Had another great idea. Sometimes you need motivation to give yourself motivation. Like if you know some trick to motivation will work, but that you are not even motivated to apply that trick.
Like my little thing about overcoming procrastination by pinching yourself till you do it. Yea it works, but you still need motivation to pinch yourself in the first place. You can't just pinch yourself to motivate yourself to pinch yourself. This is why all trick methods of personal development as listed on Steve's 33 productivity tips will fail on their own if you don't tie them down by motivation to your goal hierarchy... because you wont have any reason to apply them in the first place. So that all those productivity tips will fail if you don't have a life purpose to apply/link those tips to.
However the idea of mine to do isometric to stop procrastination worked got me because I could not make myself escape from the painful mental patterns that I was having... so I was motivated to apply that motivational trick to stop the pain of procrastination that I really wanted to start on my paper but my thought patterns where so ingrained that it was painful to transition to change them as quickly as I needed to
My crazy way of instantly overcoming procrastination / getting motivation to write another paper that I had to do. And also to get out of bed to go to Chinese class from an awesome night of partying. My mental patterns were so focused on being social, so that all my motivation and actions in that night were linked to/motivated by the goal of being a social [winner/butterfly/popular person??], so that going to Chinese had nothing to do with those subconcious motivators so that it was very difficult to get myself to come out of bed. I had not thought of this process of mentally tracing up my goal hierarchy to find motivation so I had to bear all the energy and pain of
transitioning ( check out
Pain of transitions)all those mental habits and the isometric let me do that. I just knew
somehow(not defined or linked to my real goals) that I should probably go to Chinese class. Yea, its easy to look back and say, well duh... you go to Chinese class so that you can get good grades!!! Duhh!!! but still, when you are in a social situation, getting good grades is the last thing on your mind, it is not motivation for being social, so the mental patterns/subconcious habits/loaded up skills from the previous night keep you from wanting to go to class.
To get the motivation in the first place, then that is when you have to go through the long chain of motivation of linking your current action in your mind to your top most goals.... to maintain your hierarchy and keep it whole instead of fragmented. But that is a long and detailed process... so that is then when you use the motivation that you've found by tracing your goals to install your motivational trick. Gain motivation to install a quicker motivational trick. Then instead of having to go through the really long concious process of tracing goals you just use the much faster motivational shortcut.
Which brings me to why I wrote this post in the first place. I was thinking of this when I was reading the post about the fear of failure. I wanted something that would subconsciously and automatically motivate me to write my paper. I thought that fear was a pretty automatic thing, so that I was motivated to install a fear of what would happen if I did not finish my paper. I am by default fearless so that I can be happy whenever I want. [edit: well, fear is always present you come across something new, I just have a subconcious automatic habit of systematically making the fear go away]
But then I thought about just picturing a girlfriend and said that I would be able to be with her if I finished my paper. I installed a shortcut of motivation. And it helps... thought I was so happy about it that I decided to procrastinate even more by writing this post about it. Ohwell. I'll have to figure out that one next.