For the context of this article I am taking "motivating yourself" to mean increasing the chances that you will behave in the way that you want.

Below are examples of high performers taking actions to increase the chances that they will do a desired behavior. These high performers seem to be aware of their natural tendencies. They find ways to leverage their tendencies to help their desired behavior while mitigating any tendencies that might hinder it.

Michael Jordan & competition

Michael Jordan's biography on the NBA website states: "By acclamation, Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time."¹ He won six NBA championships with the Chicago Bulls between 1991 and 1998.

The Last Dance shares some anecdotes about how Michael Jordan motivated himself. He was highly motivated by competition and leveraged this source of motivation by inventing rivalries.

In a March 19, 1993 game between the Washington Bullets and the Chicago Bulls, LaBradford Smith scored 37 points against the Bulls, the most points LaBradford scored in a single game in his career.² "And for whatever reason, Michael couldn't make a basket."³ After the game, LaBradford approached Jordan and said "Nice game, Mike." This infuriated Jordan. He told teammates, "Tomorrow in the first half, I'm going to have what this kid had in the game."

The next day, the Washington Bullets and the Chicago Bulls played each other again. Jordan ended the first half with 36 points, nearly hitting his ambitious goal.

Here are a couple of comments about Jordan's performance:

He took such umbrage at a guy saying, "Nice game, Mike," that he torched and humiliated him in front of 20,000 people.

— Michael Wilbon, The Washington Post writer 1980-2010⁴

I've never seen a man go after another player the way he did.

— B.J. Armstrong, Chicago Bulls player 1989-1995⁴

Decades later, in response to a rumor that a detail of the story was false, reporters asked Jordan whether LaBradford had really said to him "Nice game, Mike." Jordan replied, "No, I made it up."

To motivate himself to play hard, Jordan had pretended that LaBradford had insulted him. Throughout his career, he leveraged this technique of inventing rivalries, interpreting minor comments and actions as deep insults, to motivate himself to play hard.

These little slights were deep indignations to him. That's all he needs. That's like throwing meat to a tiger. He'd find a game within the game to keep him interested. But it was all in his mind.

— Mark Vancil, Author of Rare Air⁴

For a compilation of similar anecdotes, see "Michael Jordan Took It Personally" on YouTube.

Richard Hamming & pride

Richard Hamming was a mathematician who worked on the Manhattan Project, worked at Bell Labs, and invented the first error-correcting code.

Hamming realized that he was motivated by pride and leveraged this source of motivation by putting his pride on the line by promising results by specific dates. In his own words:

In the past I have deliberately managed myself in this matter by promising a result by a given date, and then, like a cornered rat, having at the last minute to find something! I have been surprised at how often this simple trick of managing myself has worked for me. Of course it depends on having a great deal of pride and self-confidence.

From chapter "Creativity" of The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn by Richard Hamming (1996), p. 330

John Carmack & responsibility

John Carmack is a self-taught computer programmer who has a reputation for his productivity. He has worked on state of the art video game engines (e.g. Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake), space vehicle development as a founder and head of Armadillo Aerospace, virtual reality as the Oculus CTO, and artificial general intelligence as an independent researcher.

Carmack has provided a couple of anecdotes of leveraging his tendencies to increase the chances of executing a desired behavior.

In working on his self-funded artificial intelligence research, he observed that he was meandering: he was spending too much time exploring things he found to be curious and too little time on the most important problems. He realized that he has an overactive sense of responsibility about other people's money. Consequently, although he could continue to self-fund his research indefinitely, he decided to accept external funding. He figured his sense of responsibility over the investors' money would be a forcing function for him to focus on the most important problems. In his own words:

Keen Technologies, my new AGI company, has raised a $20M round

[...]

This is explicitly a focusing effort for me. I could write a $20M check myself, but knowing that other people's money is on the line engenders a greater sense of discipline and determination.

From these tweets on 8/9/22

He also discusses this on Lex Fridman Podcast #309 at 4:48:43.

Carmack shared another example where he realized he was avoiding running artificial intelligence experiments that required specialized hardware. To run such experiments, he had to rent time on specialized hardware provided by a cloud service. He seemed to avoid such experiments whenever he could even though the cost of renting time was negligible to him. To reverse the situation so that he'd be biased towards running such experiments, he purchased the expensive specialized hardware for his home. He figured this would bias him towards running experiments because, whenever his specialized hardware was sitting idle, he'd feel that it was being underutilized.⁵

Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman was a theoretical physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics.

Play⁶

Feynman experienced a period where he was unable to get himself to do physics research because he felt uninterested and tired. He reflected that it felt like this period lasted for a very long time. It felt like a few years but he doesn't think it could have been that long. He felt depressed about this inability to work on research.

He thought back to what physics used to be like for him. He realized that he felt a little disgusted by physics now but he used to enjoy doing physics. He used to play with it. He used to work on whatever he wanted without any regard for how important it was to the future of science. The thing that mattered most to him was whether it was interesting to play with.

He decided that, now that he was burned out and wouldn't be able to achieve anything, he would adopt this attitude again. He would play with whatever physics he wanted, whenever he wanted, without any regard for its importance.

Shortly thereafter, he was in the cafeteria when a guy was messing around and threw a plate in the air. Feynman noticed that the plate's wobble rotated at a different rate than its medallion. He began working out the plate's motion and discovered that one rotated twice as fast as the other. Then he tried to see whether there was a more fundamental way of understanding why this was the case. Continuing to work on this led him to think about one physics topic, then another, and another. Feynman described how this experience felt:

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.⁷

Feynman was aware that he was highly motivated to do physics when he focused on playing with whatever interested him rather than considering the importance of the problem. He successfully leveraged this attitude to end his feeling of burnout.

Contribution

Feynman was aware that, as a researcher, there are periods of time where you have great ideas and longer periods where you don't have any ideas. To keep himself from feeling guilty and depressed during these inevitable dry spells, he decided he would only accept research jobs if they included a teaching responsibility. That way, he'd have the psychological comfort of knowing he was making a contribution through his teaching when he wasn't making any through his research.⁸

Twitch founders & persisting on an idea

Twitch is a popular video live streaming service.

In the early days, the Twitch founding team was aware that they had a tendency to quickly give up on an idea to jump to another one. They realized they needed the opposite capability — they needed to be able to stick to an idea and see it through. To help them achieve this behavior, they hired Michael Seibel who had this desired tendency. They figured that Michael's tendency would act as a balancing force to the current team's tendency.⁹

Reader exercise

One technique for increasing the chances of doing a desired behavior is to follow the aforementioned examples.

Think about the behaviors you'd most like to do.

Reflect on your experiences and make a list of the things to which you respond the most strongly. For example, Michael Jordan responds strongly to competition while Richard Hamming responds strongly to putting his pride on the line.

Which of these things can be leveraged to increase the chances you'll complete your desired behavior? Which could hinder your desired behavior and should be mitigated?

If you have other examples of people leveraging/mitigating their natural tendencies to increase the chances of a desired behavior, I'd be interested to hear about them.

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