You don’t have weak willpower — you have a strong environment pointed at the wrong things. Jonathan Doyle on choice architecture research: behaviour follows environment far more than intention. Including the full confession of the cookie fiasco (one daughter, one car, one half-eaten cookie that stared at him all the way home), why willpower is...
Have you heard of the Lindy effect? Taleb’s principle that age predicts future life: the longer an idea has survived, the longer it’s likely to keep working. Jonathan Doyle takes it from ancient Babylon to the Instagram feed — why brains that took 4 million years to build now drink from a firehose of “latest...
What if talent is the myth that’s letting you off the hook? Jonathan Doyle on Daniel Chambliss’s famous study of elite Olympic swimmers — years embedded with the best in the world, searching for the talent magic and finding none. What he found instead: “Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills...
A truly terrible job might save your life — but a tolerable one can steal it. Jonathan Doyle on Harvard professor Dan Gilbert’s research into “the peculiar longevity of things not so bad”: we escape awful situations fast, but stay stuck in mildly bad ones for decades, because they never hurt enough to trigger change....
The series lands on the deepest layer. Jonathan Doyle on Oyserman’s identity-based motivation research — “people act not because of incentives, but because acting is identity-congruent; we do what people like us do” — and why the most driven people aren’t chasing goals, they’re protecting an identity. Including reference groups (why you must choose who...
If rewards worked, everyone with a bonus scheme would be unstoppable. Jonathan Doyle on self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan) and their famous claim: “Perhaps no single phenomenon reflects the positive potential of human nature as much as intrinsic motivation — the inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise one’s capacities.”...
If you’re not motivated, you may not have a character problem — you may have a maths problem. Jonathan Doyle unpacks expectancy-value theory (Vroom, Eccles & Wigfield): “choice, persistence, and performance can be explained by beliefs about how well we will do and the extent to which we value the activity.” Drive = expectancy ×...
The strangest finding in the motivation literature: effort itself can become rewarding. Jonathan Doyle unpacks Eisenberger’s learned industriousness studies — “high effort produces a generalized tendency to exert high effort; effort itself acquires secondary reward value” — via David Goggins and the double dip at the dopamine pool. Then the mirror: helplessness is learned the...
Why do some people push relentlessly toward their goals while most settle into quiet desperation? Jonathan Doyle opens a five-part series on the science of drive with the finding nobody wants to hear: it’s partly biological. Conscientiousness is up to 50% heritable, and Vanderbilt’s famous fMRI studies (Treadway) show motivated brains firing more dopamine in...
Why do we avoid the things we know would make life better? Jonathan Doyle takes a walk through the latest psychological research on procrastination — and it isn’t what we were taught. It’s not a time management problem; it’s an emotional regulation problem: the brain trading your future for short-term relief from aversive feelings. Including...