Motley Fool Money - Motivation is a Skill

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

Motivation is important for a number of reasons, but how and why it works can be misunderstood. In his best-selling book Smarter, Faster, Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, Charles Duhigg shares how motivation can be a learned skill.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you're a small business owner, you already know what it takes to keep everything moving. You're juggling customers, invoices, and about 100 decisions every day. Thankfully, taxes don't have to be one more thing on that list. With Intuit TurboTax, you can get your business taxes done for you with a full service expert. TurboTax matches you with your dedicated tax expert. Who knows your industry understands your business write-offs and gives you the personalized advice your business deserves. upload your documents right in the app, hand everything off, and still feel like you're in the loop the whole way through. You can even get real-time updates on your expert's progress right in the

app, which makes it so much easier to stay on track. And you can get unlimited expert help at no extra cost, even on nights and weekends during tax season. Visit turbotax.com to get matched with an expert today, only available with TurboTax full service experts. With a Motley Full Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill. Charles Duhigg won a Pulitzer Prize as a reporter with the New York Times and became a best-selling author with his book, The Power of Habit. We talked a few years ago during the release of his follow-up book, Smarter, Faster, Better, The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business.

And one of those secrets that Charles shared is about motivation. Namely, that motivation isn't something that just comes from within, motivation is a skill that can be learned. This really came home for me when I was learning about the Marines. So most of us think about the Marine boot camp as a place where people go to learn discipline, right? We've all seen those movies. You show up and like someone yells at you and you learn to follow orders. And at one point, that's what boot camp was.

But in the last 15 years or so, they've actually completely redesigned boot camp, particularly as millennials have started coming into the armed forces. What happens now is that they're trying to teach people how to generate motivation, particularly self-motivation. And the way you do that is you teach people to start seeking out choices that make them feel like they're in control. How do they do that? Well, it's really interesting. So when you show up for boot camp pretty early, like in your first week, usually your drill instructor will take you into the mess hall or some other place and he'll say, okay, your job is to clean this place up, but I'm not going to tell you how to do it.

and you have to go and you have to figure out how to how to straighten everything up where the ketchup bottles go and how much detergent to put in the washing machine and you have to kind of take control. And then what they do is they only compliment people for unexpected acts of leadership or unexpected successes. So they'll never tell someone you're a natural-born leader because being natural-born, that means that you don't have to work hard at it.

Instead, what they'll do is they'll go to the shyest guy and they'll say, you did a great job of leading. Or they'll go to the guy who has a real-born leader. trouble running and is kind of puny and say, you did a great job on that obstacle course. What they're trying to do is they're trying to teach recruits to feel this kind of emotional satisfaction that we all get from taking control of a situation. It's the same thing that your brain feels when you're stuck in a traffic jam and you want to turn the wheel and take that exit just to get out of traffic, even though you know it'll take

just as long to get home. We all have this craving to take control, and that's how we generate self-modic. But for some of us, it has to be woken up a little bit. And the way you do that is you put people, whether they be our kids or marine recruits in situations where they get to practice taking control and they get to learn how good it feels until it becomes an automatic, almost habit. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening.

We'll see you next time.