The P.I.L.E.S. Model —or— Why To Do Fucking Anything


If you're at all like me, project ideas stack their way to the ceiling all around you. In part figuratively, in part literally, they hold up the firmament of your cognitive environs in load bearing pillars of notes for things that you know you will never get around to. Not due to laziness. Not even because you need to sleep, work and eat occasionally. Even if you never did any of these things, the time would not suffice. Even if you lived eternally as a crumbling ruin of perpetual creative output, chronology would fail to accommodate your humble ambition due to the simple fact that more new ideas are generated in any given length of time than you could finish within that selfsame interval. The piles only ever grow. They have been growing since you learned how to think, shaping your path towards the person you are now and continuing onwards into a nearing sunset where your tomb must inevitably lie at the end of an infuriatingly unfinished life. Actualizing some of the ideas has only made you better at thinking and so the problem compounds. You will never be done, unless a part of you which you value greatly dies. You have to pick your battles, pick your notes, if you don't want to be an ineffectual purveyor of mental phantasms devoid of substance. That most loathsome of creatures which we call an ideas-guy. You have got to get action and make shit take place. But I suffer from decision fatigue and I am terrible at multi tasking. If I have to pick between more than four things I will waste time I don't have and be miserable as a bonus, so I need a heuristic which spares me this existential exhaustion. The way I've found for myself is asking why I want to do certain things. And even if you don't have this same issue, I think it will help you understand your own process and the processes of people around you. I think there are five fundamental reasons to do things at all. Some people will value some of them more, some people will engage with some of them to a greater degree, and these preferences are not static in time. You might burn out on one of these engines but not the others. And I think "writers block", burnout and all of these other afflictions often result from trying to tap into a resource pool which hasn't had time to replenish when other sources of fuel are freely available. These fail-states of running dry are in my experience neither inevitable nor universal, they are a symptom of having fucked up at some stage of your internal project management, of having put your mind to the grindstone until it scraped grey matter. You want a balanced diet overall, but what your optimal distribution is is something you will have to learn, ideally through introspection, more likely through trail and error. Be mindful, be circumspect and forgive yourself for failing. Learn, adapt, fail less next time. The five pools of motivation I have identified are the following: P.ragmatic Pragmatic motivation is doing a thing because you want the result. Working because you want to have money, painting because you want the finished piece to exist, learning a craft to build a thing you need, cooking because you want food. If something is fully pragmatically motivated, you would much prefer to just be handed the product. Depending on the sort of person you are, this might seem superficial to you, like vapid consumerism or a blatant violation of the old adage that the journey matters more than its destination, but consider: An entirely altruistic volunteer-doctor does only want to protect people from death and suffering. In fact, we might begrudge them for having personal motivations beyond it. This archetypal person would be elated if their work were rendered unnecessary. Even saving the world is a pragmatic motivation, and there is nothing wrong with that, but pragmatic alone can run you dry. If you only ever do things because someone has to and no one else will, there is a good chance that you'll feel incredibly alienated incredibly quickly. Pragmatic motivation is a great driver for getting things done —it's the light at the end of the tunnel, because the end point is all that ever mattered at all— and it is immensely potent, but the longer a project lasts the more you will need something that sustains you at every step, because the finish line will seem to be nearing much too slowly along some stretches, and if you do fail —god forbid— you will be left with nothing but lost time if pragmatic motivation was all you had. This is demotivating in the extreme, and it will kill you. I.ntrinsic Intrinsic motivation is the polar opposite in some sense. It is the pure joy of the craft. It's doodling, it's sports, not to get fit but for its own sake, it's enjoying what you are doing for all of its ephemerality. If it accomplished nothing, affected nothing, you would still do it. Things done out of intrinsic motivation will probably recharge your battery. The things you consider your hobbies probably have a decent share of this facet, but intrinsic alone rarely finishes projects for the simple reason that the end doesn't matter. Doing it to the halfway point is just as fun as going all the way, and it is fundamentally opposed to frustration, meaning that intrinsic motivation rarely does things which are hard and which challenge you. Doodling still builds muscle memory, absent-minded cooking still strengthens your institutions, but it only gets you marginal optimization. It gets you over shallow hurdles but not tall ones. If there's a thing you really cannot do, you will have to sit down and actually try. It will be painful, it will be hard, and it will burn spoons. Intrinsic motivation alone will never get you there, and all fields I'm aware of do have tall hurdles. The old adage that you shouldn't turn your hobby into a job is about pragmatic motivation souring what was previously intrinsic. Don't get me wrong, the two can be mixed and it is great when they are, but you need a job to live, and if you morph your intrinsically motivated passion into one, you will have an unwanted, mentally taxing expectation in what was previously your recharge-time. L.earning Learning motivation is about becoming more competent as a person. More adaptable, more useful, more secure. It's not about getting any specific thing the way pragmatic motivation is, it's about wanting to be able to do things when the need arises. Language learning often falls into this camp, along with repair and maintenance skills. I've found learning motivation to be highly correlated with self esteem. If you repeatedly take on projects which demonstrate to yourself that you can acquire tools, you'll be pretty confident about your ability to tackle future challenges, and you'll have a decently stocked tool belt at your disposal to do it with. "Cultivation" is another term which fits in here. Where Pragmatic tackles only the specific hurdles it needs to tackle, and Intrinsic erodes shallow hurdles passively, Learning is precisely about seeking out tall hurdles and bashing your head against them until you succeed. When people speak about enjoying challenges, this is the thing they're talking about. "Aha!"-moments are the thrill of breaking through those roadblocks. Learning motivation, along with Self Concept, is probably the biggest force which get you started on a new skill, since you predictably won't get much Pragmatic reward (your first few attempts will suck and fail to produce what you wanted them to), and since there will be too much frustration and unfamiliar input to get into the comfortable groove of Intrinsic satisfaction. E.xternal External motivation is doing things because other people like them. To be very dismissive about it, it's the need for praise. This is another one I see many artistic folks dismiss as shallow, and while my own need here is comparatively limited, and while I hate compliments, I do not think this is fair. I have yet to find a person who does not get a rush when someone's eyes light up upon seeing their work. A large part of art is the need to make a connection, and connections do require at least one other person. Praise by a layperson might not mean anything once you've crossed a certain skill threshold, but praise from your idols probably does. External is easy to burn out on just like Pragmatic, since there's a risk that you'll sacrifice your soul at the altar of "number-go-up" when an uncaring algorithm nudges you towards producing mass-marketable sludge, but External motivation does not have to come from an anonymous mass, it can come from your loved ones and it can come from communities of like-minded creatives within which you may forge invaluable connections and receive deeply insightful feedback. S.elf-Concept Self-Concept motivation is perhaps the least intuitive of the bunch. It's about "Wanting to be the sort of person who does X". I've found Eco-conscious dietary decisions and engagement with difficult literature to often have great amounts of Self Concept motivation behind them, but it can be anything for which you have an internally constructed archetype towards which you aspire. S-type motivation can often be the reason why people start something, but the more they get into it the more they will usually pick up other engines. I have never seen someone stick with a project based on Self-Concept motivation alone, which is not true of any of the other ones, but this is not the same as saying that the S-motivation is necessarily replaced. It often sticks around and is merely added to. In a certain sense it can be though of as "internal external motivation", which is a silly phrase that by all rights shouldn't mean anything but nonetheless feels true. Instead of another person it's a voice within your own mind excitedly watching your process and going "Look at you, you're doing the thing we admire!".


I really need to stress that most of what you're doing right now probably has a mix of motivations, and that this is a good thing. Pragmatic will help you get shit done, Intrinsic will help you maintain your skills, Learning will help you push through the tough parts, External will help you make friends, get advice and gain collaborators, and Self-concept will help you feel like you're doing the right thing. Sometimes projects can have a single motivation and this too is fine so long as it's outweighed elsewhere. Figure out what our mana-pools are and draft your plans accordingly. For most people Pragmatic and Internal are the most important, though famous folks tend to have great quantities of External motivation in addition to this. They are not a representative sample of the population due to the obvious feedback loop between doing things for an audience and growing said audience.

(†ↄ) Telomagnetic Copyleft