A History Of Motivation
Through much of history the idea of
motivating people has focused on the external factors. The threat of
death helped drive people to pull large rocks around to build temples;
while the sniff of large rewards encourages people do things they’d
otherwise find repulsive.
The idea of a job rests in this premise.
So does school. Put in the effort and you’ll be rewarded with good
grades and a high salary, spend your time doodling pictures and passing
messages and you’ll fail the class or lose your job.
For a long time this method worked – or
at least it sufficed. All those routine, repetitive, mundane tasks that
were uninspiring, could be made more persuasive with the right external
motivator.
Then in came the 21st century, and with
it, machines and computers. No longer did we need humans for the routine
tasks, we could rely on stronger, faster, and more reliable mechanical
systems.
This change left us humans with what the machines couldn’t do: Be creative.
All the jobs and requirements of this new age now rest in our ability
to be complex thinkers, to be innovative, to think outside the box.
This change has taken the work away from
our physical bodies, and put it into the power of our minds. It’s here
that these external motivators go awry.
Finding The Third Drive
Harry Harlow found that our views on
motivation were inadequate in his experiments with monkeys. He noticed
that monkeys were quicker to solve puzzles when they enjoyed it as
opposed to those rewarded for it.
The popular view at the time was that
there existed two drives: the biological drive of hunger, thirst, and
sex; and the drive of rewards and punishments. Harlow tried to remedy
the issue by adding a third drive: intrinsic motivation, or the joy of
the task itself.
People would come home from a long day at
work, to paint, to write, to do a crossword, what caused them to do
this? Intrinsic motivation helped to explain why people were driven to
do things without the other motivators.
It seems intuitive that we have an
internal drive, something that encourages us to seek intellectual
pleasures and emotional thrills. But, outside of these personal
pastimes, what does this motivation have to do with work?
It turns out that this intrinsic
motivation can both encourage, and stand in the way of, the creative and
complex thought that businesses today rely on.
Intrinsic Motivation Requires Intrinsic Rewards
In 1969 Edward Deci set out to study motivation.
He used the Soma puzzle cube, a set of plastic shapes that can be
assembled into larger shapes, with many different possibilities. He had
two groups of participants go through three sessions of solving the
puzzle.
In each session, participants sat at a table with the puzzle, drawings of three possible solutions, and three magazines.
At first they all needed to try to create
the solutions in the drawings while Deci timed them. The second time
around was a little different, in that one group were going to be paid
for each correct configuration while the others continued for free — not
knowing that some people were being paid. The third time through, they
were all to find solutions for no reward, just as in the first session.
Midway through each session, Deci told
the participants that he needed to leave the room to get a fourth
drawing, and would be gone only a few minutes. He was gone exactly eight
minutes, but rather than getting a fourth picture, he observed what the
participants did to occupy themselves in his absence.
In the first session, all the
participants continued using the puzzle for around 3 and a half minutes.
In the second sessions, the group who were now being paid spent more
than 5 minutes using it. Clearly the extra motivation was having an
affect.
In the third and final session, those
that had never been paid remained relatively consistent, in some cases
using the puzzle for longer. The group who had been paid in the second
session now lost their motivation, only spending 2 minutes on the
puzzle.
“When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity.”
Money gets us going up to a point, for the average earner in the United States that point is around $75,000. After that, we need something different.
“The best use of money as a motivator
is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table: Pay
people enough so that they’re not thinking about money and they’re
thinking about the work.”
We all need to earn a decent living, to
be able to get by comfortably, but the long held assumption that more
money means more motivation doesn’t hold up. In fact, more money for
some tasks can result in less motivation. This is an important point for
a time when our intellectual abilities are becoming more important.
In Dan Pinks Drive, he looks to three
core intrinsic motivators that show us how to get motivated, and that
can pull us above and beyond their external counterparts: Autonomy,
Mastery, and Purpose.
1. Autonomy
We need to be in control. Nobody likes to be bossed around and feel like they have no say in anything.
Dan Pink notes that management is a human invention, an aging technology.
“Its central ethic is control; its
chief tools remain extrinsic motivators. That leaves it largely out of
sync with the non-routine, right-brain abilities on which many of the
world’s economies now depend.”
Studies have found a link between autonomy and wellbeing in many different countries and cultures. Other studies have shown
it’s positive effect on conceptual understanding, grades, persistence,
productivity, fighting off burnout, and the aforementioned overall
wellbeing.
Pink shows that there are four essential aspects of autonomy: our task, our time, our technique, and our team. With these under our terms, we gain true autonomy.
Everybody is different, with this freedom
we are able to chose to work at the times that we’re most productive,
with the people that we work best with, on the tasks that we enjoy the
most, and in the way that works for us.
Control and direction are central aspects of being human, we’re built to be “players not pawns.”
We still need to work however,
misconstruing freedom for the ability to do nothing defeats the purpose.
It takes discipline to use that freedom in the right way, but if you
truly enjoy what you’re doing that shouldn’t be a problem.
2. Mastery
Our interest withers when we feel like
we’re not getting anywhere. That worked adequately for the routine work
of the past, where jobs simply wanted compliance in exchange for money.
Now we need engagement, a function that’s missing from the old model.
Engagement is the most important route to mastery and personal fulfillment. And, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi notably discovered, the greatest point of engagement is when we enter a state of flow.
In the flow state our self-consciousness disappears, our sense of time is warped, but our goals are clear. As Mihaly found, this state is described as the most satisfying time of peoples lives.
The requirements for entering this state
are relatively simple: the challenge needs to be achievable, but it also
needs to stretch you beyond your current abilities.
Goldilocks tasks as Pink calls them, are activities that are neither too difficult nor too easy.
If the task were too difficult we’d become anxious, if it were too easy
we’d become bored. The middle ground is where flow happens.
“Throughout my athletics career, the
overall goal was always to be a better athlete than I was at that moment
— whether next week, next month or next year. The improvement was the
goal.” — Sebastian Coe.
Pink defines mastery as a set of three laws: It’s a mindset, it’s painful, and it’s an asymptote.
Carol Dweck found that what people believe shapes what they achieve, and that our self-theories
determine how we interpret our experiences. Often those that go further
are those whose goal is to learn, not to prove they’re smart.
In a study of potential military cadets, the best predictor of success was the prospective ratings of grit. Mastery occurs through effort over a long time, which takes persistence and a passion for the goal. It can also be painful.
An asymptote is a curve that is forever
approaching but never reaching it’s end. Pink notes that true mastery
never occurs, and that “the joy is in the pursuit more than the realization.”
3. Purpose
What we’re involved in needs to transcend the self, to at least feel like we’re an essential piece to a much larger whole.
“People can be inspired to meet stretch goals and tackle impossible challenges, if they care about the outcome.” — Elizabeth Moss Kanter
Every now and again we stop to contemplate our lives, and often wonder where the time has gone.
It’s here we can be struck by our own mortality, the idea that our
lives are just not that long, and that we need to be something
meaningful with them.
Our purpose often comes in the form of doing something to help others. It’s something that can outlast our own lives.
Companies are popping up today whose mission is to pursue purpose,
and to use profit as the catalyst rather than the objective. On a
smaller scale many people are turning to volunteer work to fuel their
purpose.
How we spend our money is just as important as how much we make, and when we spend it on other people or on a cause, we increase our subjective well-being.
“One cannot lead a life that is truly
excellent without feeling that one belongs to something greater and more
permanent than oneself.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The Life Mission
As Edward Deci notes, humans have an “inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capabilities, to explore, and to learn.”
Research shows
that even when our goals are extrinsic, achieving that wealth rarely
leads to greater happiness. Those who look towards the intrinsic goals,
however, attain higher levels of satisfaction and well-being, and show
lower levels of anxiety and depression.
The old “if-then” rewards are ineffective
and often deleterious to our conceptual, complex, creative drives. And
as such, need to make room for autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
It brings up thoughts of a life mission.
The external desires — money, clothing, housing — are products that
should support something higher, something less tangible and more meaningful.
The extrinsic rewards provide the base on
which our true purpose can flourish, but they cannot stand in the way
of our intrinsic desires, lest they kill our motivation and creativity.
“The
richest experiences in our lives aren’t when we’re clamoring for
validation from others, but when we’re listening to our own voice —
doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service
of a cause larger than ourselves.”
What engages and drives you beyond everything else? Have you found your purpose?
Source:
