How to do more and be happier about it

Strike while the iron is hot

Photo by Francisco Fernandes on Unsplash

As a kid, I used to suffer from writer’s block. I distinctly remember looking at a blank page in class and simply being unable to write anything. I concluded that I just wasn’t cut out to be a writer.

Now, like 10 years later, I have a hard time remembering what that was like. I do this blogging thing pretty seriously and I write a pretty considerable amount every day; there are months in which I recall publishing a decently long post every other day, on top of all my other writing obligations at my job.

My secret is to strike while the iron is hot.

Normally, I break down motivation using the three determinants from self-determination theory: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy more or less corresponds to “feeling a sense of authentic choice in what one does” or “the need to feel choiceful and volitional, as the originator of one’s actions;” competence is “feeling effective in what one does,” or “the need to feel capable of achieving desired outcomes;” relatedness is “being meaningfully connected with others,” or “the need to feel close to and understood by important others.” Combined, all three are powerful determinants of whether your sense of motivation will persist throughout difficulty and time.

I also usually break down goal-setting using a tiered goal system, which uses superordinate (identity-based) goals as the foundation of all motivation and layers on other subordinate goals as needed. Goals like “exercise for 20 minutes every day” are great and all, but underneath those goals must lie a foundation of identity, something like “I want to be the type of person who is healthy and strong”—otherwise, you’ll have no reason to stick with it when it gets hard.

However, I think there’s an aspect of motivation that is entirely missed by these frameworks: inspiration.

Inspiration gets a bad rap. To be fair, it does have its downsides—inspiration is particularly bad at promoting consistency—but I would argue that inspiration is very useful and is often just misapplied. For some reason this point seems to escape people, but you are simply more likely to do things when you are inspired; inspiration isn’t for consistency, it’s for being excited, whether you’re starting or putting the finishing touches on a piece or project.

If you want to try using inspiration, you would do well to strike while the iron is hot; that is, pay attention to what excites you and follow it. In practice, this can look like starting a book because you just had a really interesting conversation with someone, jotting down ideas for a piece after you see something in the real world or go through an interesting experience, or even just giving yourself more time to daydream so you can see what you think about when you’re not really thinking about anything.

Inspiration is also highly temporally determined. It tends to peak in the beginning stages of doing something, or even in the pre-beginning stages of doing something when you’re still working on ideation and the nitty-gritty, boring, annoying details haven’t caught up with you yet. Writing ideas down is a good way to learn to listen your inspiration, but an even better way is to sit down and write a post immediately upon being struck by a good idea. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a notes doc full of hundreds of “good ideas” that you no longer really care about. That’s not a bad thing per se; you might come back to them later—I’ve done so many times before—but it does mean not getting the satisfaction of having something to show for your efforts at the end.

Still, the defining feature of striking while the iron is hot is that you’re not really thinking about results while you strike. It’s not outcome focused. But it’s not really process focused either, at least in the sense that you aren’t focused on the nitty-gritty details of execution or trying to be consistent about some set of habits that you expect to do well by you. Striking while the iron is hot is some secret third thing. If I was forced to put a word on it, I would say it’s something close to whimsy, or perhaps aliveness.

I’ve recently come to realize that I really value aliveness in a person, the spark in the eyes that shows you that they have something they live to do, and that they love being able to do it day after day. And I think the kinds of people who never strike while the iron is hot are the people who suppress the spark in their eyes, who worry too much about failure and think too hard about what they’re supposed to do and the outcomes they’re supposed to achieve, whose internal dialogues mostly sound like should, should, should.

Striking while the iron is hot is fundamentally about learning to listen to what you want. It’s about getting in touch with all the parts of yourself—your inner child, your inner teenager, your inner adult; your ethereal spirit and your grungy gremlin; the parts of you that like socially mainstream things and the parts of you that really just want to talk about the lore of the Halo universe for the millionth time; the wise sage and the chaos monkey who are constantly fighting over the central control console in your mind. Put another way, striking while the iron is hot is about letting the elephant steer the rider.

There’s definitely a kind of person who doesn’t need to hear this advice. If you start a million books or pieces or projects and don’t finish any of them, you should maybe rely a little less on inspiration and instead find more sustainable sources of long-term motivation that will allow you to complete projects instead of just starting them. And if you’re the kind of person who actually does need to get more disciplined, well, there’s not much to do except get used to doing things you you don’t feel like doing.

But if you never start anything because you don’t think you’re going to finish anything, if you’re a perfectionist who doesn’t do stuff just because it’s fun, you should maybe consider whether you’re too disciplined, or at least too rigid in always doing what you feel like you’re supposed to do instead of doing what you actually want—which happens to be the magic formula to suffer from burnout and hate your life. Obviously you sometimes have to slog through the stupid details. But if your work always feels like a slog, you’re naturally going to lose motivation to do it, and that really sucks.

So if you wish to read more, write more, draw more, hobby harder, or even just hang out with your friends more, you know what to do. Take some time to yourself and think about what you feel like you should want. Then take some time to yourself and think about what it is you actually want and then go in that direction. Stop worrying about consistency and tenacity and follow through: relearn how to be impulsive. Follow your heart.

Do take your head with you, though.