Optimize for Pride - Nick Wignall

Ever since Adam and Eve ate the apple, pride’s gotten bad rap.

A lot of this has to do with language. When we use the word pride, we’re often conflating at least three different concepts:

Pride the Behavior. Boasting, showing off, and generally acting in a self-aggrandizing way—usually as a way to compensate for some insecurity.
Pride the Attitude. Arrogance, thinking you’re better than other people, condescension, judgmentalness, etc. Again, usually a coping mechanism for insecurity.
Pride the Emotion. Feeling good about yourself for your accomplishments or positive qualities—sort of the inverse of shame or guilt.

The first two seem pretty clearly to be psychologically unhealthy, and perhaps even, morally wrong. But the third one, pride the emotion, seems pretty great. And while I can’t speak to the theological or spiritual implications of feeling the emotion of pride, I’m confident saying that it’s a very normal, healthy—and as I’ll try to show in the rest of this little essay—productive thing to experience.

But before we get there, a short detour to lay out why specifically I don’t think it makes sense to moralize about the emotion of pride…

An emotion can’t be good or bad because emotions aren’t under our direct control. And it seems a little silly to hold ourselves (or others) morally accountable for things we can’t control.
But what about people who are arrogant jerks?! Surely that’s wrong?
I agree that acting or thinking like a jerk is definitely wrong and pretty unhealthy psychologically. But the thoughts and behaviors so often associated with pride are not the same as the emotion of pride itself.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the real point of this essay: If you want to be more productive, optimize for pride.

It might seem a little odd to think of pride as a productivity hack, but here’s the key idea:

Authentic pride is a powerful motivator.

When a behavior is followed by the feeling of pride—especially if you allow yourself to sit with it and savor it—you will be much more motivated to do a similar task in the future.

Just like a dog who gets a treat for sitting or shaking will be more likely to sit or shake on command, a human who feels pride after completing a difficult task will be more motivated to complete similar tasks in the future. And even better, the pride and confidence achieved by completing this first task are likely to create a halo effect that makes you more motivated to complete your next task.

I think this idea has implications for how you arrange and structure your work. If you optimize for pride and begin your day with a task that is likely to lead to a genuine sense of pride, you’ll not only increase your odds of being productive tomorrow, but also in the next ten minutes as you start your second task for the day.

Of course, I’m not saying this is some kind of magic trick that will instantly turn you into a hyper-productive creativity machine. Far from it. The ability to consistently do good work is a tricky problem with many inputs and variables. But on the margin, optimizing for pride can be surprisingly helpful.

To make this a little more real, let me give you some examples of how I’ve started implementing this principle in my own work.

Two of the most common strategies for getting things done are:

Swallow the Frog. I don’t know where this name comes from, but basically it means front-loading your day with the most unpleasant task to get it out of the way first.
Dip Your Toes In. Alternatively, you can start small and work your way up to the really big or unpleasant tasks.

And while I use both of these pretty regularly and find them helpful, sometimes neither works very well. Which is where the optimize for pride approach comes in as a potential third way.

Here’s a pretty typical daily to-do list for me:

Exercise
Respond to John’s email
Start OR licensure process
Draft new essay on optimizing for pride
Assemble deck for August presentation
Edit most recent video
Proof and prep anxiety at work essay
Clean up desktop files
Brainstorm ideas for September presentation
August bookkeeping
Read a couple more chapters of Talent

Now, if I was going to do the most unpleasant task first, it’d probably be edit most recent podcast video because I find it incredibly boring and inevitably more tedious and time-consuming than I planned for. But precisely because it’s tedious and boring, I don’t get much satisfaction or pride out of completing it. So when I finish I feel drained, and if anything, have less motivation to start the next task. When the swallow the frog approach fails, it’s often because the task is big and important but not especially meaningful.

On the other hand, if I start with really little stuff to warm up (responding to an email or proofreading an essay), I similarly run the risk of feeling depleted rather than energized because, while easy, the small stuff isn’t very satisfying or meaningful.

But if I optimize for pride, I’d probably choose draft new essay. Because even though it’s a difficult task and fairly time-consuming, I also derive a lot of satisfaction and pride from completing a draft for a new essay. And the energy I get from that pride makes it much easier to do just about anything else on the list—even edit videos!

Think about it this way: Productivity problems are often energy management problems. Which means that if you can spark and maintain high levels of energy, almost any kind of task becomes much easier to accomplish or make progress on. And one underrated source of energy is the emotion of pride which many of us habitually neglect or avoid because we tend to conflate it with arrogance or vanity.

So, as you’re scanning your to-do list, consider this question before you get started: