During the process of designing and building the Marble Machine X,
I’ve teached myself a lot of new skills, but there is one skill to rule them all
and that is focus.
During the past years I’ve been thinking a lot about how to achieve goals and how to focus,
and in this video I want to share with you my thoughts on this topic.
For very long periods in this build, I have been very dissatisfied with the progress
and my own performance.
I have constantly been thinking about how I can improve my efficiency.
Years and years of thinking have now condensed into my home-cooked theory
on how to achieve your goals and improve your focus in two "simple" concepts.
I put "simple" in quotation marks because the concepts themselves
are very simple, but not easy to carry out.
And even though this method is specialized for my unique situation,
maybe there are some general things in there that can be useful for you as well.
Let's get right into it.
Let's begin breaking down the first concept: how to achieve goals.
When I was home in Sweden to celebrate Christmas with my family,
my sister told me about the goal setting theory.
This is a very fascinating subject, and I’m not well read on it at all,
but my two key takeaways from goal setting theory is:
one, setting a goal can help you a lot;
two, the nature of the goals you are setting, is very important for the likeliness of success.
So, before we even start to try to achieve our goals,
we have to look at our own goals skeptically, and scrutinize them, and see,
are these goals good goals?
We have to learn to set better goals
and that's basically my advice for step one:
set better goals.
So, how do we set better goals?
This is a topic for one billion self-help books,
but I have found for me personally
one breakthrough aspect,
and that is to think about your goals as externalized or internalized goals.
Picture a tennis player preparing for a match.
The player can either think: "my goal is to win the match",
or the player can think: "my goal is to play to the best of my ability"
"to give myself the largest chance of winning the match".
The first type of goal, "I am going to win the tennis match", is an externalized goal,
depending on external events out of your control.
In such, it's a kind of a fragile type of goal.
The second type of goal, "I am going to play to the best of my ability to give myself"
"the largest chance of winning the match", is an internalized type of goal,
depending only on stuff that you, self, can control.
And herein lies the magic of internalized goal.
We are already standing on a firmer ground with our goals.
We have formulated our goal in such a way that we can actually do something about it.
We are not dependent on external events out of our control.
So, that's my tip #1 about "how to set goals": set internalized goals.
The example with the tennis player is from the book
"A Guide to the Good Life" by William. B. Irvine, if you want to read more.
Another thing that helped me to set better goals is to be careful about the size of the goals,
is to be careful about how long-term versus short-term the goals are.
So, in my example, I want to go on a world tour with the Marble Machine X.
If that's my goal every single day, I am failing every single day.
no matter what I achieved during 12 hard hours working in my studio,
I will have failed by the end of the day.
So what I try to do, is to break down goals into smaller steps.
and I’ve taken this into the extreme.
Before, I used to think in the morning:
"Today I want to be finished with the marble divider", or something like that.
So, first of all, this kind of goal is actually an externalized type of goal.
I don't know, what kind of issues will appear during the day,
that will prevent me from finishing the marble divider,
and I will be failing at my work yet another day and feeling frustration.
And this has been most of the dynamic throughout the build of both
the original marble machine and the Marble Machine X.
I woke up, I’ve been setting myself an ambitious goal and I’ve been failing to achieve it,
which is demoralizing over time. I wanted to turn this around and stop wasting
energy on unuseful frustration.
If I use the tennis match analogy for my workday, how can I formulate a goal for workday?
And what I’ve come up with is this:
My goal is to stay focused for the whole workday. [laughs]
It's really simple as that.
You've been listening to me talking for like five minutes and this is like what I’ve come up with.
My goal is to stay focused for the whole workday.
And, this is an internalized goal. This is achievable within the same day.
It's an amazing type of goal to set for myself. This has turned my work around.
Actually, no, this hasn't turned my work around, because I’ve been having huge trouble to focus
and this leads us neatly over to step two: how to learn how to focus.
[notes played on vibraphone]
By the way, the reason I taped the funnel was because my argon gas was out for my
tig welder and Pascal - you're a hero - Pascal found a new bottle, so now we have
a new bottle and I can weld things properly.
[piano flourish]
So, now let's start breaking down the second of my two simple concepts:
how to improve your focus.
Working on such a long term project like the Marble Machine X is very challenging
from the gratification point of view. There is very little instant gratification,
it's all about delayed gratification and long-term progress,
and I have been struggling a lot with maintaining focus and work efficiently,
especially when I had to make repetitive work. On the Marble Machine X there are
38 channels, so there's a lot of instances where I need to make highly
repetitive work: I need to make 38 pieces of this, so I need to bend 38 pipes,
or something like that. And those instances have been especially challenging for my
focus, because the first pipe is okay, the second pipe is okay. When you're down to
the sixth pipe and you still have 32 to go, your brain hates you. [laughs]
It's like a war with your brain.
Your brain is screaming out of boredom. You don't want to make
the seventh pipe, you want to do something else, you want to set up an
account on chess.com and learn how to play chess; play five minute blitz games
and improve my rating, you know. Because, that's much more fun
than bending the seventh PMMA pipe. So, I have started to look at all these dynamics
through the lens of dopamine, and what I have found lately that really works for me
and helps me improve my focus is to deliberately reducing my dopamine intake.
This for me is the key aspect on how to learn how to focus and do more boring
but long-term useful things. Let's get into it.
Just like with goal-setting theory
I’m not well-read on dopamine but it's described in the wikipedia article
as an organic chemical that plays a major role in the motivational component
of reward motivated behavior. And then it says something that highlights exactly
what I find so fascinating with dopamine. It says: "In popular culture and media,
dopamine is usually seen as the main chemical of pleasure, but the current
opinion in pharmacology is that dopamine instead confers motivational salience,
and motivational salience is a form of attention that motivates or propels
an individual's behavior towards or away from a particular object, perceived event
or outcome. Motivational salience regulates the intensity of behaviors
that facilitate the attainment of a particular goal, the amount of time and
energy that an individual is willing to expand to attain a particular goal,
and the amount of risk that an individual is willing to accept or working to attain
a particular goal.” So the link between dopamine and achieving goals is quite clear.
Dopamine is responsible for motivating us to achieve this or that goal.
Let's take a very simple example. When you're hungry and you cook like
the best lasagna ever that looks like Garfield picturesque, it comes out of the
oven, you let it rest on the bench, you put the big piece on your plate, and you
put it in your mouth. Will you have problem focusing on eating that lasagna?
No. You are dead focused on that lasagna. Why? Because your brain is giving you so
much dopamine from putting that lasagna in your mouth and you are loving it.
Not a thousand horses can pull you from the spot. Like your tendencies to
procrastinate during the middle of a wonderful meal is like zero. Why is that?
If I understand things correctly, it's because your brain is rewarded with a lot of dopamine
for eating the lasagna, it keeps you focused and you continue to eat.
So the food example illustrates the positive sides of dopamine
where dopamine is telling us what we need to do to survive.
It's easy to see why evolution has premiered a system like this.
It's actually really really smart but what happens when it goes wrong?
Let's go back to the example where I’m working on the Marble Machine X and I need to bend
38 PMMA pipes. I’ve bent the first six and I’m on my seventh pipe,
and I cannot find motivation to do it. In the corner of my eye I see my computer
and I know that I have a whatsapp chat with all my colleagues over there.
What if someone has written me something? Maybe they have a question? Maybe there's
a problem I can solve? My brain is rewarding me with dopamine on the mere
thought of checking whatsapp. Let me repeat this fact: the mere thought of
checking whatsapp is more rewarding than starting to bend the seventh pipe. I go
over to whatsapp and I chat with my colleagues and I do solve a problem or
two on the chat, which is very rewarding, gives me some dopamine. So then I’m
rewarding myself again with a five-minute blitz game on chess.com
which I lose because of my pawn structure, so then I play three or four
more games, then I have a new goal of learning how to have a better pawn
structure on the chess board. So let's play four or five more games so I can
learn that skill and I only bent six PMMA pipes that workday and I go to bed
feeling frustrated and feeling under achieved. So the Marble Machine X build
stands still and I’m rated 600 in chess, which impresses no one. So this is what
happens when I let dopamine control my behavior. How can we change that?
So the way to turn this dynamics around is to perform a dopamine detox.
A dopamine detox will look very different from person to person start by mapping
out the behavior you want to change by finding out dopamine inducing activities
that are not helpful for your long-term goals.
One example from my work days is that I used to listen to audio while working on
the work bench. I mainly played youtube videos. I put podcasts on and I had them
going on in the background, which for me was extra distracting, because every time
I needed to record with the camera, I needed to go over to the computer,
pause the video, go over to the camera, press record, record my clip, press stop on the camera
and go back to the computer and press play on the podcast again.
And while on the computer it's easy to get distracted with whatsapp and chess.com,
so this really didn't work out well, and I noticed that I couldn't stand the
silence in the room. While working on repetitive tasks,
I couldn't stand just listening to my own thoughts because it's just not
beautiful. It's just not fun, you know, and what I realized is that I… I was dependent
on a voice in the room just to be able to force myself to stand by the workbench.
So I tried to reduce the distraction by moving away from youtube and I started
to listen to a Harry Potter audiobook read by Stephen Fry, which is a big
recommend for anyone. It's just amazing but when I listened to the last episode
a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to try to challenge myself to see if I can work in
silence, and since then, I’m not been playing any podcast at all when I’ve
been working, and it has been absolutely amazing.
[machine sounds]
[snare drum sound]
[notes played on vibraphone]
Working in a silent room felt horribly lonely in the beginning. I was like exposed
to my own thoughts but after a few days, I noticed how much more work I got done;
it was an amazing difference. And if we look at this through the dopamine lens,
what I’m doing when I’m standing working in a silent room is I’m training my
resilience to cope with lower dopamine levels by slowly making myself used to
lower levels of dopamine. It's becoming much easier to withstand the urge to go
hunt for dopamine on whatsapp or chess.com. So it's really a domino effect once
you start cutting back, it becomes easier and easier to cut back on all the
dopamine. So the rules that I have for my dopamine detox is as follows: I check my
messages on my phone one time in the morning and one time in the night.
All other times during the whole day the phone is shut completely off. I’m not
watching any form of video content at all, so if you stop watch Wintergatan
Wednesdays through your own dopamine detox, I can only congratulate you for a
wise decision. So during these days I’ve been overcome by boredom not knowing
where to put myself, because I just want to distract myself. So every time I feel
that urge I just drink a little bit of water, practice a little piano, take a
short little walk, and then go back to the workbench. And by the end of a day
like that I have felt fulfilled. I have felt like if I have just walked onto the
stage of the world premiere with the Marble Machine X with my fist punching the air
every single day. By the end of the day I shut off the lights in my studio
knowing that I achieved my goal. I achieved my goal of staying focused
for a whole day. You compare that with a feeling of someone who goes to bed
failing to finish the marble divider, and you have a completely different situation.
This is what the dopamine detox has given me. And if someone
would have told me that I would be able to assemble these eleven vibraphone funnels
on 12 hours, I would have not believed them. But with dopamine detox and a focused workflow
I get maybe 10 times amount of work done on one day.
Wow. I’m going to call it a day, I started at 6:30 in the morning in the studio
so 12 and a half hours is enough,
and I’m very happy with this, so see you at the morning coffee
for another focused working day. Cheers.
Top o' the morning to ya'. [laughs]
[clapping] Let's get going!
Out with the old, and in with the new.
[turns on belt-sander]
[Martin imitating belt-sander noise]
[belt-sander noise]
[Martin singing 'Take Me Home, Country Roads']: West Virginia!
[Martin now playing 'Take Me Home, Country Roads' on his piano]
So what I’m doing here is, I’m giving the top of the wires, a continuous surface, so
I can weld the top wire on. I think if I look back on 2019, I’m gonna be…
I’m afraid of what I’m going to see because I was in a procrastination mess.
It sounds a little cheesy but I’m still in the beginning of this process
but I already feel that I’m getting a larger reward from smaller things. My brain is
like seeing the world from a much more naive place, if you understand what I mean.
And most of all I feel like I’ve developed an ability to pull myself back
to focus whenever I’m distracted because you will always be distracted. It's like I see
through myself. It's like I see through my own bluff, you know. –„No Martin,
you do not want to play chess at chess.com, just cancel the account and finish
the vibraphone funnels instead, that's what you actually want.” I don't want to
sound too religious about it because of course this is not a like one-step
solution for all your problems kind of thing, but not focus on the results of my
work but focus on the quality of my attention, the quality of my focus,
has turned my everyday life around in a very radical way and that's what I wanted to
share with you today. So remember that you can't change that dopamine will
control your behavior, but you can change what behavior you allow it to
point you towards. Social media endless scrolls are tailored to keep us addicted
to them because they are giving you dopamine. I think we're living in a very
special time where we have devices that prevent us from ever being bored,
and I think slowly it undermines our creativity. I have been a victim of this
just like everyone else, and it's only in sheer desperation of wanting to finish
this machine that I got motivated to do something about it. I want to thank you
for witnessing me when I’m like a Mad Max soldier driving straight into this
fire cloud that is the MMX. It means the world to have you to confess to every
week, which has been an issue before. So thank you so much for watching
and thank you to everyone who are supporting the project through youtube memberships
and patreon. We're soon at eight thousand people which is like quite mind-blowing;
and thank you for listening to my home-cooked ponderings about
goal-setting theory, and dopamine detox, and how it can help you achieve your goals,
and to focus better and have nicer work days and days in general.
So good luck with everything you're doing and see you on the next Wintergatan Wednesday,
or not, if you're in dopamine detox and then see you on the world tour
premiere, which will come sooner? [laughs]
Last weld.
Come on, don't screw… Oh, I screwed it up. I screwed it up. [laughs]
I can fix that tomorrow. Oh yeah, I screwed it up royally. [laughs]
Ok, time to stop.
I didn't...
I didn't burn through a wire the whole day until the last, last... Wait, I can put it on.
Ok, time to go to bed, Martin. [laughs]
I did it.