Dr. Kentaro Fujita

So balancing your time and effort between those two modes I think is really important.

You have to decide, okay, this goal is worth sacrificing for.

These other ones are not.

And as long as we're aware of the tradeoffs, I think that's good.

My concern is I think we often aren't aware of the tradeoffs.

We're only aware of the tradeoffs in retrospect after we've made the decision.

So, you know, those who have sort of more balanced their goals, they say I should have –

put more effort into the one, I didn't achieve all the things I wanted to and so they're regretful of that.

And you also see lots of stories of people saying like, I killed myself for this one goal, it did it, but I kind of wish I had this other.

And so I think the more we can do it proactively as opposed to retrospectively, the closer we will be to where we wanna be.

Again, there's not much research on this and I think that's what's really interesting to me about it.

We can have this conversation

As a scientist, I'm a little frustrated that science hasn't quite caught up to these insights that we're talking about.

You're making really interesting observations about the current state of our society and also about the impact it could potentially have on motivation.

I think the interesting angle for me and what you're just saying, you're asking whether these cup stackers are doing this for the attention or they're doing it for themselves.

And I would say the research suggests that they probably do it because they themselves love it.

It goes back to something that you said, a conversation we had earlier about doing hard things.

Research suggests that

When it comes to doing really hard things, especially sustaining that hard things over time, so you could do something hard maybe once when you're externally motivated, but sustaining that over time is really difficult if you are exclusively externally motivated.

Research suggests that your self-control or at least your performance and self-control is enhanced to the extent that you're intrinsically motivated.