motivation
What makes effort feel worth it: the neuroscience of wanting to act, apathy, dopamine, and habit.
FilterEveryone, all time
- NF
Nat Friedman quoted
Their wordsWhere do you get your dopamine? The answer is predictive of your behavior Better to get your dopamine from improving your ideas than from having them validated
- 3 days earlier
- SA
Scott Alexander quoted
Their wordsRather than treat AI as similar to airplanes, we should treat it as something between airplanes and humans. We don’t know exactly where on this spectrum they will land, but we can no longer be certain that AI will lack any given humanlike motivation.
- 1 day earlier
- JL
Joe Liemandt quoted
Their wordsAnd that's why we say motivation is 90% of the problem or the solution because you have to be able to motivate the person to engage with these personalized lessons to learn it.
↗How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandtyoutube.com 18th of 26 in this recording
- JL
Joe Liemandt quoted
Their wordsthese kids have a block that they can't do it. You do whatever you can including paying them to break through the block. they then see themselves as a different person
↗How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandtyoutube.com 22nd of 26 in this recording
- 7 days earlier
- MH
Masud Husain quoted
Their wordsit was only about 15 years ago I started beginning to be aware that there may be a an important biology underlying motivation and when that biology goes wrong, it can lead to loss of motivation and even pathological apathy.
↗How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husainyoutube.com 1st of 24 in this recording
- MH
Masud Husain quoted
Their wordsWe find that everyone is willing to work for high rewards. But the difference between motivated people and apathetic people is at the level of the low rewards. Apathetic people are more inclined to say, "Nah, I don't think this is worth the effort, so I won't do that option."
↗How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husainyoutube.com 2nd of 24 in this recording
- MH
Masud Husain quoted
Their wordsWe were talking about reward versus effort. And essentially that's a very important way I think that we make a decision. Much of that could be subconscious.
↗How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husainyoutube.com 3rd of 24 in this recording
- MH
Masud Husain quoted
Their wordsIt's showing us that apathetic people use more brain energy when they're making this decision. They have a bigger activation energy barrier to overcome because when they're making that decision, the brain is consuming more energy. It's consuming more glucose when it's doing that.
↗How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husainyoutube.com 4th of 24 in this recording
- MH
Masud Husain quoted
Their wordsYou can either increase the reward or change it in some way in terms of something that's meaningful for the person or you change the effort required to accomplish maybe part of the task or perhaps start you know just initiate the task and often starting can be a huge motivational pull.
↗How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husainyoutube.com 5th of 24 in this recording
- MH
Masud Husain quoted
Their wordsIt would also help if your manager said, "Well done for getting that bit done." Right? That's that's also a motivation pull to think, "Yeah, actually I don't need to get the whole piece done to get the reward of somebody identified that as a positive thing to have done."
↗How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husainyoutube.com 7th of 24 in this recording
- MH
Masud Husain quoted
Their wordsYou have to persevere. And that's the other really important part of motivation. You know, we know a lot of people who start things and then we also know the non-competers, the people who are always so energetic but actually don't finish, right? So, it's almost as important to be able to finish and complete as initiate actions.
↗How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husainyoutube.com 9th of 24 in this recording
- MH
Masud Husain quoted
Their wordsif you do for some reason generalize maladaptively to thinking this didn't work and I tried this, this didn't work, and I tried this and I'm really bad at this. That can lead not only to loss of motivation, but what we might call clinical depression.
↗How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husainyoutube.com 10th of 24 in this recording
- MH
Masud Husain quoted
Their wordsthere are some people who have pure apathy, no depression like David. And there are other people who can be depressed, they can be sad, they can be hopeless about the future, but they don't necessarily lose motivation. They can have pure depression.
↗How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husainyoutube.com 11th of 24 in this recording
- MH
Masud Husain quoted
Their wordsOne is yes, I agree with you that this sort of behavior, doom scrolling, etc. occurs, but I think the evidence that there are dopamine hits when you're doing this isn't really very strong.
↗How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husainyoutube.com 15th of 24 in this recording
- MH
Masud Husain quoted
Their wordsAnd the evidence suggests that wanting pursuit of a goal is mediated or modulated at least by dopamine whereas actually the liking the pleasure you might get from an outcome is not that seems to be related to uh opioid neurotransmitters in the brain.
↗How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husainyoutube.com 16th of 24 in this recording
- MH
Masud Husain quoted
Their wordsSo it's a different way of framing why is there a reduction of action? Why is there bradicynesia, a slowing of movement in people with Parkinson's disease? That's really interesting. It doesn't just have to be about motor control. It could be the motivation to act just as we said with David, right?
↗How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husainyoutube.com 17th of 24 in this recording
- MH
Masud Husain quoted
Their wordsDopamine in the human brain isn't all about motivation to action. There's dopamine in other parts of the brain. We know from some really classical work by Patricia Goldman Rakit, for example, that dopamine is important for working memory, short-term memory.
↗How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husainyoutube.com 18th of 24 in this recording
- MH
Masud Husain quoted
Their wordsWhat we find is that those individuals who score highly on just self-reported questionnaires for motivation, if they score highly for apathy, they have twice the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease than people who don't.
↗How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husainyoutube.com 23rd of 24 in this recording
- 2 weeks earlier
- FL
Fei-Fei Li quoted
Their wordsThe absolute bad outcome is that our young generation, their agency and human level motivation of learning and living is taken away by tools. So doom scrolling, passive watching of shorts, all this are not helping agency, human agency.
↗Using AI to Increase Your Intelligence & Enrich Humanity | Dr. Fei-Fei Liyoutube.com 15th of 21 in this recording
- FL
Fei-Fei Li quoted
Their wordsThe other kind of danger is in the name of agency and and uh and motivation the tools are denied to our students because we're worried you cheat or worry you only got your answer from Chad GBT. That is very bad as well
↗Using AI to Increase Your Intelligence & Enrich Humanity | Dr. Fei-Fei Liyoutube.com 17th of 21 in this recording
- 3 days earlier
- MH
Max Hodak quoted
Their wordsIt gives you these effect sizes that you just don't really see in medicine. Like if you have a patient on on a dopamineergic drug for Parkinson's that works for some period of time, but it's a it's a relatively small effect after a little while. You turn on a deep brain stimulator and a patient goes from not being able to hold a cup of water to being able to write cursive in like 10 seconds.
↗Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enoughyoutube.com 18th of 22 in this recording
- 4 months earlier
- DH
David Heinemeier Hansson quoted
Their wordsThis is not like a limited sale. like AI is going to be here next month and the months after that.
↗DHH’s new way of writing codeyoutube.com 19th of 20 in this recording
- 6 weeks earlier
- PK
Paul Krugman quoted
Their wordsIt has been clear from the beginning that a primary motivation for tariffs was that they empowered Trump personally.
↗Attack of the Zombie Tariffspaulkrugman.substack.com 4th of 4 in this piece
- 5 months earlier
- AC
Albert Cheng quoted
Their wordsI actually in many ways see language learning as like their first vehicle. And what they have a superpower in is that again, the motivation, the habits, etc.
↗Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)youtube.com 14th of 26 in this recording
- AC
Albert Cheng quoted
Their wordsThen you need a metag game, which for Duolingo is kind of like the path, but it's also the leaderboard, achievements, kind of long-term things that you're going to strive to such that you have like long-term, I guess, motivation uh to continue doing the thing. And then the profile is also critical because you build up a profile over time. It's a reflection of your investment inside the product experience. And so when you nail those three things, you can end up with a long-term learning journey that can be quite successful.
↗Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)youtube.com 23rd of 26 in this recording
- 5 days earlier
- LF
Lex Fridman quoted
Our readingAction comes before motivation: you do first and feel afterwards, not the other way round.
Their wordsIf you’re stuck in a depressive cycle, even when you really, really, really, really don’t want to do anything, to do something. Try to make progress because the good feeling comes on the end of that. The whole point is to do first and then feel, not feel and then do.
↗Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #482youtube.com 6th of 28 in this recording
- PD
Pavel Durov quoted
Their wordsYeah, I think overabundance paralyzes motivation and willpower. It's extremely harmful, particularly for young boys, to grow up in an environment where they can be proud, not of their own achievements, but of their father's achievements or their father's wealth.
↗Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #482youtube.com 24th of 28 in this recording
- 6 months earlier
- RV
Rahul Vohra quoted
Their wordsAnd that's the problem with rewards is they just massively undermine intrinsic motivation. And that's why gamification doesn't work. And when gamification does work, it's because the underlying experience was already designed like a game.
↗Superhuman's secret to success | Rahul Vohra (CEO and founder)youtube.com 19th of 24 in this recording
- 7 weeks earlier
- NL
Nathan Lambert quoted
Their wordsuntil there are feedback loops of open source AI, it seems like mostly an ideological mission. People like Mark Zuckerberg, which is like America needs this and I agree with him, but in the time where the motivation ideologically is high, we need to capitalize and build this ecosystem around, what benefits do you get from seeing the language model data?
↗DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters | Lex Fridman Podcast #459youtube.com 42nd of 44 in this recording
- 8 months earlier
- CR
Charan Ranganath quoted
Their wordsis this idea that we form these internal models at particular points of high prediction error or points of, I believe also points of uncertainty, points of surprise or motivationally significant periods. And those points are when it’s maximally optimal to encode an episodic memory.
↗Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories | Lex Fridman Podcast #430youtube.com 3rd of 20 in this recording
- 15 months earlier
- CD
Cory Doctorow quoted
Their wordstech barons are ordinary mediocrities, no better and no worse than the monopolists that preceded them, and any differences come down to affordances in technology and regulation, not an especial wicked brilliance.