Drive: The desire to strive

How to handle the contradiction of wanting two opposite things at the same time?

For example:

• "I want to lose weight" and "I want to eat junk food."
• "I want to be strong" and "I want to skip the gym again today."
• "I want to be professionally successful" and "I want to do as little work as possible."
• "I want to be liked and respected by others" and "I want to say whatever comes to mind."

I believe there's no contradiction in the sentences above. The problem is we're using the verb "want" to mean two different things:

1. A Striving: The intent to achieve a future state
2. A Desire: The intent to do a pleasurable activity

Striving, the cognitive want

I call striving the intent for the future to be in a particular way. We can strive to be promoted, to run a marathon, to lose 30 pounds, or for our kids to go to a good school.

For the future to be the way we strive it to be, we need to act. We shape the future through action.

The motivation to act on what we strive towards differs from acting on our desires, though.

Unlike the easy, pleasurable fill of an 800-calorie cheesecake and the almost instinctual smoking of the next cigarette, acting on what we strive towards can be challenging and feel bad. It's much more painful to resist the craving for a smoke than to give in.

To strive, we need self-discipline: the ability to control our actions despite our desires.

And acting despite our desires is, by design, really hard. It's literally the opposite of what we were wired to do.

My striving to be healthier: Weight training

Almost nobody likes going to the dentist (sorry dentists!), but we do it because "we need to." We strive for the dental health it provides.

Going to the gym daily to do weight training, using those myriad weigh machines with pulleys everywhere, was as hard for me as going to the dentist. To many of us, it still is: "I need to be healthier, but I hate going to the gym," people will tell me. I can relate.

Still, I persevered. I used to joke that going to the gym was like going to the dentist every day; I didn't like doing it, but I liked having a healthier body and mind, so I did my best to do it anyway.

I did that for several years. Some people say it gets easier, and you end up liking it eventually, but that never happened to me. It was always hard, kind of a slog, and I never really liked it.

But what if my desired actions aligned with those necessary for what I strived toward?

Drive: Aligning Desire and Striving

Desire leads us to act, feel good, or avoid feeling bad.

Striving requires us to act to shape the future we want.

Drive is when desire and striving align. The actions we take from our desires and those necessary for our striving are so aligned that achieving the future we want feels good.

(Drive is also a wordplay of adding [D]esire to what we St[rive]!)

Much of our primitive desires were aligned with our primitive striving, such as surviving and taking care of kin.

But what we strive towards in modern life is often misaligned with the desires created by modern technology.

Of concern is that modern technology frequently shapes our desires to align with the future that some other company wants. Instead of creating the future we want, fulfilling our desires creates the future they want!

But that doesn't need to be a rule.

We'll achieve better results in our striving if we align them with our desires. We'll need less self-control and feel better doing it to boot.

Through drive, our actions "make sense" – it's hard not to act, and the future we want becomes inevitable.

The more drive we have, the higher the alignment of our desires and striving, the better outcomes we'll achieve.

My drive to be healthier: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ)

While weight training felt like going to the dentist every day, practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) felt like eating a cheesecake every day.

To me, BJJ is the action that aligns my desires with the future I strive for. For some of us, it's yoga, running, biking, swimming, etc.

Drive is why Cross-Fit is so popular: we desire the camaraderie, the goal setting, the peer accountability. The endorphin and serotonin of today brings us back tomorrow.

By finding an activity that aligns what I desire with what I strive towards, the actions feel easy and natural, and so does achieving the future I want.

Instead of fighting our modern desires, we should focus on choosing them based on drive, understanding how their outcomes align with what we strive towards.

Understanding the outcomes of desires

Like cigarettes and cheesecakes, most exercise is "modern technology." There's nothing natural about running on a treadmill, riding a $5,000 bike, or drinking powdered creatine.

We exercise to be healthier and offset our modern sedentary lifestyle.

Daniel Lieberman talks about this and many other facets of exercise in the hypnotizing book Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved To Do Is Healthy And Rewarding.

And he starts by talking about his ordeal in taking treadmills to hunter-gatherers in Kenya!

Hence the treadmill. Our plan was to use it to study how efficiently women in this region walk while carrying heavy loads of water, food, and firewood on their heads. But the treadmill was an illuminating mistake. After we invited the women to stand on the machine and the belt started to move, they walked self-consciously, hesitantly, awkwardly.
[..] Although the women’s treadmill-walking skills improved slightly with practice, we realized that to measure how they normally walked with and without loads, we had to abandon the treadmill and ask them to walk on solid ground. As I grumbled about how much money, time, and effort we had wasted getting a treadmill to Pemja, it struck me how these machines encapsulate the main theme of this book: we never evolved to exercise. What do I mean by that? Well, exercise today is most commonly defined as voluntary physical activity undertaken for the sake of health and fitness. But as such it is a recent phenomenon.

Lieberman, Daniel. Exercised . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Under his definition of exercise being something we undertake for health and fitness, there would be no point in exercising unless it led to improved health and fitness.

However, many of us have fun exercising. Some of us play soccer, meet friends in the park for a walk, and go for a swim – because it feels good.

Activities we pursue can both feel good and help us act toward the future we want if we choose them carefully.

By understanding the future our desires create, we can align them to our striving and turn our desires into drives.

Pursuing a life of drive

So, "How to handle the contradiction of wanting two opposite things at the same time?"

You handle that contradiction by pursuing a life of drive, aligning your desires with your striving.

Instead of relying solely on self-control, we should embrace modern technologies we love, such as exercise, as long as they lead to outcomes we strive towards, such as health.

So from now on, instead of thinking, "I want to lose weight," think, "I strive to lose weight," "I strive to be professionally successful." Differentiate your desires from striving.

And then, reduce your reliance on self-discipline by choosing desires that align with the future you want to create.