When the Fun Stops

Motivation direction: We move away from pain and towards pleasure. 

You started an acting class and it was fun. It was new, it was exciting, you got a real buzz from it. Then after a while, it starts to fade. You’re still really keen, but it’s started to get tough, you don’t enjoy it so much any more and frankly it’s frustrating. It used to be fun and now you leave each class with a sense that you aren’t progressing, others are surpassing you, but when you try to get better, you end up back on your ass. It’s a very unpleasant feeling and that isn’t fun. The pleasure you initially felt is turning to pain – so we start to back away from it.

What has happened? 

When you started the class you had a great time because there was a novelty factor, you were also fairly unconsciously incompetent, you didn’t know what you didn’t know and you were blissfully unaware of the struggle ahead. Because you weren’t aware of the challenge, your skills matched your perception of what you had to do. This perhaps created moments of the psychological state of flow, that fully immersed state in which we are pleasurably lost in what we are doing.

Then, you started to become aware of the challenge ahead. You became conscious of your incompetence. Your skills didn’t match the challenge, the bar has raised, and flow was no longer possible. It was painful.

So now you’ve lost the novelty factor and you don’t experience the pleasurable loss of self in the activity.

And you’re aware that you’re not good at certain things. But it’s still kinda fun, it just hurts occasionally.

Next, the fun goes. And you can feel more pain.

What’s happening now will separate the successful from the unsuccessful.

At this point, those that derive their gratification from the activity being fun, easy, novel, or challenging in a way that matches their current skills will struggle a lot, mainly because now that the fun and novelty have gone, the conscious realisation of their incompetence has such a negative impact on their self-image, every failure is a blow to that image and they will do anything to escape it.

Those that derive their gratification from the slightly masochistic experience of trying, failing, evaluating what’s gone right and wrong, and trying again - in other words those with a growth mindset, a Succeed or Learn mindset – are now in their element! Every failure is a learning opportunity, and this individual gets off on that process, they can delay their gratification, they don’t need novelty, fun isn’t their priority, they actually derive pleasure from the challenge of Succeed or Learn. It’s still painful, it’s just that they get more pleasure from the challenge of growth.

Growth hurts. It isn’t often fun. What happens at the separation point is that some people start deriving their fun from a different source – from the challenge and the experience of that challenge –  and others don’t. When it stops being fun – start changing your mindset.