![]() However, those consequences aren’t significant enough to overcome other factors that may be holding you back. If you don’t stick to your diet and, as a result, don’t make your weight goal, you will experience some social and psychological discomfort. While there is certainly social pressure applied by that kind of commitment, it doesn’t inspire the kind of motivation you need to achieve the maximum chance of success. With those groups, you publicly declare a weight goal and then attend weekly weigh-ins in front of your peers. This idea of using public commitment to inspire motivation is used by many organizations, for example ones geared toward weight loss. It’s critical that whatever you commit to aligns with your values, or you may set yourself up to fail before you even start. ![]() ![]() I need to make an important point here, though. If you want to take advantage of the social element of “burning the ships”, you need to make a public commitment about something that you want to accomplish, but where you have struggled with motivation in the past. Procrastination is not the way to use this tactic to your advantage. It also likely has the potential to cause you social embarrassment and loss of status if you don’t finish or do a poor job. Rushing to finish the task or project at the last minute will undoubtedly cause you pain, in the form of stress, lots of hard work, and probably lost sleep. When you leave something undone until the last minute, you invoke both aspects of this psychological tactic. Unfortunately, the most common way that people unwittingly burn their own ships is by procrastination. You can use it to your advantage by burning your own ships. But this knowledge doesn’t only have to be wielded by other people. Robert Cialdini in his landmark book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.Īrmed with this knowledge, a shrewd person can influence (and some would say manipulate) another person by exploiting this trait. This desire for consistency is one of the primary tools of influence, as described by Dr. One of the primary ways we do that is to maintain consistency between our words and actions. Thousands of years ago, being shunned by your clan was usually a death sentence, so humans beings have developed an instinctive desire to seek acceptance by our peers. This discomfort can manifest itself as embarrassment, loss of social status, or being shunned by your social circle, or even society as a whole. The second reason “burning the ships” works is because it can cause psychological or emotional discomfort. In fact, it doesn’t even need to be physical pain. But the potential pain doesn’t need to be torture and/or death for it to provide sufficient motivation. The first reason is pretty obvious, and is the one described in the examples above: fear of potential pain. Psychologically, there are a couple reasons it works so well. But this idea can even work in non-life-threatening situations. It’s seems logical that, in life-or-death scenarios like these, a person would be supremely motivated. So, to eliminate that option, he orders his ships to be burned, which creates a much higher level of commitment and motivation. He realizes that his troops are demoralized and likely to desert him if they know they have the option of retreat. While the details vary, the general storyline goes that a military leader is faced with daunting odds, often out-manned and out-gunned by his opponent by 5 or even 10 to 1. Rather, a Chinese General ordered a bridge destroyed after his troops crossed a river to battle their larger and stronger enemy. Today the wording “burn the ships” is more symbolic, since the ships were sometimes sunk or destroyed by some other means and in one case there were no ships at all. While researching this topic, I also found similar examples from Burma in 1538 and China in 207BC. There is Julius Caesar’s attack on Britain in 55BC (where some accounts indicate he was outnumbered 10–1), Alexander The Great’s battle against Persia in 334BC, and Cortes’ attack on the Aztec empire in 1519. The saying is rooted in several military conquests of the last 2,000 years. In our vernacular, the expression “burn the ships” has come to mean eliminating all your options so that there is only one path forward. Have you ever heard the expression “burn the ships”? That saying has a lot to do with motivation, and you can use it to your advantage in your life.
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