Dr. Kentaro Fujita

that you enjoy it for the task itself.

So there's research that Ayelet Fischbach has done and Caitlin Woolley as well, where they've shown that if you go to the gym and you only think about all the things that you benefit long-term from the gym,

that your attendance at the gym is okay, but if they include intrinsic positivity or intrinsic rewards, like just listening to your favorite music while you're on the treadmill, increases your likelihood of going regularly, right?

So the idea here is that

It's easier to sustain motivation over time, especially when things are hard.

That's when you need to sustain it the most, when you love what you do.

If you can't find something to love, then you might be able to do it short term, but over time, you'll struggle to keep that motivation up, mostly because the rewards are not tracking with the difficulty of the task, right?

That's led me to have some thoughts about how you build self-control and how you teach self-control.

And I think the worst thing to do is to make someone – like the way that we currently teach self-control I think a lot is in the classroom where we make kids sit in the chairs really quietly and it's sort of like rule imposed.

This is what you're supposed to do.

I'm not convinced that that's necessarily the best way to teach self-control only because that's all externally imposed.

The child does not want to sit there quietly.

The child wants to do their thing.

Instead, I think the best way to cultivate self-control for yourself or for others is to do it in a domain that you have intrinsic interest.

Because there's something where you will do the hard thing for a long time, but you'll also—

be more willing to explore and find better ways of doing something because you love it so much, right?

So I used to practice martial arts and I loved it.

And I would lose a competition or I would have a horrible practice or I just couldn't do something.

And what kept me going wasn't some desire to be better or some desire, it was really just the intrinsic love of the thing itself, the intrinsic love of the process

that kept me in the game when things were the hardest.