#33: I'm supposed to be doing what I love - what's gone wrong?
Lucky you: you get to spend your time researching that thing you find more interesting than anything else in the whole world! So, why is it that you can't bring yourself to do it these days? Why does the thought of it make you feel anxious and overwhelmed rather than excited and energised?
Friend, you've fallen out of love with your research. It happens. And it's not just you. Unfortunately, academia (and, come to think of it, the world in general) is geared to trying to motivate you in ways that actually kill your interest in what you do. But there's a way out of this muddle, and your imperfect friend is here to tell you all about it.
For the 5 whys analysis template mentioned in the episode, click here.
References:
Greene, D., & Lepper, M. R. 1974: 'Effects of extrinsic rewards on children's subsequent intrinsic interest', Child Development 45, 1141-1145.
Lepper, M. R., Greene, D., & Nisbett, R. E. 1973: 'Undermining children's intrinsic interest with extrinsic rewards: a test of the overjustification hypothesis', Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 28: 129-137.
Loveland, K. K., & Olley, J. G. 1979: 'The Effect of External Reward on Interest and Quality of Task Performance in Children of High and Low Intrinsic Motivation', Child Development 50/4: 1207.
Episode transcript:
You’re supposed to be doing what you love, so why does it feel all wrong?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
You’re doing what you’re doing because it’s what you love, right? You’re studying a subject that you were drawn to because it fascinated you. Perhaps you have a job where you get paid to research and teach something you live and breathe … supposedly. But something has gone wrong along the way. Because despite being led to where you are by curiosity, fascination, enthrallment, and a hunger to know more, the honeymoon period is over and you now find yourself scrolling through Instagram when you know you should be writing, or reading news stories about things that you don’t care about instead of reading about things that you really do care about. And while you’re doing this, you’re feeling guilty because think of all those people who spend their entire working lives doing something they hate - and here you are, a spoilt little brat, turning her nose up at doing the thing that she always wanted to do. I mean, what you’re supposed to be doing is the same thing as what you love doing, right? You’re paid to think about what you find most interesting. And yet, you just want to crawl into bed and binge-watch Netflix.
Does this sound familiar to you? Me too. I can remember when I first started studying philosophy, I couldn’t get enough of it. I was interested in all of it. The whole lot. Even the boring, pointless bits - because, trick question, there weren’t any boring, pointless bits. I was enthralled by this new subject that I’d never studied at school. I never submitted any late work throughout all the years that I was a student. In fact, I was known as someone who would hand stuff in days or weeks in advance of the deadline. It just wasn’t an effort. I would go home in the evenings and look forward to getting stuck into the reading I needed to do for my seminars the following day. Essays and exams weren’t burdens to me, they were opportunities to dive into really fascinating topics that I was hungry to know more about.
These days, however, I can’t remember the last time I submitted something on time. I’m currently polishing off the manuscript for a book that was originally due to be completed in 2016. And I’m not alone. It often seems that the entire institution of academic publication is built around pretending that deadlines are important while secretly acknowledging that everyone knows they are completely meaningless. Doing what we love has, somewhere, somehow, become a chore. You might even have forgotten that you once loved what you do now. Lots of my clients have. They talk about what they do, describing their anxieties and their struggles, and when I ask them about why they originally got into it, they seem to surprise even themselves when they talk about how they were once motivated by genuine curiosity and interest.
Of course, it’s not unusual to get bored with things, eventually. Eat your favourite meal every night for six months and it’s no longer your favourite meal, right? Except that’s not what’s happening here. Researching what interests you isn’t like eating the same meal every night for years on end, because research develops and changes and progresses. Researching what interests you should be more like eating your favourite meal every night but being able to adapt and change it as your tastes change, and as you learn more about how to prepare food, and as you discover new and exciting ingredients and recipes and places to go grocery shopping. Falling out of love with what you do is not as simple as getting bored of the same old thing, because it’s never the same old thing. So, why has it become such a grind?
Well, here’s one theory: it’s not about you. It’s about what’s going on around you. Specifically, it’s about the rewards - or potential rewards - that you’re presented with for doing what you do. Promotion, qualifications, grant success, publication, pay rises, prizes, recognition - for academics (and for a lot of non-academics too) it’s external rewards like these that we chase, and that we’re encouraged to chase. Getting them feels good, and symbolises how well we’re doing. Not getting them when we hoped we might is disappointing. But there’s a problem. Rewarding people for doing something they are already interested in is risky. It’s risky because it undermines their interest.
In the 1970s, there was a collection of psychological studies that looked at how children respond to receiving rewards for doing some activity they were doing anyway. The subjects were preschool children - roughly around 3 years of age - and the activity was drawing. Kids like drawing, as you probably know - some more than others. They’ll do it simply because they like doing it. The psychologists came in and started giving half of the kids participation awards for doing their drawings. The other half was the control group, and they just carried on drawing when they felt like it, for no reward, as usual. After a while, the kids who were getting rewarded came to expect their rewards. And then the psychologists stopped giving them rewards for drawing. What happened? Well, the kids who had been receiving the rewards lost interest in drawing, compared to the kids who were never given rewards. Coming to expect external rewards for doing what they were initially motivated to do for its own sake destroyed the kids’ motivation for doing it. What’s more, this motivation-undermining effect was concentrated in the kids who started out really loving drawing. The motivation of the kids who initially didn’t care that much about drawing wasn’t undermined by the rewards. It turns out that, the more motivated you are to do some activity for its own sake, the more vulnerable your motivation is to being destroyed by the introduction of external rewards for doing that activity.
What does that mean for you? Well, you started out doing what you do through passion, right? You were motivated to do it simply for its own sake. The activity - the researching, writing, reading - was its own reward. And then you discovered external rewards: degrees, scholarships, grants, publications, promotion, and so on. You came to expect those external rewards: if you were doing a good enough job at whatever it is, you came to realise, you’d get the rewards. And so, like the kids whose love of drawing got killed by the participation awards they started to receive from the psychologists who were studying them, your love of your subject got killed by the line of work you got into. All those rewards that your profession dangles in front of your nose like carrots, with the aim of motivating you to work harder and aim higher, are having the opposite effect. They’re killing your passion. There’s a quotation that seems to get attributed to a wide range of different people: ‘Choose a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life’. But that’s not what the evidence points to. What the evidence points to is something much more disheartening: choose a job you love and you’ll fall out of love with your job.
Pretty depressing, right? Don’t worry, there’s a happy ending here. Let’s go back to those kids who stopped getting rewarded for their drawings. While, initially, no longer receiving rewards led them to lose interest in drawing, this wasn’t a permanent effect. When the psychologists went back to check up on them 7 weeks after stopping the rewards, all the kids had returned to their initial level of interest in drawing. Those kids who started out loving drawing had rediscovered their love of it. Which is a good thing for psychologists, right? It wouldn’t have been a good look if they’d spent a week with a bunch of preschoolers and managed to permanently kill their burgeoning creative streaks.
It’s also a good thing for you. That love that you used to have for your research? You haven’t lost it forever. You can rediscover it if you get rid of the external rewards. You just need to get rid of the whole network of promotion, grant awards, prizes, publications, degrees … easy, right? Well, despite the way it sounds, it’s not impossible. It all depends on how we understand ‘get rid of’. You’re not, of course, going to be able single-handedly to wipe out all universities, journals, grant-awarding bodies, and so on - and you probably wouldn’t want to, especially if they pay your salary. But you can change your relationship to them. Those external rewards are still going to be there, but they don’t have to be your why. It doesn’t have to be because of them that you’re doing what you’re doing. If you’re listening to this, it’s because you’re one of those people who has fallen out of love with what they’re doing. But I bet you have colleagues who aren’t like that - people who are still passionate about their research, whose curiosity and thirst for discovery still gets them out of bed in the morning. Those people are often really successful by all the usual sorts of external measures - but it’s not the pursuit of those external measures that keeps them going and motivates them. You can be like that too. You just need to stop caring so much about promotions, grants, publications. It’s just a job. It’s just a degree. Much as the academic machine wants us to think that it’s more than that, it’s not. It’s just a job.
How do you stop caring, though? Wouldn’t that involve having to pull some sort of mental trickery on yourself, so that you end up no longer caring about things that you actually do care about? Well, not really. It’s not about conjuring motivation from nowhere. It’s about rediscovering what originally brought you to where you are. When you first started out as a student, you didn’t care about publications and grants and promotions. You didn’t understand any of that. You didn’t know the difference between the different grades of academic, or between journals of different calibre, or how academic funding works. You just wanted to spend time studying this interesting thing, among people who you could talk to about it. That interest is still there, probably (I’ll come back to the ‘probably’ in a moment). You just need to reconnect with it. One useful tool to help with that is the ‘5 whys’ analysis - you can find a template for that on the resources page of the Academic Imperfectionist website, and I’ll put a link to that in the notes for the episode. Rediscover your why, and keep it in mind. When you’re sitting down at your desk, remind yourself that, fundamentally, you’re not doing it because you want a promotion or a grant or whatever. You’re doing it because there are things you want to find out. What are those things? What is it about them that lights you up? Spend some time thinking about that. Because if that’s not what’s at the forefront of your mind when you open your laptop, it’s not surprising that you’re feeling jaded.
Now, I don’t want to suggest, with my ‘you just need to reconnect with your why’, that it’s easy. Increasingly, we seem to live in a culture where we’re encouraged to try to monetise anything we do. Enjoy making clothes? Set up an Etsy shop. Good at DIY? Try making your fortune in renovations. Like playing video games? Start a YouTube channel where can generate loads of advertising money from posting very long videos of yourself playing games while talking about what you’re doing in a very very annoying voice (seriously, my son will probably watch it). You’d be forgiven for thinking that doing something you enjoy simply for its own sake, without trying to instrumentalise it to attain some external reward, is a pointless waste of time. But it’s not. Of course it’s not. If you want to continue to enjoy the things you enjoy, you need to resist that way of thinking. I’m not saying ‘never try to make money out of the things you enjoy’ - just don’t let that become your primary reason for doing it.
Back to that ‘probably’. What if you’re not interested any more? What if you’re not the person you were when you jumped into academia? Perhaps you’re sick of the overly cerebral world of knowledge. Perhaps you want to jack it all in and set up a gardening business, or take that gap year you never took when you were a teenager. You might have a different itch to scratch now. If that’s the case, the same advice applies: reconnect with your why. Because, isn’t it better to know than not? If you’ve lost interest in doing what you’re doing for its own sake and the external rewards really are your only motivation, then perhaps this relationship has run its course, and it’s time to move on to new adventures. There are other things that could light you up, other things that you’d do simply for the love of doing them, and until you get out of the rut you’re in, you’re missing out. But you’re not going to get out of that rut unless you first realise that you’re in a rut.
I’m going to leave you with a little hack. You know how much I like a little hack. Ask yourself this: ‘If I were doing what I do simply for its own sake, without the expectation of any external rewards, what would my attitude towards it need to be?’ So, for example, suppose your alarm goes off in the morning and you head downstairs, make some coffee, and make a start on your research - research that you’re not going to be rewarded or penalised for, regardless of how good or bad it is. What do you need to be telling yourself about what you’re doing in order for that to happen? How are you motivating yourself in those circumstances? What is it that appeals to you about it? How are you envisioning your day opening up before you? What sort of day do you need to have in order to end it feeling like you’ve spent your time well? What sort of person are you, in this scenario? If you can tell yourself a coherent story about this, and if the life you’re imagining is one you can see yourself being able to climb inside, then great. This is something you can connect with and build on . On the other hand, if the whole thing strikes you as completely alien - if the version of yourself who gets out of bed and makes a start on her research purely for its own sake just isn’t someone you identify with at all - then are you sure you’re in the best place?
Whatever the outcome, if you’re feeling like you’ve lost your way, do something. Don’t allow yourself to normalise dissatisfaction. There’s something better for you. Laters, imperfectionists.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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