Drive on

[flexagon]

Another topic I go around and around on is internal vs external motivation.

The last of my nonfiction binge books last week was Drive: the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Main premise: what people find really fulfilling is not gold medals or money, it's autonomy and mastery and the pursuit of something personally meaning. Main conclusion: it's better to be intrinsically motivated than extrinsically motivated, including at work.

Yeah, yeah. That feels true, and yet nearly everyone does things for external reasons sometimes -- we all want the new toy sometimes. And many people are helped along in achieving their personal, intrinsically motivated goals by finding someone to be (externally) accountable to -- a running partner, a personal trainer, a therapist, a thesis advisor, a gymnastics coach, a boss. So it feels wrong to be judgemental when someone is motivated externally.

Comments

[nahele-101.livejournal.com]

I agree...mastery brings self contentment.

[bluechromis.livejournal.com]

I only see one major problem with external motivation: you can't control other people. If you have a gym buddy who flakes on you, there goes that motivation. If you try to please a boss who changes their expectations a lot or doesn't give consistent feedback about your progress, there goes that motivation. External motivation is a quick a dirty tool to get things going in the right direction, until you have enough momentum to keep things going on your own...and, as such, there are a lot of things that wouldn't happen without it.

As for people liking autonomy and mastery and personally meaningful things...why, yes, we ARE all control freaks, this is not news. ;-)

[flexagon]

I have a certain fascination about that middle ground of wanting to score well in a solo video game, or wanting to check off an item on your list -- a list that you wrote down without anyone else's input, or when people graph how long it takes them to do the NYT crossword puzzle over time. People seem to do things (all on their own) to create an "external" motivator that isn't even conscious, and it works. So that's weird.