Now consider playing tennis against someone who is your equal.
THE GOLDILOCKS ZONE PROFESSIONAL
In contrast, if you play a professional tennis player like Roger Federer or Serena Williams, you will quickly lose motivation because the match is too difficult. If you love tennis and try to play a serious match against a four-year-old, you will quickly become bored. The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty. While there is still much to learn, one of the most consistent findings is that the way to maintain motivation and achieve peak levels of desire is to work on tasks of “just manageable difficulty.” 2 The Goldilocks Rule Why is it that some people, like Martin, stick with their habits-whether practicing jokes or drawing cartoons or playing guitar-while most of us struggle to stay motivated? How do we design habits that pull us in rather than ones that fade away? Scientists have been studying this question for many years. In his words, “10 years spent learning, 4 years spent refining, and 4 years as a wild success.” And yet Steve Martin faced this fear every week for eighteen years. It is hard to imagine a situation that would strike fear into the hearts of more people than performing alone on stage and failing to get a single laugh.
Martin’s story offers a fascinating perspective on what it takes to stick with habits for the long run. I recently finished Steve Martin's wonderful autobiography, Born Standing Up.
THE GOLDILOCKS ZONE HOW TO
(Photo by Paul Natkin.) How to Stay Motivated Steve Martin performing in Chicago, Illinois in 1978. He catapulted to the top of his genre and became one of the most successful comedians of his time. Another 45,000 tickets were sold for his three-day show in New York. He had 18,695 people attend one show in Ohio. He toured sixty cities in sixty-three days. By the mid-1970s, he had worked his way into being a regular guest on The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live.įinally, after nearly fifteen years of work, the young man rose to fame. He took a job as a television writer and, gradually, he was able to land his own appearances on talk shows. He spent another decade experimenting, adjusting, and practicing. He had to read three poems during the show just to make the routine long enough, but his skills continued to progress. At nineteen, he was performing weekly for twenty minutes at a time. By high school, his material had expanded to include a five-minute act and, a few years later, a ten-minute show. His first routines would only last one or two minutes. It wasn’t glamorous work, but there was no doubt he was getting better. One night, he literally delivered his stand-up routine to an empty club. Most of the people in the crowd were too busy drinking or talking with friends to pay attention. He was rarely on stage for more than five minutes. The crowds were small and his act was short. He set his sights on becoming a comedian.īeginning in his teenage years, he started performing in little clubs around Los Angeles. Soon he discovered that what he loved was not performing magic but performing in general. He experimented with jokes and tried out simple routines on visitors. Within a year, he had transitioned to Disney’s magic shop, where he learned tricks from the older employees. Labor laws were loose back then and the boy managed to land a position selling guidebooks for $0.50 apiece.
In 1955, Disneyland had just opened in Anaheim, California, when a ten-year-old boy walked in and asked for a job. This article is an excerpt from Atomic Habits, my New York Times bestselling book.
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