Progress makes the world go round
The prolific Irish playwright, critic, and political activist George Bernard Shaw was a controversial and often divisive figure, but there’s one thing that can be said about him without fear of contradiction: he was a man obsessed by progress.
The Nobel Prize-winner was certainly not one to settle for the status quo, and his life was characterized by his desire to push the limits, whether in the arts, politics, philosophy, social reform, or language. Indeed, he even campaigned to replace the English alphabet with a new 40-letter phonetic version.
Many of Shaw’s most famous quotes are also about progress:
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
“Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders.”
And my own personal favorite:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
This last quote has been something of a personal motto for as long as I can remember, not because I’m an unreasonable man (ok, maybe sometimes), but because it perfectly encapsulates the single-minded determination and tenacious stubbornness that’s required to drive progress and effect change.
A Work in Progress
At 96%, Progress is very much one of my dominant Intrinsic Motivators, and it’s something that underpins many of my habits and behaviors.
In the most basic sense, this means that I am driven by a continual quest for self-improvement, whether that means honing my existing abilities and working out how to be more efficient and effective, or learning and developing new skills.
On a day-to-day level, this need manifests in a few different ways:
Planning: The way I see it, the first step towards making progress on any project or in any situation is setting goals. After all, how can you know if you’ve achieved what you set out to do if you don’t have a plan to check against?
As such, I’m a methodical and relentless list-maker. Every day, I have a list of work and personal tasks that I want to complete, and I’ll usually make these day-by-day lists for at least a week into the future so that I can add more items as they occur, or move things around to ensure that each day’s workload remains achievable. On top of this, I make separate lists of less-time-sensitive tasks that I want to accomplish in different areas of my life, from work and finances to health/fitness and personal creative projects. Crossing completed tasks off any of these lists definitely gives me a quick dopamine rush, and completing a whole list even more so.
Tracking and measurement: For me, improvement needs to be tangible, so tracking and measurement are key. As a complement to list-making, I also regularly check my progress in terms of quantifiable metrics. Some examples of this would be tracking my time to run 10km, then trying to improve on it on subsequent runs; making bi-monthly audits of my finances and investments; or charting the performance of web traffic and newsletters over the course of a year, and continually attempting to surpass the previous best in various categories.
Forming strong habits: In my experience, habits are the bricks that you need to build improvement, so it’s also important for me to be consistent in the things I do—something that tracking also helps with. For example, I’ve been a user of the Headspace meditation app for close to a decade, but only managed to start doing it day in and day out when I began tracking my use. The app itself indicates how many days in a row you’ve meditated, but the game-changer for me was marking each day I meditated on a physical calendar to see my progress at-a-glance, which in turn motivates me to keep the streak going.
Being highly goal- and deadline-oriented: Having worked as a journalist, copywriter, and magazine editor for the best part of two decades, the drive to work towards fixed deadlines is hard-wired into me. However, this can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, it makes me adept at doing whatever it takes to complete a project in the allotted time, but it also means, in true Pavlovian fashion, I usually need the pressure of a looming deadline to do my best work.
Progress Overload
Like any other Motivator, however, high Progress needs come with certain drawbacks, or at least things that it’s important to be mindful of.
Impatience: A constant desire for progress doesn’t make me the most patient of people, and I often get frustrated when projects don’t move at the speed I would like them to, especially if the bottlenecks are caused by other people.
Tunnel vision: The other side of the goal-oriented coin can be tunnel vision. This can make me less aware (and, if I’m being totally honest, less bothered) about other people’s processes or preferences, which can come out as irritation when others want to take time to discuss various options in detail when I’ve already done my research and decided upon what I consider to be the best course of action (sky-high Autonomy and Competition needs are also a factor here).
A strong aversion to inertia: This is essentially Kryptonite for people with high Progress needs, and a lack of forward motion in any project or area of my life makes me very antsy until things start moving again.
A tendency to get bored easily: If I’m not learning new skills, or applying my current abilities in a way that allows me to test and enhance them, or doing something that gets me closer to achieving one of my goals, then I find it difficult to muster enthusiasm for the task at hand. These types of tasks tend to fall down the pecking order quite quickly, which in turn places them in a state of inertia that can be doubly off-putting.
Meta-Progress
Ultimately, people who are strongly motivated by Progress tend to be excellent at hitting deadlines, driving projects to completion, and striving for growth, but sometimes this can be at the expense of respecting other people’s processes and the fact that others may prefer to do things differently.
Some may even feel, as Shaw did, that: “Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.”
If you have high Progress needs, or if someone on your team does, developing an awareness of the inclinations listed above should help in playing to the strengths and overcoming the blindspots—something that the in-built desire to improve should help to achieve.
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