Month 7 - Freedom

I've been unintentionally sabotaging myself. Time to go back to the roots.

My big revelation: I cannot have goals.

That's it. No goals allowed.

I suppose I am someone who is extremely driven by intrinsic motivation. Making a goal steals that. I'm no longer acting according to my own curiosity or interest, I'm acting to achieve the goal, which saps the joy from the thing itself. There's a similar concept called the "overjustification effect," which is how motivation drops when you're rewarded for doing it.

When did I stop learning Japanese? When I set the goal of reaching N2. I had no goal before that, and got to the level of reading books (Mahjong strategy books!) just out of habit, interest in solving the grammar puzzles, and the feeling of getting better.

When did I stop playing OSRS? When I planned out the PvM progression. Before that, I had immediate goals, more like desires. Do GOTR to get bloodbark. Train Hunter because it's fun. But once I had a multi-step plan ahead of me, I lost interest.

What happens if I plot out a story I want to write? I lose interest in writing it. I typically work in islands, having a few scenes in mind I want to write, but no idea how to get there.

When did I stop playing RAID? When I completed all the content. I never set a specific goal.

When did I have the most fun playing Mahjong? When I was reading books, gathering information, putting together my little document, optimizing my MAKA scores, etc.

When I set the 1000 game goal, suddenly everything was reframed, and I didn't realize it. I was no longer playing for any of the reasons I was before. I was playing to fill the goal. And that sapped the joy I found from the other things. That's when the tilt crept in.

Then I tried to patch over the tilt issue, looking at motivation sciences, which led to different kinds of goal-setting. But I cannot have goals.

Play 1 game a day? Changes it from outcome to process. But sounds pretty goal-like. Out.

Get my average NAGA score above 90%? Redefining the outcome from winning to being good. Yup that's a goal.

Reach Saint? That's obviously a goal. Not allowed. I had set that goal initially, but I think I wasn't treating it as one. It was my stated goal, but my internal goal was still improving, derusting, gathering information.

They can be SMART goals. S - Reach Saint. M - Rank points. A - Yeah. R - Yup. T - In a year. Doesn't work for me.

They can be reverse goal setting, WOOP, OKR, doesn't matter. If I have a goal, I lose motivation.

There's also another thing I saw when looking into the overjustification effect: "Moreover, the overjustification effect tends to be less pronounced when rewards are tied to performance quality rather than mere participation." So 'Saint' is a better goal than 'play games,' which also matches my experience of the '1000 games' goal having a much greater negative effect than 'get Saint.'

Self-Determination Theory says intrinsic motivation stems from three pillars: Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness. I'm apparently very lopsided here. I value Autonomy extremely high, which goals weaken, and I value Relatedness quite low. I write and I write and I post the finished stories but I don't even look at the comments, don't talk to other writers. Same with RAID, I played that for two years without talking with other RAID players.

(Side note: LLMs suck at writing fiction, but they're really good at teaching how to write fiction. After a one-week prose writing bootcamp with Claude this month, I've improved an insane amount.)

Ok. So without a goal, how to achieve anything? How to keep up the motivation?

First, when left to my own devices, my default state is improvement. I don't actually need a goal to be motivated. Getting better, solving problems, answering questions is inherently motivating already. And that's what the goals remove. Other people are different, but this is me. The self-determination theory taken to an extreme.

So, I need to cultivate an environment that allows that.

A similar thing happened with exercise recently. I could never for the life of me keep up with a weight routine. But it's the same goal problem. "Do these sets on these days." They way I solved that was to just write down exercises for each exercise day (push / pull / legs), then set a 30 minute timer. In those 30 minutes, I can do whichever of those exercises I want, in whatever order, as much as or as little as I want. And that works. I do it every time, three times a week, and usually end up hitting all the same exercises anyway. It's not the actual exercise I didn't like, it's the way it was framed.

How do I do that with Mahjong?

No outcomes. No quotas. Not even tracking.

NAGA is the answer, I believe. If I keep looking at NAGA, I will keep seeing things, keep getting questions. "Why does it fold here?" "Why is this a call?" Those will fuel my curiosity. And I'll self-optimize my gameplay to fit NAGA, the same way I did with MAKA.

With Japanese, I hated flashcards. I had a pretty high level of motivation towards reducing my flashcards as much as possible. So if I got one wrong, I would try to find ways to get it right next time. Maybe the same thing will happen with NAGA.

However, I mustn't track my NAGA results like I'd been tempted to before. That turns it into a goal again.

There is one thing that might get in the way. Tracking risks becoming a goal. And your rank is automatically tracked. Especially on Mahjong Soul, where the rank progress is shown after each game. If I know I'm close to a rank up, it'll affect me. And once I have something external that I've latched onto, the intrinsic stuff gets consumed.

On Tenhou, with the HTML client, I could at least block the rank display.

One thing to try there is the cognitive behaviour therapy technique, positive reappraisal. When you encounter negative aspects of something, you refocus on the positive ones. Sort of like meditation, where when your mind drifts, you bring it back. So for me, since I like the curiosity, discovery, and improvement, if I start getting focused on the rank or such, I'll focus back on NAGA, the questions, what the game is gonna reveal.

So. The next steps:

1. Block my rank on Tenhou. Don't let myself see how close I am to a rank up (or down).
2. Don't write down the results. Write down the questions, and the answers.
3. Don't require any quota. Time blocking still works for me, as evidenced by the exercise bit, but whether I play games or read books or watch streams doesn't matter.
4. Make playing Mahjong easy. Leave Tenhou open. Use an app blocker to block my writing software during Mahjong times.

None of these act as surveillance. None of them become a metric I might start valuing over improvement. The main risk is in the NAGA scores, but that previously helped me, so we'll see.

I also simplified my schedule a lot, now that I've stopped playing RAID and stuff. Four normal days, one heavy day, one rest day, one active recovery day.

Though, I have no motivation for language right now. I'm good enough at Japanese and nothing else calls to me... So I'm mostly just writing more during those blocks. Maybe I'll pick up Korean at some point for no reason, but I just don't like kdramas.