There Is No Motivation Without Fear.

A Conversation with Olav Schewe, the Super Student.

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As always, I would appreciate any feedback on this week’s conversation! And please make sure to read to the end for some rare moments of vulnerability from me :)

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The ability to motivate oneself may be the most important skill to master when trying to achieve lifelong learning. As a young kid, Olav Schewe had the wherewithal to ask himself the simple question: What does it take to be one of the smart kids? He wanted to be better than average, one of the best. Without knowing it, that simple question would start him down a long-lasting path to help people reach their full potential. Thirty-plus years in, and somewhere in the middle of his journey, Olav knows one thing for sure: the one superpower he wishes everyone had is the ability to understand motivation. I recently caught up with Olav to discuss his efforts to teach people how to learn, his work on how to study more effectively, and his journey to better understand the brain and the power of motivation.

If educational success was to be based solely on grades, a young Olav wondered what was necessary of him to be the best. As a kid, he believed that if you were extremely smart you could get good grades without much work, if you were mediocre you would need to work extremely hard to achieve good grades, and if you weren’t smart then you didn’t even stand a chance. In hindsight, this thinking was extremely simplistic, but as a middle and high schooler, these assumptions felt like truths. Originally prompted by comparing his (average) marks to that of his peers, he noticed that other, smarter students were grasping new concepts more quickly than he. Confused, he wanted to know why. 

“I was reading chapters over and over, but why didn’t that mean I knew the material three or four times better? I noticed their methods for studying were different; I realized that their intelligence was based on how they studied.”

Olav’s own research show’s that if you are born extremely intelligent, you will find better ways to learn via more effective methods. He sought out to learn the most effective ways to study rather than accepting his fate as being less intelligent than his peers. Experimenting like a scientist with different techniques, he would put on audio tapes of Harry Potter in English and listen to them while he slept to see if he could remember anything from the book when he woke up, or if somehow his English would improve a little bit. “Of course, that was a terrible idea because I woke up and would be grumpy, because I hadn’t slept well!” But he continued tinkering, finding small efficiencies in the way he studied that incorporated together brought about good practices and study habits. 

“If you take a group of average students [by GPA] and a group of smart students and you teach them the same techniques, the same study methods, the achievement gap closes... and the results on tests tend to be the same.”

Olav was motivated to do better, to get better grades, to finish at the top of his class. But where was that motivation coming from? Was it extrinsic or intrinsic, and could it be taught? Personal motivation is often based on the expectancy theory - that your behavior is determined by the desirability of the outcome. More specifically:

Motivation to try something = the value derived from achieving it X the likelihood that you will succeed. 

Therefore fear, and not inability, can often get in your way of achieving the task at hand. When speaking with Olav, I was reminded of a podcast I listened to with David Blaine (the American illusionist, endurance artist, and extreme performer). He talked about the process he goes through to conquer fear. First, he discussed doing research, understanding the thing you’re scared of, building a tolerance for that thing, and adjusting your mindset to believe that you can overcome that very thing. A confident mindset is not simply built on positive self-talk. Overcoming fears, gaining confidence, and thus, possessing motivation are often about not being afraid to fail. When you remind yourself you’re not the first one to fail and that failure is okay, you’re more likely to succeed. Often, you will learn something new as part of a failure.

The impact of motivation when trying to learn something new is not binary and often has many factors swaying you in one direction or another. I’ll speak to my own motivation or lack thereof and how it is often associated with fear of failure. As we try and learn a new skill, a new topic, or a new expertise, we often ask ourselves whether we have a willingness to complete a specific task. Quitting my job, starting this newsletter, and attempting to upskill the global workforce didn’t happen overnight. It took me two years to establish exactly what I was setting out to accomplish, what my goals for the project were, and why I wanted to do this. But more than anything, it took accepting that the likelihood of failure was far greater than the likelihood of success. It took putting myself out there, involving many conversations with friends and family, and a lot of self-reflection to grow into my comfortability with failure, to understand that there is no such thing as failure, just lessons to be learned along the way. 

I’ve already failed many times throughout this process - I haven’t posted as many articles as I’d hoped. I haven’t built my following as big as I expected just yet, and I still don’t know the business I want to build. But I stay motivated because I know that with failure comes resilience, the greatest superpower of them all. Stop shaming yourself if you're not motivated; instead, start asking yourself why you’re afraid to fail.