Grin and Bear It

Perhaps productivity is just a mind game?

British therapist Marisa Peer has an interesting take on productivity and willpower – she says that the secret to achieving your goals is effectively communicating with your mind.
“When you collaborate with your mind and tell it what you want, then you get what you want.”
Four things you need to know about the mind:

1. Your mind does what it thinks you want it to do. If you haven’t got what you want, then you are not properly collaborating with your mind.
2. Your mind is hardwired to move toward pleasure and away from pain.
3. The way you feel about things is only about 1) the pictures you make in your head, and 2) the words that you say to yourself.
4. Your mind is programmed to prefer the familiar. If you want to succeed, you have to program your mind to treat unfamiliar things as familiar.

I had some experiences with these principles during my first winter in Minnesota. Initially, I wore insane amounts of layering (long-johns, 3 pairs of socks, etc.) because I thought the cold was going to be so awful.

Blizzard in Minneapolis, Minnesota. My car was buried.

I thought the cold was going to be awful, and so it was.

Car buried in Minneapolis blizzard.

Then one morning while walking to law school I decided that I was too damn busy and tired to be cold. I stopped wearing the long-johns and ridiculous layers, and managed to survive.

Marisa Peer’s full Ted Talk is excellent. Watch it here: