Psychology and Mind: Outcomes and Our Mental States

Mrs. Denmarkguy and I have been participating as vendors with our creative endeavors at an event this weekend.

Preparing for, and participating in, such events is typically both exhausting and time consuming... but how we feel about our efforts - before, during and after - varies considerably.

Over the years, I have found it very interesting to take a closer look at how the degree to which we are being successful at one of our events - which we have now been doing for 10 years or so - has an influence on how tired we feel at the end of the day.

Perhaps a natural inclination would be to think that if you have been really busy and it's been highly successful day you are quite exhausted. In actual fact, the opposite holds true. When you have been working hard all day and your results are actually not very good it is far more tiring than having a day where you worked all day but you had a really good result.

So what's going on there?

In some ways, I suppose it's much like blogging on Hive. If you write a really good post and it pretty much falls through the cracks and you only make a few cents on it, it feels like you expended far more effort than if you put in the same amount of effort into writing the same post and instead you get really excellent rewards for it. We have found very much the same thing to hold true with our shows.

Today when we left at the end of day two (of a three day event), we were just really tired and dragging because try as we might and after talking to lots of people all day we just didn't seem to be able to make any significant sales.

Essentially what sets in is a little bit of self-doubt and then you start wondering "why did I put in all this effort for almost nothing?"

In a sense it's very similar to what we experience with social media both here and on other venues. Researchers have even studied this and repeatedly conclude that after a while we get somewhat addicted to the small dopamine hit we get when somebody "likes" what we're doing. Creating artwork and taking it to a show and selling versus not selling is not all that different from posting a blog post.

Perhaps the only thing different is that you have already gained some enjoyment from the creative process itself before you offered anything for sale. That said, if you're a keen writer you could say the same thing about a blog post; I enjoy writing very much but I also enjoy being rewarded for my writing.

Is it a bit mercenary to be wrapped up in rewards for our efforts? Well, we need some kind of motivation... don't we?

Of course, we will go back tomorrow and endeavor to do our best for day three and hopefully things will turn around a little bit... because the first two days have been rather slim pickings. Which again goes to show that you just never know what you're going to get!

Regardless, results definitely do impact our degree of tiredness/exhaustion.

Thanks for stopping by, and enjoy what remains of your weekend!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Created at 2023-11-12 00:34 PDT
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