biology of dopamine, and the beautiful thing is it’s accessible to all of us.
But just to highlight the things that can interfere with and prevent you from getting dopamine release from effort itself: Don’t spike dopamine prior to engaging in effort, and don’t spike dopamine after engaging in effort. Learn to spike your dopamine from effort itself.
Serbian Translation
Težak deo je dobar deo. Znam da boli. Znam da se ovo ne oseća dobro, ali sam fokusiran na ovo. Počeću da pristupam nagradi. Kada se fokusiramo samo na trofej, samo na ocenu, samo na pobedu, potkopavamo ceo proces. Sposobnost da pristupimo ovom zadovoljstvu kroz napor je bez sumnje najmoćniji aspekt dopamina, a lepa stvar je što je dostupan svima nama. Težak rad je težak. Generalno, većina ljudi ne voli da naporno radi. Neki ljudi to rade, ali većina ljudi naporno radi kako bi postigla neki krajnji cilj. Krajnji ciljevi su odlični, a nagrade su odlične, bez obzira da li su novčane, socijalne ili bilo koje druge vrste. Međutim, naporan rad zbog nagrade koja dolazi kasnije može učiniti naporan rad mnogo izazovnijim i učiniti nas manje sklonim da se u budućnosti priklonimo naporu. Postoji klasičan eksperiment sproveden na Stanford-u pre mnogo godina u kojem su deca u vrtiću i vrtiću crtala slike jer su volela da crtaju. Istraživači su uzeli decu koja su volela da crtaju i počeli da im daju nagradu za crtanje. Nagrada je obično bila zlatna zvezdica ili nešto što bi malo dete smatralo nagradom. Zatim su prestali da im daju zlatnu zvezdicu, i ono što su otkrili je da su deca imala mnogo manju tendenciju da sama crtaju. Sada nema nagrade. Setite se, ovo je bila aktivnost koju su deca pre primanja nagrade prirodno uživala i birala da rade. Niko im nije rekao da crtaju. Ovo se odnosi na takozvano intrinzično i ekstrinzično pojačanje. Kada primamo nagrade, čak i ako sebi damo nagrade za nešto, skloni smo da povezujemo manje zadovoljstvo sa samom aktivnošću koja je izazvala nagradu. Ako dobijete vrhunac dopamina od nagrade, to će smanjiti vaš bazalni nivo, a kognitivna interpretacija je da niste zaista radili aktivnost zato što ste uživali u aktivnosti. Radili ste to zbog nagrade. Sada je ovo antiteza rasta uma. Moja koleginica sa Stanforda, Carol Dweck, kako mnogi od vas znaju, je došla do ove neverovatne teorije i principa, a zapravo ide dalje od teorije u principu, nazvanog rast uma, što je ovo težnja da se bude bolji, da se bude u ovom načinu razmišljanja “Još nisam tu, ali samo težnja je krajnji cilj.” I to, naravno, dovodi vas do ogromnih performansi. Viđeno je iznova i iznova da ljudi koji imaju rast uma na kraju postižu vrlo dobre rezultate jer su fokusirani na sam napor, a svi mi možemo da kultivišemo rast uma. Neuralni mehanizam kultivisanja rasta uma uključuje učenje da pristupimo nagradama iz napora i rada, a to je teško. Jer morate sebi reći: “U redu, ovaj napor je odličan. Ovaj napor je prijatan, iako možda ste zapravo u stanju fizičkog bola zbog vežbanja, ili se sećam ovoga sa fakulteta, samo osećaj da želim da ustanem sa stola, ali prisiljavam sebe da učim, prisiljavam sebe, prisiljavam sebe.” Ono što otkrijete vremenom je da možete izazvati oslobađanje dopamina iz trenja i izazova u kojima se nalazite. Potpuno eliminišete sposobnost da generišete ta kola i nagrađujući proces nagrađivanja trenja dok ste u naporu ako ste fokusirani samo na cilj koji dolazi na kraju. Dakle, ako kažete: “Oh, ja ću uraditi ovu jako tešku stvar, i ja ću gurati i gurati i gurati za taj krajnji cilj koji dolazi kasnije,” ne samo da manje uživate u procesu onoga što radite, već ga zapravo činite bolnijim dok se u njemu bavite. Činite sebe manje efikasnim u tome jer ako ste mogli da pristupite dopaminu tokom napora, dopamin ima sva ova neverovatna svojstva povećanja količine energije u našem telu i umu, naše sposobnosti fokusiranja. Ali takođe, podrivate svoju sposobnost da se vratite u tu aktivnost sledeći put. Sledeći put kada vam treba duplo više kafe i trostruko više glasne muzike i četvorostruko više energetskog pića i socijalne veze samo da izađete na vrata kako biste istrčali ili učili. Dakle, korisnije je povezati osećaj trenja i napora sa interno generisanim sistemom nagrađivanja. Ne težite samo stvarima koje su prirodno prijatne. Dakle, možete sebi reći: “Težak deo je dobar deo. Znam da boli. Znam da se ovo ne oseća dobro, ali sam fokusiran na ovo. Počeću da pristupam nagradi.” Naći ćete nagrade, odnosno oslobađanje dopamina, unutar napora ako ovo ponavljate iznova i iznova. I lepa stvar je što to počinje da postaje refleksno za sve vrste napora. Kada se fokusiramo samo na trofej, samo na ocenu, samo na pobedu kao nagradu, potkopavamo ceo proces. Dakle, kako to radite? Radite ovo u tim trenucima najintenzivnijeg trenja. Kažete sebi: “Ovo je veoma bolno, i zato što je bolno, izazvaće povećanje oslobađanja dopamina kasnije, što znači da će povećati moj bazalni nivo dopamina.” Ali morate sebi reći i da, u tom trenutku, to radite izbora i radite to jer volite to. I znam da to zvuči kao da lažete sebi, a na neki način i jeste lažete sebi, ali lažete sebi u kontekstu istine, a to je da želite da se osećate bolje. Želite da se osećate još prijatnije. Sada je ovo veoma daleko i drugačije od razmišljanja o nagradi koja dolazi na kraju, čokoladni sund sa sladoledom za nakon što pređete ciljnu liniju. I možete zameniti čokoladni sund sa sladoledom bilo kojom nagradom koja vam se slučajno sviđa. Divimo se ljudima koji su sposobni da rade ono što opisujem. David Goggins pada mi na pamet kao veoma dobar primer. Mnogi od vas su verovatno upoznati sa Davidom Gogginsom, bivšim mornaričkim fokom koji je u suštini napravio post-vojnu karijeru objašnjavajući i deleći svoj proces pretvaranja napora u nagradu. Sposobnost da pristupimo ovom zadovoljstvu kroz napor je bez sumnje najmoćniji aspekt dopamina u našoj biologiji dopamina, a lepa stvar je što je dostupan svima nama. Ali samo da istaknem stvari koje mogu da ometaju i spreče vas da dobijete oslobađanje dopamina od samog napora: Ne podižite nivo dopamina pre nego što se uključite u napor, i ne podižite nivo dopamina nakon što se uključite u napor. Naučite da podignete nivo dopamina iz samog napora.
Fill in the Blank: Effort and Rewards
Complete the sentences with the correct word from the box. Some words may be used more than once.
Word Bank:
work | rewards | enjoy | difficult work | motivation | better | effort | challenge | hard | goal
- Many people do ________ because they want ________, like grades or money.
- Focusing only on ________ can make ________ feel more difficult and less enjoyable.
- If we focus on ________ only, we may lose ________ to work hard in the future.
- Children who loved drawing stopped when they got ________ like gold stars.
- A growth mindset means saying, “I’m not there yet, but I’m getting ________.”
- To ________ hard work, you need to focus on the process, not just the ________.
- Over time, your brain can feel good about ________ if you remind yourself it’s a ________.
- Avoid giving yourself ________ before or after the ________.
- Tell yourself, “This ________ will make me stronger and ________.”
- Learning to ________ the process can give you more energy and ________ to improve.
Answer key
- work, rewards
- rewards, work
- rewards, motivation
- rewards
- better
- enjoy, goal
- effort, challenge
- rewards, work
- effort, better
- enjoy, motivation
Discussion
What was this video about?
What challenging words and expressions from the video do you remember?
What does a growth mindset mean? How can it help you?
What should you tell yourself to enjoy hard work?
Why is it better to avoid giving rewards before or after work?
What happens in your brain when you learn to enjoy effort?
What is the “superpower” mentioned in the text? How can you use it?
Have you ever heard of this concept before? Do you agree with Dr. Huberman? Why or why not?