What is motivation and where does it come from?

Motivation has always felt like something that

if for some reason you were lacking it, there was really nothing you could do.

And this is evidenced by the sheer number of motivational videos and books and podcasts and music that exists out there,

all created by people trying to solve this problem of how to get motivated when you're just not.

But the field of motivation science

has started to find that motivation actually is something we can control.

That not only is it something that is not as confusing

and intangible as it once seemed, but that it could actually be turned on, that it could

be controlled, that if the right circumstances were put together, one could engineer motivation in their lives.

This is what we're going to be discussing today with my guest, Dr. Islet Fishbach.

She is the author of the book Get It Done,

Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation.

And she's also the Jeffrey Breckenridge Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and

marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. This is part one of a two-part conversation with Eillet, so be sure to check out part two as well once you're done with this one.

But in the meantime, get excited because this is tiny leaves.

Big change. Oh, motivation is an interesting part of getting things done. If we have it, it allows us to take massive action,

to get more done than we feel is even possible, and to push harder than we've ever pushed before.

And then in an instant we can lose it and be incapable of doing the smallest tasks and even more strange if we lose our motivation

it starts to feel like we're incapable of accomplishing the smallest tasks.

What is this thing and why does it have so much control over our lives?

Why is motivation something that we struggle with in the first place

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