The Science of Motivation
What motivates you?
While there are thousands, millions, maybe billions of answers to that question, a growing body of research, some of it dating back 50 years, shows two things that don’t motivate us very well – the promise of rewards and the threat of punishment.
It seems counter-intuitive, since after all we take it for granted that we need incentives to do work. It’s the basis of our whole economic system, for crying out loud! And yet, the research is abundantly clear: once a reasonable standard of living is achieved, rewards and punishment not only don’t motivate us to do more, better, or faster, they often demotivate us.
One classic example of this is a study involving lawyers asked to provide legal services for low-income persons. One group was asked to do so for a low fee, $10 or $20 an hour, while the other was asked to do so for free. Interestingly, the subjects asked to provide services for a fraction of their typical rate were unwilling to do so, while those asked to do so for free were overwhelmingly willing. By offering a small fee, the subjects were actually less motivated, since they could only think of the work in relation to their normal, much larger fees. The other subjects were not pushed to think about their work as an economic transaction (in which the fee was nothing) and so were able to imagine other ways in which the work itself was its own reward.
Rewards force us to consider our work in a limited way, even work that we might gain great satisfaction from doing without the promise of reward. In fact, offering incentives can limit not only one’s perception of the work but one’s ability to even do the work. Consider the “candle problem” (watch author Dan Pink’s TED talk on the candle problem for more information). Subjects are seated at a table against a wall, given a candle, some matches, and a box of tacks, and told to work out a way to burn the candle without getting wax on the table. In one study, one group was offered money for figuring the puzzle out, while another wasn’t – and the subjects who were not offered any reward did remarkably better.
(The solution, by the way, is to empty the box of tacks and set the candle up inside of the box – most people ignore the box at first, because they see it only as a holder for the tacks and not as part of the equipment available to them. People working for a reward have a much harder time making the creative leap to seeing the box as part of the puzzle than people who are not being incentivized except by the pleasure of solving the puzzle itself.)
I should clarify here: it should be clear by now that it’s not rewards in the abstract that demotivate us, it’s rewards that are external to the task at hand. We are actually very easily motivated by any sort of challenging work, which is why so many of our hobbies involve complex problem-solving (working on motorcycles, woodworking, gourmet cooking, reading mysteries, sailing, training pets, collecting rare things, fantasy sports, and so on). But when someone else offers us money (or some other reward) to complete the same problems, it gets shunted into the category of “work” and our creativity shuts down.
The trick to motivation, then, is to find the intrinsic reward in our work and to enjoy it. Note that this doesn’t mean that nobody should ever accept money for anything – before our drive for mastery and personal challenge lies our drive to survive! But there’s a reason why so many painters are willing to suffer for their art while so few people are willing to become hobby investment bankers – one kind of work has its own intrinsic motivation while the other, except for a very rare few of us, does not.
Knowing all that, there are a few things you can do to keep yourself motivated.
1. Have a mission.
Perhaps the single most motivating factor in our lives is the sense that we’re fulfilling a greater purpose. That’s why lawyers will do for free what they won’t do for cheap – the sense that they’re contributing to something greater than themselves. A lot of people have taken a page from the corporate world and written a short, one- or at most two-sentence mission statement, against which their actions can be evaluated. If your mission is, for example, “to make the world a better place” (which is maybe too vague to be all that effective, but it’ll do for illustration purposes) then knowing that some task is helping to make the world better can be very motivating, indeed!
2. Measure improvement.
While work that engages with the rest of the world can be very intrinsically rewarding and thus very motivating, so too can work that makes us better people. Personal growth is an important motivating factor. But most of us take little time to determine just what constitutes being “better” – we set goals like “be more moral”, “spend more time with family”, or “do my job better” but those aren’t very powerful motivators because they’re not concrete. This is the idea behind S.M.A.R.T. goals, goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Set goals whose progress you can measure – according to whatever metric matters most to you! – and keep track of your progress.
3. Make learning a primary goal.
An important part of personal growth is achieving or moving towards mastery – of a body of knowledge, of a tool or system, of a particular task. Work that helps us move closer to mastery is generally rewarding in its own right.
But it’s not always clear what, if anything, we’re learning. So I’d like to borrow an idea from marketing “guru” Seth Godin. Godin advises readers of business books, to “Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it.” This can apply to just about anything: ask yourself, as you start a new project or a new job or anything else, “What three things am I going to learn from doing this?” This will put you in a mastery frame of mind so that you’re aware of the learning you’re doing as you move through your various tasks.
4. Examine your life.
Alan Webber, the founder of Fast Company, keeps two lists in his pocket on index cards. One is a list of things that get him up in the morning, the other of things that keep him awake at night. Ask yourself what gets you out of bed in the morning, and what keeps you up at night. If your answers are positive things, you’re in pretty good shape – but if they’re not, you’re begging for a motivation problem. When you get out of bed eager to tackle the challenges of the day, and lay awake at night dreaming up new challenges, new projects, and new directions to take your life in, motivation comes pretty easily!
5. Separate work from rewards.
This is a tough one, because we often battle procrastination by depriving ourselves of something positive and promising ourselves we can have it once we’ve gotten some work done. The problem is that it paints the work we’re doing as something undesirable, something we wouldn’t do unless we had that grand latte, trip to the mall, or afternoon swim as a reward. In his classic, The Now Habit, Neil Fiore suggests that procrastination comes not from the nature of the work but from our relationship with it – work we see as drudgery that we have to do in order to get something we want is ripe for procrastination. Instead, he suggests we change the very language we use to talk about our work, emphasizing that we choose to work on a task or project. Work we choose to do – like hobbies – rarely suffers from motivation problems!
With all that we’ve discovered about what motivates people, it will be interesting to see how businesses, who have until now depended on perks, stock options, and other bonuses to increase motivation, will adapt. It’s become clear that, while rewards and punishments might have increased productivity on the factory floor, it actually hinders the kind of knowledge work that makes up the vast bulk of our economy these days. Already a few companies are experimenting, quite successfully, with ways of helping employees to discover the intrinsic rewards of their own work – Google’s 20% time, which gives engineers one day a week to work on whatever project they choose and which has resulted in products as crucial to the company as Gmail, AdSense, and Google News, is one prominent example – most managers remain convinced that their employees will never do work without the promise of a reward or the threat of punishment.
Which is kind of a sad commentary on all of our lives, isn’t it?
WRITER'S BIOGRAPHY
Dustin Wax
Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He can be reached though his freelancing site at DustinWax.comDon't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
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Comments
Tristan Lee says on October 22nd, 2009 at 9:30 am
That experiment you provided us was really cool (how the people who did it for free were more motivated than the people who did it for money).
Is it only true, however, that rewards or punishment motivates us?
What about just going through the process of the challenge itself?
I like to combine a challenge, yet make the challenge fun somehow.
This way I don’t necessarily have to “have” something to motivate me all the time.
Kristoffer Grønnegaard says on October 22nd, 2009 at 11:29 am
Tristan, as i read it, the conclusion was that punishment or reward does not motivate us. Quite opposite, only projects that we do not associate with work truly motivates us. And i must agree. I am a student of computer science, and when i do assignments i never feel motivated to do the extra assignments for “motivated students”. I still spend my time on CS related projects, just not the ones proposed by the professors. But mainly i think its because i have a problem with authority… ^^. But still i feel its the same principle. Let me back it up with an example: so far the only class where i got a an A (in CS) was one where i chose not to buy any books. Instead i just took the subject we had to study a given week and researched it myself by all other sources than the book we where told to use. This was fun and therefore motivating.
Dustin Wax says on October 22nd, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Kristoffer: Your “problem with authority” brings up another good point — it seems that we’re far more motivated when we work on our own projects and our own time-table than when we have someone cracking the whip at us. COnsider the open-source movement or Wikipedia, where contributors are building amazing things out of sheer love for the work. Or consider something like Best Buy’s Results-Only Work Environment, where employees have no schedule and work or don’t work as they feel fit, so long as they achieve the goals they work out with management — which has produced really significant increases in productivity. Authority might work on the factory floor, but for creative endeavors, it seems to reduce motivation, not increase it.
Jeff says on October 22nd, 2009 at 6:25 pm
I think that reward can be even more sinister than simply demotivating. As you pointed out:
“We are actually very easily motivated by any sort of challenging work, which is why so many of our hobbies involve complex problem-solving {…}. But when someone else offers us money to complete the same problems, it gets shunted into the category of “work” and our creativity shuts down.”
I think not only does creativity and motivation both shut down, but we start to question whether the effort is worth it. By someone offering me $1500 to fix one of their pinball machines, I suddenly start to worry if my work is good enough. I start to question my self-worth. But if they simply asked me to come over and take a look at it, I would feel a higher level of self-worth because they recognized a passion and talent of mine.
Putting a price tag on things makes us sometimes question the value of that thing, and sometimes ourselves.
Vinnie says on October 23rd, 2009 at 2:06 am
While reading this I was reminded of an article I read in the 1990s, written in the 1970s, in a youth rights ‘zine, about how behavior modification (i.e. giving rewards for good performance) in schools made for lesser, not greater, student acheivement.
We’ve known this for all my life, yet as a society we certainly aren’t implementing this knowledge. Why not?
gberke says on October 23rd, 2009 at 10:44 am
Your study with the lawyers was badly flawed! they were offered a demeaning compensation. so they would actually pay almost as dearly yet get no credit as having done something out of choice, out of good will. The more accurate comparison would be to give them the opportunity to work at current scales or receive no pay and all and then see what the numbers are.
Low pay is a huge disincentive and is socially demeaning. Next time, for instance, try to tip your doctor or your lawyer :-)
The people doing the study set up the tests to give them the outcome they wanted… they were motivated toward their desired results… dog bites man: not news. Ah, but man bites dog…
Dustin Wax says on October 23rd, 2009 at 11:27 am
Vinnie: Good question! Some of the research goes back to the 1950s! Part of the reason we’ve ignored it is that the system of rewards and punishmnents works decently enough when you’re trying to motivate people to crank more widgets — that is, to do routine, non-creative tasks over and over. And most of our management and leadership literature is based on that kind of work. Also, I’d say that managers and executives are loathe to give up the power that comes with meting out bonuses and penalties.
Dustin Wax says on October 23rd, 2009 at 11:38 am
gberke: Actually, you’ve walked right past what was RIGHT with that study. Any lawyer will work for their regular rate — that’s hardly worth studying. The question is, why would a lawyer prefer to do for free something s/he wouldn’t do for a little bit more than free? (Paging Chris Anderson!) And as you say, paying a little bit puts lawyers into their “normal” frame of mind, where they offer services for money — and $30/hr is, in fact, a demeaningly small amount for most lawyers. But FREE is an even MORE demeaningly small rate — except that when you take them out of their normal “work-for-pay” mentality, lawyers can come up with all sorts of reasons to do the work that they COULDN’T when they were being offered MORE MONEY.
Let that sink in a bit — it’s a lot more complex than it looks.
Amber says on October 23rd, 2009 at 12:15 pm
I really do believe that you can accomplish anything and live your life to the fullest if you see everything you do in your life as a learning experience, and a chance for self-improvement. Too many times people go to university and become something like a lawyer or doctor, just to make money, but whats the point of money if you can’t enjoy it, and you can’t enjoy your career and feel like you are actually contributing to something bigger. I’m only a high school student, but I’ve already learned that you sometimes have to analyze your life and figure out what you really want in your life and figure out what motivates you, or else you won’t get anywhere in life. Great post, I love this site!
Will says on October 23rd, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Great information, especially in a time when so many people are looking for new ways to become motivated. I do agree that anything we want to be motivated towards needs to be intrinsic. That is why many entrepreneurs fail and others succeed. Too many times people are looking for the quick buck, but the business has not intrinsic value to them, they are just doing it for the money.
Your 5 steps are good primary steps, but do take more than just a few minutes to complete. They also require being very disciplined honest with themselves. I also believe that number 4 should be at the very top. Without understanding who we are and what is important to us, the rest doesnt’ matter.
Geoffrey says on October 24th, 2009 at 2:44 am
Timely article! Just another one, same conclusions about money, but different study :
http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/.....vation.php
Cheers,
Geoffrey
AA says on October 25th, 2009 at 7:15 am
This is very interesting, but I worry about some of the repercussions.There are some work situations, such as the civil service in the UK, where the financial rewards are minimal, any incentive of ‘job for life’ gone (which is to be a perk for the sacrifice of a lesser salary) promotion is artificial and not related to the being the best or the right person but passing a psychometric test, it is hard to imagine how non financial rewards will make people do more. civil servants already do what they do out of a desire, no matter how hidden, to serve, specially those highly qualified. The only thing left for inspiration is position (grade in CS speak) and money. Given the hard financial times and the utter lack of motivation many workers find themselves in, the last thing they need is to make financial reward ‘not the right thing to do’ as it will allow those above ,making juicy salaries and commanding their hordes like a god given right with little actual knowledge on how to do it, to manage in a patronizing way; ‘ Do more, no reward, the doing will be the reward’. Just worried, that’s all, good points anyways.
Dustin Wax says on October 25th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
AA: The “adequate base salary” is an important part of all this. Our primal drive is to survive, after all — none of the stuff I write about above kicks in unless our basic survival needs are met. So a too-low salary actually is a powerful *demoritvator*. Conisder teaching in the US — we are facing a massive shortage of qualified teachers nationwide, because the base pay in most communities is too low for survival. Yet in many places with programs for bringing non-traditional teachers into classrooms (e.g. alternate licensure programs that aim to bring people with life experience rather than traditional education training into teaching) there is a long waiting list of business people, lawyers, and other professionals ready to leave their 6-figure salaries behind for the classroom. These people, whose business success has given them the luxury of not worrying about a paycheck, are motivated by the intrinsic value of the work, while there is a 50% chance the recent education graduate will leave teaching within 5 years, mostly because the hardships of teaching include pay too low to subsist on.
Tom says on October 25th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
following up on gberke and Dustin Wax…
There has been a lot of research in this area of reduced fees vs. free for a service. The trick, it seems, is that when the service is seen as a gift (i.e. free), people are more willing to give than if it is for a reduced fee. The key appears to be the commercialization of a transaction–it changes the nature of a relationship. One of the interesting findings from the research indicates people will do the work for free or for a modest gift will not even do it for a $5 gift certificate. The dollar value of the gift changes the nature of the relationship from a personal transaction to a commercial one. Cool stuff.
John Duffield says on October 30th, 2009 at 6:35 am
Good morning Dustin. Kudos for taking on this giant of a puzzle. Namely….”how to motivate people?” (including ourselves). The solution lies in your first observation. In essence, anyone on a real Life-Mission is absoluely self-motivated. A huge motive force from within drives folks on these Journeys that count. Fulfilling the Mission is its own reward and no punishing sticks are needed. This kind of work is welcomed, not hated. But how does one find their Life-Mission to experience this explosive release of potential? Well, as it turns out, everyone’s Mission is exactly the same. And there’s only one thing keeping it from any of us. My Mission and yours is to grow Human from birth to death to eventually blossom into a uniquely mature person. To do that, we need ideas about who we are and what to do with our lives. Acting on those ideas, we can work to become authentic people making real dreams true. So how do we get those ideas? That’s the four gazillion dollar question isn’t it! Thankfully, the answer is simple, albeit a bit tricky. Here it is. Those ideas are held back by fears of being judged. It works just like a tap holding back water from flowing. Learn how to remove those fears (failing, making mistakes, loving, trying…etc) and a Niagara of ideas about who we are come to us. Just like magic. Nothing more is needed to get these potent ideas. Learning how to dump those fears is simple enough for anyone as well. It has to be, because growing the Way we’re meant to grow is called “being ourselves” and being themselves is everyone’s birthright. Ciao Dustin. John Duffield
Robin Krieglstein, CEO GoalTribe.com says on October 30th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Another provocative article from Lifehack! Thanks Dustin. This is a critical discussion for us humans to get to the bottom of.
For an in-depth exploration of the “rewards” issue, take a look at Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn. I found it fascinating & provocative read.
But be cautious! I find the research findings are mixed, at best. It really seems to depend heavily on what types of rewards we’re talking about. If extrinsic rewards absolutely didn’t work, then we wouldn’t have so many video games offering points, titles, and virtual goods for doing highly repetitive tasks. This system of offering seemingly valueless rewards has evolved over time because they’re highly motivating, even addictive. This is especially true when you add the social element, because humans are evolved to be extremely social. (Probably because human babies are depend on adult care for survival longer than any other animal.)
I specialize in web tools that leverage clinically demonstrated motivators to help people improve their lives. So I’d like to share:
3 Clinically Proven Motivators that Even a Computer Can Deliver
1. Score Keeping: “Keeping score produces clear, frequent feedback that can transform tasks into accomplishments that, in turn, can generate intense satisfaction. [Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, researcher at the University of Chicago], has discovered that almost any activity can be made more engaging if it involves reasonably challenging goals and clear, frequent feedback.” Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, Influencer: The Power to Change Anything: 152 (2007)
2. Social Encouragement: “Research demonstrates that those who simply receive e-mails from a friend checking on their progress with smoking cessation, dieting, or exercise do a much better job of sticking with their plans than those who receive no inquiries.” Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, Influencer: The Power to Change Anything: 152 (2007)
3. Praise: A study published in 1997 demonstrated that praise from a computer generates positive effects similar to praise from people. B.J. Fogg and C.I. Nass, Silicon sycophants: The effects of computers that flatter, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 46: 551-561 (1997)
Our new 30 Day Fitness Challenge Facebook App leverages these 3 motivators and several others to make it highly motivating to keep a regular workout routine.
Mitch says on November 4th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
I have to say that I’m always having to re-motivate myself, which luckily I can do for the most part. One of the pieces missing, in a way, is that we also all want to see some kind of positive success from the things we do.
For instance, it doesn’t matter if I write what critics might later consider as the greatest book in the world if I can’t get anyone to read it, let alone buy it. Sure, for a minute I’d have the satisfaction in saying that I wrote a book, and that might motivate me to do some other things, but if I couldn’t ever get anyone to read the book, my motivation might wane and I might say “why bother writing another one.” Sure, we tell people to ignore that voice and go on, but we know it’s a reality to deal with.
Nicely written piece.
Serge says on November 20th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
Nice article on motivation. You may check another related here Useful Positive Attitude Tips
PFMinTN says on December 3rd, 2009 at 10:12 am
Maybe the lawyer fee thing wasn’t to be focused on the lawyers, but on the recipients…
and on that same line of thinking… did I really just see an ad for Scrabble where EVERY word is a winner?
Surely, surely not.