Any task can be made more attractive by looking at it differently.

You want to start a business, but are confused by all the regulatory requirements and which ones do, and don’t, apply to you. You want to build a house on raw land, but are unsure of the best order of operations for the major tasks. You need to clean out the chicken house, and replace a season’s worth of poop with a layer of fresh dirt and hay. It’s easy to put off each one of these tasks because they seem insurmountable in different ways. It can be hard to find the motivation to learn new things, to take on complex projects, or to do work that isn’t particularly pleasant. 

A very effective mental trick for taking on a task that seems unapproachable is to imagine that you are doing it for someone else. Simply pretend that you are doing it as a favor for someone you love and respect, and who very much needs your help⏤or that someone has hired you, and is paying you to do it on their behalf. Think about it: You’ve had to learn new skills, new processes, or new systems at work your entire career. For some reason, it’s generally easy to bring creativity, resilience, curiosity, confidence, and fortitude to your work life. Putting on your imaginary worker hat when you approach personal projects is a way to bring this same grit to your work outside of work.

You almost always do better work when you do it for someone you love, or when you are getting paid generously to do it, so pretending that your personal projects are work projects conjures up that same ‘best self’ that you bring to the workplace every day. Why give your best self only to your job when you can bring it to your personal work, too? If your 9 to 5 is where your excellence shows up, then your 5 to 9 deserves it as well. While you might be exhausted at the end of a workday⏤and more easily prone to discouragement and lack of motivation because of that exhaustion⏤this mental trick can change your outlook entirely. It also allows you to detach from your personal projects in a way that makes them less personal, makes you less sensitive to potential failure, and allows you to encounter setbacks, blind turns, closed doors, misinformation, and confusion in a way that isn’t crushing.

In chemistry, there is something called the activation barrier. This is the amount of energy you need to put into a reaction to get it going. Picture pushing a fully-loaded shopping cart up a hill. Once you get over the crest you can jump in the cart, and ride it down the hill on the other side. Mental tricks are ways to overcome the activation barrier of tiredness, low motivation, or just feeling overwhelmed. Try putting on your magical worker hat next time you tackle a weekend or after-hours project, and see how it transforms your approach to the work at hand.

Copyright 2023 Kesel Wilson (entirely, 100% human-created)

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