I have written quite a few posts (they remain perennially the most popular entries on the blog) about the Myers-Briggs personality profile and being an INTP. It's 2020 now, and personality tests are not a trendy topic compared to when I started writing here, but I have found they continue to be a topic of interest on instagram, which has many channels devoted to MBTI.
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| Apparently there is a smaller but dedicated Korean MBTI community? |
One stereotype of INTPs, frequently mentioned in those instagram posts on the topic, is that INTPs lack motivation. More specifically, the motivation is all focused on information gathering, and not on "getting out there and doing things." As far as I can tell this is true; I find myself naturally drawn to gathering and systematizing information to further complete a "theory of everything," which feels like an autotelic and all-absorbing occupation, whereas I often have to make to-do lists and try to cultivate good habits and drink coffee and cue up the right playlists at the right times to spur myself on to being productive and making progress on other kinds of goals. (Such as anything involving paperwork)
So coming from someone who struggles less to see things worth doing and more in summoning the willpower to accomplish some subset of them, a technique I find helpful is the one I want to explain briefly in this post.
An Embarrassment of Motivational Riches
There's a lot of good self-motivation material out there for free nowadays. If the motivation you lack can truly be supplied by anything external to yourself, YouTube has hundreds of hours of different styles and flavors of gifted speakers and accomplished people urging you to get out there and do something, to get up off the mat and overcome whatever is holding you back, to break your larger goals down into small enough steps that you can get started immediately, etc.
I enjoy a good Tom Bilyeu or Jocko Willink interview myself, and have gleaned some valuable puzzle pieces about how life and people work from some of the very accomplished people featured there, which I find ways to apply to my ministry work. (While recognizing the goals being discussed on that and other channels are usually very "this-worldly," if an observation is true then it's true, and truth works cross-platform)
In terms of self-motivation, self-improvement, "hustling/getting after it" and that whole milieu, Solomon tells us that chasing after material wealth isn't worth it; not only because a love for money can lead to all kinds of evil, but that it's simply not worth exhausting yourself for a lifetime for what you can't take with you and what other people may spend badly after you're gone.
(Yet that truth doesn't conflict with the true observation that "A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit." Scripture also informs us that, generally speaking, when the righteous are diligent, they will also be prosperous, and this is considered a good thing, and society as a whole benefits.)
However many people have goals other than wealth; you may need motivation to work off that extra quarantine weight, to get skill certification and move into a new career path, or simply to accomplish that thing you've put off for two years already. But what about when that motivation is balanced more or less equally by our lack thereof?
"The Third Party Vote"
The 2016 election was a surreal experience, perhaps even more so to watch from overseas. One interesting thing to watch on FB was how people who were not excited about either choice mostly fell into two camps: either "lesser of the two evils" or "if we'd all just vote third party, it would solve this." Both camps had weak points which the other side pointed out, but the third party advocates were tenacious and I expect to see some of them back soon for election season 2020.
In trying to motivate ourselves to do a difficult or unpleasant task, we tend to fall into a similar dilemma. Not moving towards our goal is a bad option, but the effort or drudgery or willpower-expenditure involved is demotivational. We thus are trapped between two things we don't want: not making any progress, and some amount of suffering required to make progress.
In this situation, with one vote for progress yet one vote against it, we can benefit from a third vote. In this case, not a vote for a third party, but a vote by a third party. There is a third party involved in the decision, and we seldom give them a vote.
That third party is us, after we've made that progress and arrived at a different place. The you that has run the miles or applied for the grant or rearranged the shop or memorized the scripture passage. The you that now has increased optionality because you've put in the work to get there.
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| Give the third party involved in your decisions a vote... |
Optionality, and the Coronavirus
Optionality is a topic I have not discussed at any length on the blog, though it is an integral part of the theory of Antifragility which I have mentioned quite a few times.
I will probably do a whole post on optionality in the future. For now let's consider it at a basic level--having worked to have more options at your disposal.
The coronavirus situation has caused untold economic damage and personal suffering in the US, partly because of a lack of optionality. Setting aside conspiracy theories to the contrary, the US healthcare system wasn't prepared to handle this kind of pandemic, and thus could only react in an extreme way (since nothing was in place to react at varying levels of extremity as appropriate), yet that meant both federal and state governments could only scramble to obtain resources for this kind of extreme reaction, for which there was no SOP (standard operating procedure) already in place. Hospitals couldn't obtain the supplies they needed and were under contrary instructions on what to do. It was most crudely effective shock test to the system imaginable (one the system failed badly) and yet new revised figures emerging all suggest it was a merciful one.
By contrast the optionality provided by things like more local manufacture of health supplies, a pandemic SOP and agreed-on chain of command, experience of previous pandemics, a smaller population size with fewer international points of entry, etc. helped Taiwan respond to the virus quickly and effectively. It is to be hoped that with the experience of 2020, the US federal and state governments, as well as the American populace, will know better how to respond. Some optionality will have been earned through experience, though at immense cost.
Optionality shows up in people's individual responses to the pandemic and quarantine as well. Some people with sufficient savings were in a position to "pivot" and use the unexpected time at home profitably, whereas those who depended on a weekly income were sorely hurt by the mandatory business closures and shelter-in-place orders. As the weeks drag on, some have even re-opened their shops in defiance of state governments, trying to provide for themselves and their employees with no other source of income. Their situation didn't leave them with any other options.
We can see examples of optionality in scripture, and the woman described in Proverbs 31 is an impressive example:
"She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come." (v25)
She can laugh because she has worked hard, become a strong person, and knows she has options regardless of what may come. This is not only a question of material security because of all her "side gigs" (weaving, etc) as they'd say on some of those YouTube channels. Her hard work and the strong character she has developed, not to mention her position in the community and acts of charity, all work to secure her against future hardship. One given example is that she is not afraid of a cold winter, for she and her children already have warm clothes (v21-22).
I'm sure with little effort you can imagine various modern parallels. What does "laughing at the days" to come look like in 2020? Among other things, it certainly means setting your faith on a firm foundation and investing effort in doing lots of those things that are difficult, un-fun, yet give you good optionality in the future when you'll probably need it.
Conclusion: Vote for Optionality!
I said at the beginning that this would be short, and I'm rapidly failing to achieve that goal. So, let's wrap things up by combining this concept of optionality with the idea of a third vote: When caught in that balanced-dilemma moment of trying to decide whether or not to tackle a task you don't feel any motivation to complete, rather than just comparing the yes vote of our current level of motivation against the no vote of the effort and/or hardship involved and letting things stagnate there, try giving a third vote to that future self, who is in a place of better optionality due to your invested effort and time. If it's 2 vs 1, do it. You will thank yourself retrospectively from the future.
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