Eating something tasty, or going to a party, or otherwise “indulging” yourself, every time you do something that contributes to your long-term aspiration.
AFAICT, this classic indulgence-as-a-reward can aim at one of two things:
it can be something you only think to do after having completed a task, to build positive assocations for the future
it can be something you think of to motivate yourself to start on a task to begin with
I believe that the first thing is generally good advice, but that a lot of people can’t do the second thing. At least brains like mine, I go for the reward regardless of whether or not I earned it!
So I found a different formulation that works better: fist-pump.
Just fist-pump each success. It is no reward in itself, no indulgence: the gesture feels meaningful only after there is something to celebrate, so it can not be short-circuited. And yet, it can still work as something to look forward to: “oh, if I finish up that task, then I’ll get to fist-pump about it”!
I’d never heard the phrase “fist pump” before, but apparently it is an alternative with a slightly different hand arrangement than “fist bump.” Given how close the sounds b/p are, I may have been collapsing numerous occasions of hearing “pump” mapping it to “bump” https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/who-made-that-fist-bump.html
Zooming in on one of your examples,
AFAICT, this classic indulgence-as-a-reward can aim at one of two things:
it can be something you only think to do after having completed a task, to build positive assocations for the future
it can be something you think of to motivate yourself to start on a task to begin with
I believe that the first thing is generally good advice, but that a lot of people can’t do the second thing. At least brains like mine, I go for the reward regardless of whether or not I earned it!
So I found a different formulation that works better: fist-pump.
Just fist-pump each success. It is no reward in itself, no indulgence: the gesture feels meaningful only after there is something to celebrate, so it can not be short-circuited. And yet, it can still work as something to look forward to: “oh, if I finish up that task, then I’ll get to fist-pump about it”!
I’d never heard the phrase “fist pump” before, but apparently it is an alternative with a slightly different hand arrangement than “fist bump.” Given how close the sounds b/p are, I may have been collapsing numerous occasions of hearing “pump” mapping it to “bump”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/who-made-that-fist-bump.html