When I tell my grandmother all the things I’m doing she usually says something like, “Just hearing about your activities makes me tired.” This comment always makes me wonder why we all have different thresholds of activity before we become overwhelmed or burnt out and disinterested.

Hypothesis

Interest is to productivity like salt is to water.

Water on its own boils at a certain temperature, but after dissolving salt in water the temperature at which it boils is higher. This is because the intermolecular forces between the molecules are stronger when salt and water are mixed than between water molecules alone. In other words, it requires more energy to boil a pot of salt water than it does a pot of fresh water because the little bits that make up salt water are more strongly pulled toward each other than the tiny bits that make up water are pulled together.

I believe interest acts like the salt when the water is productivity. If you dump some interest into your productivity pool, you’ll achieve a higher production rate than you would if you just do things without figuring out how they are interesting. I define interesting as something that is thought-provoking, relevant to my interaction with people, useful in the activities I do, and/or helpful in reaching my goals.

So what?

Productivity is not set in time nor does each person have their own unique productivity rate. We each have varying productivity depending on zillions of factors like time of day, enjoyableness of what we’re doing, and how many things we have on our mind. But, what I’ve found as I take each step on the doctorhood quest is that if I can convince myself (or already am) interested in something I can focus on it a lot longer and accomplish a lot more in less time than I can if I’m apathetic about it. I can cut the time it takes to do something sometimes by half if I can think of a way to find it interesting.

That’s what I did with first semester physics, specifically kinetics. At the time, I’d been battling squirrels. Squirrel rapscallions were decimating my garden, and though I truly hated those rascals, there was nothing I could or would do about it. I wasn’t going to kill them–I didn’t have the heart. However, kinetics equations such as those used to describe projectile motion gave me a tidy solution. Kinetics can be used to describe how far, fast, and high you throw something. I imagined (even though I’d never, ever actually throw a squirrel) that all my projectile equations related to chucking squirrels. The metaphorical “strike back” was enough to ease my anger over my garden crops being stolen by squirrel thieves and gave me the source of interest I needed to learn and excel in physics.

Side note: Once I got started, I didn’t need the squirrel metaphor…physics is actually pretty cool all on its own.

Test

I think it’s a powerful observation and a testament to the power of the mind that you can trick yourself into being interested in something and by doing so improve your ability to learn about that thing. If you can dig deep and find a fragment of something that sparks your imagination and curiosity even the hardest and most tedious of tasks goes more smoothly. Don’t be believe me? Next time you’re doing something that absolutely must be done even though you hate it, try to find something about the task that is interesting and worthwhile. Focus on that as you do the task. My guess is that you’ll find the whole process slightly more bearable and that you’ll also finish sooner than you normally would have. Challenge: Prove me wrong.