感觉没有动力？试试“斯金纳定律”

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In 1780, hunched over a table at his home in London, Jeremy Bentham wrote the first lines of the first chapter of one of his most famous works. It read, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters: pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”

The British philosopher built an entire philosophy around this idea — that we are all motivated by pleasure and pain. Lucky for him, then, that almost all of the social sciences today agree with him. We are a hedonistic , happiness-seeking species who fear the pain-inflicting monsters of the world. Under all the pretense and bravado , we can be reduced to the simple push and pull mechanisms of the carrot and stick. After we get over the humbling and demoralizing simplicity of this, we can learn a few valuable lessons. We can game our own mechanisms and manipulate our Benthamite sovereigns. We can do anything. It’s all to do with something the writer George Mack called “Skinner’s Law.”

According to Mack, Skinner's Law is that when you are procrastinating or finding a task hard to get on with , you have two choices: either “make the pain of not doing it greater than the pain of doing it” or “make the pleasure of doing it greater than the pleasure of not doing it.” Since we know that we are only motivated by two things, we can use our higher, rational faculties to work that fact to our advantage.

The trick, then, is to set yourself pleasure rewards or pain punishments for doing (or not doing) a certain task. Essentially, there are two ways to motivate yourself: intrinsically or extrinsically . Intrinsic motivation is when you want to do something out of some inherent drive or desire. You might just want to eat pizza. Extrinsic motivation, though, is when you do something for some further benefit or reward (or to avoid a punishment). So, I don’t eat my pizza because I want to be trim for my beach holiday. The genius behind Skinner’s Law is that it turns our most powerful intrinsic motivator (pleasure) into an extrinsic reward.