In case you hadn’t heard, I’m writing a book. I began work on it a little over a year ago, and at least 9 months of that time has been focused on research. I’ve plowed through over 100 research papers, books, interviews, and articles to understand the science of motivation and procrastination, the evolution of our impulses, and just why the hell humans do all the silly, downright inane things we do.
Why do I have the urge to eat a pint of Haagen Dazs every night after I put my son to bed? Why is it I want to buy a motorcycle each spring when the weather starts to warm? Why in the holy fuck do I speed up on the highway to prevent some jackass from cutting me off and getting to his destination 5 seconds faster than I get to mine?
The short answer: we have nasty little dictators inside us that drive much of what we do, say, and think. If left to their own devices they can turn our lives into a miserable hell. It doesn’t have to be that way, though, and there’s a strategy to overcoming them and making them work for you.
One of the books I read during the course of my research was Jay Burnham and Terry Phelan’s excellent book Mean Genes, a fascinating account of the little taskmasters inside of us that drive just about everything we do. During the course of reading Burnham and Phelan’s book I began to understand just how powerful – and merciless – our genes are.
Genes are segments of our DNA that, through a lengthy journey of assembly and transformation, eventually result in some aspect of “us”: our hair color, height, our likelihood of having ezcema as infants, or even our awkwardness around other people.
Genes are responsible for much of what we look like, who we are, and how we behave. Like a rogue New York cab driver, if we don’t pay attention they can take us to a completely unexpected destination. Our genes have a vested interest in guiding us in a certain direction, and if we want to live a rewarding, happy life, we need to seize the wheel.
The genes of Homo sapiens are the result of billions of years of random experimentation, and our default behaviors today are those very behaviors that ensured the survival of our ancestors millions of years ago. Examples include:
- The hominid with a gene that led her to gorge herself on fatty or sweet foods on the rare occasion she could find them
- The prehuman with a gene that impelled it to automatically respond to noises in the jungle by fleeing
- The ancestor with a gene that drove him to strut his stuff in front of females
All of these individuals had a better chance of surviving than those who did not have the same genes, and those genes were eventually passed on to you and me.
A Look at Ardi
To understand another curious behavior, let’s look at one of our most distant apelike relatives, Ardipithecus ramidus, a hominid that scientists believe lived in the area that is now Ethiopia around 4 million years ago.
There is much debate about how A. ramidus lived, but for the purposes of our discussion we’re going to take a few liberties. The behavior we’re going to highlight may not have originated in A. ramidus or even in our hominid relatives at all. It may have come from an ancestor much earlier in history, like an amphibian or a prehistoric fish. In fact, the gene that we’re going to talk about may not exist in the exact form we suggest, but we’re going to pretend that it does for the purposes of our thought experiment. Don’t worry, it will still be a useful experiment, and there’s evidence that this gene actually exists.
Let’s suppose we have two individuals, Ardi and Rami, both females and living in eastern Africa near the shores of Lake Tana, in what is today Ethiopia. Rami is a lazy girl and likes to sleep late. She’ll wake up rubbing her eyes and maybe forage for some berries, have a little social interaction with her group, then take a nap. Rami’s life is a leisurely one, and she is pretty typical of her species.
Ardi, however, is different. She has a mutated gene that causes her brain to release dopamine when her system is under stress. If she gets up a little earlier or if she works a bit harder, she gets a tiny rush of pleasure. Unlike so many of her kind, Ardi feels good when she puts pressure on herself. So she strives. As soon as she opens her eyes in the morning, she’s up in search of food. She puts a lot of effort into socializing with her troop and building relationships. She runs and plays much more than other A. ramidus, and as a result her level of fitness is higher than normal. She is a more attentive mother.
How well is Ardi going to do compared to the rest of her kind when the shit hits the fan? When predators invade their midst, Ardi has a better chance of escaping or fighting for her life. When food becomes scarce, Ardi will be more capable of feeding herself. Her young, who may also receive the “striving” gene from their mother, stand a better chance of survival than their peers both because their mother works harder and because they themselves strive as well.
The gene that Ardi carries has hit upon a successful strategy, one that will make it more likely that it will be passed on to the next generation. This means that the other “lazy” variations of the gene will slowly die out as their owners are outworked by Ardi and her descendants.
Let’s call this gene the Short-Term Hustle Gene, or STHG for short. Why “Short-Term”? I’m glad you asked, because that’s the important part.
STHG survives today, in us. Have you ever felt lousy, then lifted your spirits with a quick workout at the gym? Or felt exhilarated by accomplishing some small task on your to-do list? This is STHG at work. Our brains reward us with a little bit of dopamine whenever we make a little progress, and it feels good.
Now this would, at first, seem like a strong benefit for us. It certainly was for Ardi and her descendants: they out-hustled their fellow A. ramidus and won a genetic battle royale by passing on their genes to us. The problem, however, is that STHG doesn’t always work in our favor. It evolved to enable Ardi and her descendants to survive long enough to have offspring and raise them, which is great for STHG. Our genes don’t give a damn what happens to us, they just want to get to the next generation.
Survival, however, is not the same thing as happiness. We find this over and over again with adaptations that benefited our forebears millions of years ago but no longer serve us today. Gorging yourself on calories whenever they were available was critical to survival when food was scarce and the environment unforgiving. Now, however, in a world were there are Waffle Houses and Burger Kings on every corner, it’s an adaptation that is slowly killing millions of us.
So We’re Screwed. Now What?
The key to using STHG to our benefit is those first two words in the acronym: “Short-Term”. We get the dopamine rush from quick wins, spurts of progress, and bursts of activity. However, critical work that takes weeks, months, or years allows us an STHG dopamine rush very infrequently, which makes it more likely that we will quit the long-term work and instead turn to a short-term activity, like screwing around on our phones. Picking up our iPhone and checking social media or surfing the web is a prime STHG activity because to our primitive brainstem it feels like learning and progress. This is why when you walk down any city street in America you’ll see dozens of people glued to their devices. STHG mushes their human hosts like little Iditarod sled dogs and we meekly obey.
To advance our lives in a meaningful way and create real change for ourselves and the world around us takes prolonged, concentrated effort. We cannot build a canoe with our own hands, knit a sweater, train to be a physician, learn a programming language, save for a down payment on a house, or organize a cleanup effort for our local playground in just a few hours. These types of activities create enormous opportunity and value for us and others, they drive progress in our world, and they make the world a better place.
STHG works against us by rewarding quick wins, but quick wins alone are insufficient for a rewarding life. So how do we work around STHG, or better yet, use it to our benefit?
To employ the Short-Term Hustle Gene in a way that helps rather than hinders us, we need to deliberately use STHG’s quick-win reward mechanism to drive us through much longer work cycles. We can accomplish this by breaking down large projects up into smaller goals that we can hit in a few days to a week.
Instead of feeling stagnant because your one-month goal of building a new art studio in your garage drags on for what feels like forever, you can check another task off your list every day or so (“Clean out left side of garage”, “Paint floor”, “Demolish old workbench”, “Install shelving”, etc) and get a satisfying dopamine reward that carries you into the next task.
If this approach is new to you, start small. Pick a project that excites you but will only take a few weeks to a month to complete. Then break that project down into smaller tasks that will each take at most a day to complete. Every day you will get a little burst of pleasure to help drive you forward and keep you on track, which increases the likelihood of your finishing the project. Successfully completing a challenging venture in turn makes it more likely that you will be willing to tackle even larger jobs in the future, creating a virtuous cycle of effort and success that will boost your competence and self-confidence.
This strategy, by the way, is the essence of the cliché “starting is the hardest part.” Once you have a plan for tackling your project and you’ve divided it into smaller tasks, you have actually created an ass-kicking, project-crushing machine that will help propel you to your goal. All you have to do is step into it. Thus Goethe’s oft overused but still inspiring quote:
“What you can do, or dream you can, begin it,
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it…”
We are built for quick wins and short-term action, for which we need to plan when we attack long-term goals. One of the best ways to use this feature to our advantage is to structure those long-term goals in such a way that our nasty little master, the Short-Term Hustle Gene, rewards us frequently and adds to our momentum. This makes it even more likely that we will finish what we start, accomplish something important for ourselves, and make our little corner of the world a slightly brighter place.
Want to learn more? Check out the Facebook Group for my upcoming book and join in the conversation.