What to Do if You’re Not a Naturally Tenacious Person
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Throughout my life, when faced with adversity, I’ve often wanted to magically become either a cat or an Olympic athlete.
Cats are enviable because they’re immune to worry and striving, and feel no pressure to accomplish long-term projects. They are completely satisfied to bask in a square of sunlight on the carpet, or squat on a dresser like a Zen chicken, blinking slowly and indifferently. It would be nice to have such a close alignment between one’s natural desires and one’s capabilities.
I’ve envied athletes for similar reasons, although they approach life very differently than cats do. Top athletes have clear goals and a kind of inner drive that seems able to move them through vast amounts of pain and difficulty. On some level they must want to get up at 5:00am to throw medicine balls against a wall. They want to run or ski or pommel-horse until their bodies – not their minds – threaten to quit on them, if that’s the cost of a shot at a gold medal.
I’ve never wanted a gold medal, but I’ve always wanted whatever quality it is that makes people want gold medals – or anything — that badly.
Wanting to Want
Whenever interviewers ask an athlete how they endure training in the searing heat, or how they bounced back from a torn ligament last year, they always say, “You just have to want it bad enough.”
The follow-up question they never ask is, “How do you get yourself to want it bad enough?” I assume the athlete would shrug and say they don’t know, they just do. Whether a goal attracts you strongly enough to incentivize pushing through every obstacle seems more like a function of luck – some natural attunement to the goal, or some inherited trait – something you happen to be rather than something you choose.
Naturally attuned to his goals
I believe I was born with an unusually strong desire to eat sugary treats, for example. This desire has driven me to cross the city solely to obtain a certain Ben & Jerry’s flavor from a certain grocery store before it closes, and to eat it at 9:50pm even though I know it will give me horrible dreams about losing my teeth or my passport. I don’t have to drum up the desire to seek this ice cream, or to endure any costs and consequences it entails. The drive is intrinsic.
Meanwhile, psychologists tell me that my brain’s natural reward system is underactive, meaning that the prospect of conquering challenges and solving problems does not generate the same amount of motivating reward-juice it does for the average person. (It is also not uncommon with ADHD, they tell me, to react to that deficiency with dopaminergic vices like eating entire pints of ice cream.)
That’s not the end of the world because I do have other talents and advantages. For one thing, I’m pretty good at appreciating life’s ordinary moments (although I have had to work at that). I wouldn’t trade places with the billionaire who can’t set aside his desire to earn more money long enough to enjoy a week-long vacation with his family. But I sure do wish I was dealt a bit more of that trait we sometimes call drive or tenacity – the inclination to push through discomfort and adversity to the rewards beyond.
Appear to want something
The gold medalists and billionaires among you may not understand this particular conundrum. I’m sure some of you can relate, though. What do you do if you’re not a naturally tenacious person? How do you become tenacious?
“You just have to want it enough” is a common refrain but isn’t useful advice, and in fact isn’t advice at all, unless you’re able to control how much you want things. Essentially it’s another way of saying, “You have to be someone else, sorry.” If sufficient desire is there, it’s there, and if it’s not, it’s not. The discus thrower who wants nothing more than the time to throw discuses all night is in some sense lucky (or unlucky) to want that.
The Two Rewards
Recently I had an insight that might help you if you’ve always felt a similar deficit in the drive or desire to overcome challenges.
I was journaling about the conundrum of self-motivation when I found myself having typed the line, “One thing I do desire strongly is the feeling of relief I get after giving up on a tough problem.” I have never exactly realized this, but I love giving up. I love giving up like I love ice cream. As long as I feel like I can somehow get away with it, I can’t wait for that moment of releasing all effort and expectation, of unshouldering the heavy bag of grain onto the floor, of clapping the laptop closed and saying fuck it.
Looking back, I’ve been seeking this specific form of surrender-induced relief as long as I can remember, perhaps similarly to how Serena Williams seeks the feeling of winning tournaments and hoisting trophies.
Giving up, at least for the day, has always felt like salvation, a moment of release from the awfulness of having to do things you don’t know how you’re going to do. In my case this is undoubtedly a developmental side-effect of coping with undiagnosed ADHD for thirty-some years. Many of my memories of being a student or an employee were of being charged with an ordinary task that confounded me completely, and which most people around me could just do with no visible agony or trepidation. Escaping or delaying the task (while minimizing the fallout) often seemed like best achievable outcome, and I got very good at that.
An old friend
In other words, instead of learning to seek, as many people do, the glorious feeling of solving and surmounting problems, I learned to seek a related but different glorious feeling: the feeling of escaping having to do it.
Escaping vs Surmounting
These two rewarding feelings — that of escaping the burden, and that of overcoming it — are cousins, each a result of a certain shift in the effort applied to a stubborn task.
This “unshouldering the burden” feeling, the giving up feeling, comes from dropping the effort applied to the problem. You stop and surrender, releasing all mental and muscular tension, accepting that you are not solving this thing, not today anyway.
The “overcoming/surmounting” feeling comes from seeing the task beginning to break down as a result of effort – the exhilarating sensation of the knot finally loosening or the wall beginning to topple. It often comes after pushing harder than usual, trying several different angles, or drawing creatively on your resources, rejecting all scenarios in which you don’t solve the issue.
Unshouldering the burden
Both of these competing glorious feelings – escaping and surmounting — are known to all of us. Some of us, for whatever reason – learning disabilities, bad luck, bad mentors — have developed a much stronger taste for the former. Our routines, even our personalities, have become attuned to the escape feeling. Our hearts have ached for it and our expectations have been built around it.
For the chronic escaper, realizing the relationship between these opposing feelings creates an opportunity for recovery. The new game, as I understand it, is to stay as aware as possible of your fondness for the bliss of surrender, letting it remind you of the other, less familiar glorious feeling that is also available. You can begin to consciously develop a taste for surmounting, while consciously reducing how often you indulge in the escaping feeling.
What we need to remember is that both of these rewarding feelings are available at the *exact same moments. *Any instance in which you’re tempted by the dropping-the-sack feeling, you could instead go for the toppling-the-wall feeling. They both feel good, but one makes the future better and one makes it worse.
Always an option
This new taste for surmounting can be developed in small bits; you don’t have to throw yourself into a PhD program or sign up for an ultramarathon. For example, when I look at the clock and see there’s only eight minutes left until quitting time, I’m tempted to drop the grain-sack right there and begin thumbing through my phone, because it’s only eight minutes so who cares. But even this innocent move reinforces the taste for escape, for the backing off of effort. A small taste of surmounting is available in its place – I can instead dial up the effort for that last eight minutes, and knock off some small task I’d otherwise have to do tomorrow.
(This, in hindsight, is why a certain method of working has been so powerful for me.)
More importantly, these small reversals make me a little less inclined to unshoulder the grain-sack at the first opportunity. The taste of surmounting likewise becomes a little more appealing. The reward centers get a little more used to that taste, and more likely to drive me towards it in the future.
I believe this is the way for the self-motivation hard-cases among us: to gently but steadily tip the balance towards a taste for surmounting, by ramping up effort in precisely the places where we feel a craving to dial it back.
This process is what I now think of as tenacity. Even the word itself tastes good.
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Photos by Graham Covington, Michael Sum, Jon Chng, Andrew Teoh, Simon Maage, Eduardo Flores, Leonardo Sanches, and **Masaki Komori