Competence
Perhaps you enjoy building Ikea furniture.
Or maybe it is a gruelling test of patience and willpower.
Despite these irreconcilable preferences, your appetite is not static.
Your appetite can be modulated by math.
On average, 33% of people are keen to build Ikea furniture.
If you ask people to attempt, without success, a hard math problem beforehand, that appetite increases to 60%.
You are wired to want to prove your competence.
When you fail, you obsess over another opportunity to do so.
This obsession generates an inadvertent increase in appetite for any activity, even Ikea furniture.
Failure gets labelled as something which gets you stuck.
Rather than the failure getting you stuck, it may be the subsequent obsession to prove your competence.
And that stuck feeling? It might have more to do with attempting to prove your competence through tasks which you normally avoid.
Coffee is liquid competence,
-Morning Cup
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