Learning How To Focus and Achieve My Goals

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.

I did it.