Community Is Motivation on Tap

Summary

AW A good community can have tremendous influence on one’s motivation. I never appreciated this fact enough so I wanted to write about it here. Looking at successful athletes, founders, musicians, game speedrunners, or overachievers in any area, they seem to have unlimited motivation to do loads of tedious work or practice. One might say they are interested in the work itself, but how inherently interesting can beating super mario 1ms faster be? The work of a founder might look stimulating on the surface, but the amount of monotony that has to be tolerated to make ends meet is daunting. How do these people carry through with this while I still struggle to get my laundry done? My Story I believe most highly motivated people have a good community working towards the same goals. A community can multiply your motivation while people working alone run out of steam easily. My experience with StarCraft resonates with this. I have a long held passion for this game, but the game (along with the entire RTS genre) is dwindling and few of my peers even know of it. I’ve made practice plans but never ended up putting in consistent effort. It’s hard to be entirely self-motivated, especially as life priorities shift every other week. Is contrast, I poured hundreds of hours playing, studying meta, watching pro plays into Brawl Stars, a completely brainrotting game whose gameplay itself I didn’t even enjoy a single bit. Yet I was hard grinding the game, just because I happened to have a few friends sweating this game too. I enjoyed StarCraft a lot more, yet I was far more motivated for BrawlStars. I wonder if this powerful source of motivation can be harnessed to achieve greater things. The Mechanics of Motivating Communities The ideas mentioned here may sound intuitive, but I think a clear understanding of the underlying mechanics of motivation helps me come up with reasonable action plans without conducting extensive tests. Approval Seeking. It’s in our genes to seek approval. Well...