On March 4, 1928, at half past three in the afternoon, 199 men lined up at Legion Ascot Speedway in Los Angeles and set off to run to New York City.
The promoter was C.C. Pyle, known around the sports desks as Cash and Carry Pyle, and he was offering $25,000 to whoever posted the fastest cumulative time over 84 days. A traveling carnival went along with them, complete with Egyptian belly dancers and a five-legged pig. The newspapers called it the Bunion Derby.
They went out hard. Roughly eighty of them dropped out before the race reached Nevada.
On May 26, 55 runners arrived at Madison Square Garden. The winner was Andy Payne, a 20-year-old Cherokee farm boy from Foyil, Oklahoma, who had finished high school the year before and took up running largely because he disliked riding horses. He covered 3,423 miles in 573 hours, 4 minutes and 34 seconds, averaging about six miles an hour, daily for nearly three months. He used the prize money to pay off the mortgage on his parents’ farm.
Andy’s father had told a reporter that he “couldn’t get no work out of him, he sprinted from morning till night.”
The 144 men who didn’t finish were not short on motivation. On March 4, they were very likely the most motivated people in the country. But their motivation didn’t carry them through to New York.
I’ve written before about why motivation alone is not enough.
A sewing machine I purchased sat in the garage for a decade, waiting for my inner Martha Stewart to make an appearance. I have similar stories involving juicers, cookbooks, race entry fees, and 4 a.m. alarms. Many of these aspirational items were chosen by a version of me who is rested, fed, and feeling capable. Unfortunately, the version for whom these purchases were made didn’t feel as capable.
We buy stuff not for stuff’s sake but because of what it represents. We feel that the juicer, the sewing machine, the cookbook (insert your own contraption here) is exactly the missing piece of the puzzle, the one thing between us and our perfect life. But they sit in our homes, and our minds, in the gap between our ideal selves and reality, waiting for the perfect version of us to emerge before they can be used.
Loran Nordgren and his colleagues gave that gap a name: the restraint bias. Not only do we overestimate how little we can control our impulses, we put ourselves straight into temptation with that overconfidence. In one of their studies, smokers told they had strong impulse control chose to hold an unlit cigarette in their hand while watching a film about smoking were three times more likely to light it than the group told they had weak control. Smokers, who supposedly quit, but were overconfident and kept cigarettes around the house, and didn’t bother to ask others around them not to smoke, were the ones who ended up picking up the habit four months later.
George Loewenstein referred to a version of the same problem as the hot-cold empathy gap. When we’re calm and full, we cannot imagine being tired, rushed, or hungry, so we fail to make arrangements for those inevitable circumstances.
Which brings me back to a test I wrote about years ago and stopped running on myself: picture yourself on your worst day. Would you still juice, exercise, make fancy recipes, go to the gym on a day where you have competing priorities? Honestly, if my experiences are any indication, probably not. It’s like stepping on the gas in the car in our garage in ‘Park’ mode. Lots of noise and no movement.
Experts such as Angela Duckworth, Tamar Gendler, and James Gross argue that making compromises or changing the situation is the only viable choice when life gets in the way. Pick the gym on the way home rather than the better one across town. Move the cookies and the cigarettes into the trash can, out on the street, and preferably inside the garbage truck, far enough so you cannot reach it. Motivation is fickle.
To get out of a funk, the experts say we should do something different. Physical movement always helps. Doing something for someone else without expecting anything in return is an unbeatable mood booster. These activities don’t require much internal enthusiasm, which is why they work on the days we have none.
Not to be an Eeyore, but it’s sensible to assume that our best-laid plans will collapse. When that happens, it helps to know how to get back on the bandwagon. Because now we know how long the road is, restarting is often much harder than starting the first time. That’s where removing friction helps; getting rid of the cookies and junk food from the house, so the tired version of us doesn’t fall prey to “in your house, in your mouth.”
I’ve written before that we can recommit on a Tuesday at 2:37 p.m. even when we’re in the middle of a laundry cycle. So, instead of designing my weeks around a version of me who wakes up delighted to be awake, I plan to do fewer things and lower the bar to something my most unmotivated self can still clear. Sure, it seems dull, but that’s the only way I can get it to resemble a habit that lasts longer than 5 days.
“It’s great to be great, but it’s great to be human.” Will Rogers, Daily Telegram, February 28, 1930