I
19
The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay
Motivated in Life and Work
N 1955
, Disneyland had just opened in Anaheim, California, when a ten-
year-old boy walked in and asked for a job. Labor laws were loose back
then and the boy managed to land a position selling guidebooks for $0.50
apiece.
Within a year, he had transitioned to Disney’s
magic shop, where he
learned tricks from the older employees. He experimented with jokes and
tried out simple routines on visitors. Soon he discovered that what he loved
was not performing magic but performing in general. He set his sights on
becoming a comedian.
Beginning in his teenage years, he started performing in little clubs
around Los Angeles. The crowds were small and his act was short. He was
rarely on stage for more than five minutes. Most of the people in the crowd
were too busy drinking or talking with friends to pay attention. One night,
he literally delivered his stand-up routine to an empty club.
It wasn’t
glamorous work, but there was no doubt he was getting better.
His first routines would only last one or two minutes. By high school, his
material had expanded to include a five-minute act and, a few years later, a
ten-minute show. At nineteen, he was performing weekly for twenty
minutes at a time. He had to read three poems during the show just to make
the routine long enough, but his skills continued to progress.
He spent another decade experimenting, adjusting, and practicing. He
took a
job as a television writer and, gradually, he was able to land his own
appearances on talk shows. By the mid-1970s, he had worked his way into
being a regular guest on
The Tonight Show and
Saturday Night Live.
Finally, after nearly fifteen years of work, the young man rose to fame.
He toured sixty cities in sixty-three days. Then seventy-two cities in eighty
days. Then eighty-five cities in ninety days. He had 18,695 people attend
one show in Ohio. Another 45,000 tickets were
sold for his three-day show
in New York. He catapulted to the top of his genre and became one of the
most successful comedians of his time.
His name is Steve Martin.
Martin’s story offers a fascinating perspective on what it takes to stick
with habits for the long run. Comedy is not for the timid. It is hard to
imagine a situation that would strike fear into the hearts of more people
than performing alone on stage and failing to get a single laugh. And yet
Steve Martin faced this fear every week for eighteen years. In his words,
“10 years spent learning, 4 years spent refining, and 4 years as a wild
success.”
Why
is it that some people, like Martin, stick with their habits—whether
practicing jokes or drawing cartoons or playing guitar—while most of us
struggle to stay motivated? How do we design habits that pull us in rather
than ones that fade away? Scientists have been studying this question for
many years. While there is still much to learn, one of the most consistent
findings is that the way to maintain motivation and achieve peak levels of
desire is to work on tasks of “just manageable difficulty.”
The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal
zone of difficulty. If you love tennis and try to
play a serious match against
a four-year-old, you will quickly become bored. It’s too easy. You’ll win
every point. In contrast, if you play a professional tennis player like Roger
Federer or Serena Williams, you will quickly lose motivation because the
match is too difficult.
Now consider playing tennis against someone who is your equal. As the
game progresses, you win a few points and you lose a few. You have a good
chance of winning, but only if you really try.
Your focus narrows,
distractions fade away, and you find yourself fully invested in the task at
hand. This is a challenge of just manageable difficulty and it is a prime
example of the
Goldilocks Rule.
The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation
when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities.
Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.
