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Lecture Notes - Motivation

This document discusses strategies for effective self-motivation. It suggests focusing on intrinsic rather than extrinsic goals that are specific and enjoyable. While external rewards can help with difficult tasks, they risk undermining the goals or encouraging poor habits. Instead, the document recommends finding elements of work you enjoy, using uncertain or loss-averse rewards, and offsetting drudgery with other activities.

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sarangagunasekara
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70 views2 pages

Lecture Notes - Motivation

This document discusses strategies for effective self-motivation. It suggests focusing on intrinsic rather than extrinsic goals that are specific and enjoyable. While external rewards can help with difficult tasks, they risk undermining the goals or encouraging poor habits. Instead, the document recommends finding elements of work you enjoy, using uncertain or loss-averse rewards, and offsetting drudgery with other activities.

Uploaded by

sarangagunasekara
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Motivating yourself is hard.

In fact, I often compare it to one of the exploits of


the fictional German hero Baron Munchausen: Trying to sustain your drive through a
task, a project, or even a career can sometimes feel like pulling yourself out of a
swamp by your own hair. We seem to have a natural aversion to persistent effort
that no amount of caffeine or inspirational posters can fix.

But effective self-motivation is one of the main things that distinguishes high-
achieving professionals from everyone else. So how can you keep pushing onward,
even when you don’t feel like it?

To a certain extent, motivation is personal. What gets you going might not do
anything for me. And some individuals do seem to have more stick-to-itiveness than
others. However, after 20 years of research into human motivation, my team and I
have identified several strategies that seem to work for most people—whether
they’re trying to lose weight, save for retirement, or implement a long, difficult
initiative at work. If you’ve ever failed to reach an attainable goal because of
procrastination or lack of commitment—and who of us hasn’t?—I encourage you to read
on. These four sets of tactics can help propel you forward.

Design Goals, Not Chores


Ample research has documented the importance of goal setting. Studies have shown,
for example, that when salespeople have targets, they close more deals, and that
when individuals make daily exercise commitments, they’re more likely to increase
their fitness levels. Abstract ambitions—such as “doing your best”—are usually much
less effective than something concrete, such as bringing in 10 new customers a
month or walking 10,000 steps a day. As a first general rule, then, any objectives
you set for yourself or agree to should be specific.

Goals should also, whenever possible, trigger intrinsic, rather than extrinsic,
motivation. An activity is intrinsically motivated when it’s seen as its own end;
it’s extrinsically motivated when it’s seen as serving a separate, ulterior purpose
—earning you a reward or allowing you to avoid punishment. My research shows that
intrinsic motives predict achievement and success better than extrinsic ones do.

Read more about


How (and When) to Motivate Yourself

Take New Year’s resolutions. We found that people who made resolutions at the start
of January that were more pleasant to pursue—say, taking on a yoga class or phone-
free Saturdays—were more likely to still be following through on them in March than
people who chose more-important but less enjoyable goals. This is despite the
obvious fact that aspirations for the New Year are usually tough to achieve; if
they weren’t, they wouldn’t require a resolution!

Of course, if the external reward is great enough, we’ll keep at even the most
unpleasant tasks. Undergoing chemotherapy is an extreme example. In a work context,
many people stay in their jobs for the money, feeling like “wage slaves.” But in
such situations they usually do the minimum required to meet the goal. Extrinsic
motivation alone is unlikely to help us truly excel.

The trick is to focus on the elements of the work that you do find enjoyable.

In an ideal world we would all seek out work roles and environments that we enjoy
and thus keep our engagement high. Unfortunately, people often fail to do this. For
example, my research shows that when asked whether positive relationships with
colleagues and managers are critical in their current position, most people say
yes. But they don’t remember that office morale was key to success in past jobs,
nor do they predict it will be important for them in the future. So simply
remembering to consider intrinsic motivation when choosing jobs and taking on
projects can go a long way toward helping sustain success.

In cases where that’s impractical—we don’t all find jobs and get assignments we
love—the trick is to focus on the elements of the work that you do find enjoyable.
Think expansively about how accomplishing the task might be satisfying—by, for
example, giving you a chance to showcase your skills in front of your company’s
leaders, build important internal relationships, or create value for customers.
Finally, try to offset drudgery with activities that you find rewarding—for
instance, listen to music while tackling that big backlog of email in your in-box,
or do boring chores with friends, family, or your favorite colleagues.

Find Effective Rewards


Some tasks or even stretches of a career are entirely onerous—in which case it can
be helpful to create external motivators for yourself over the short-to-medium
term, especially if they complement incentives offered by your organization. You
might promise yourself a vacation for finishing a project or buy yourself a gift
for losing weight. But be careful to avoid perverse incentives. One mistake is to
reward yourself for the quantity of completed tasks or for speed when you actually
care about the quality of performance. An accountant who treats herself for
finishing her auditing projects quickly might leave herself open to mistakes, while
a salesperson focused on maximizing sales rather than repeat business should
probably expect some unhappy customers.

Another common trap is to choose incentives that undermine the goal you’ve reached.
If a dieter’s prize for losing weight is to eat pizza and cake, he’s likely to undo
some of his hard work and reestablish bad habits. If the reward for excelling at
work one week is to allow yourself to slack off the next, you could diminish the
positive impression you’ve made. Research on what psychologists call balancing
shows that goal achievement sometimes licenses people to give in to temptation—
which sets them back.

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In addition, some external incentives are more effective than others. For instance,
in experiments researchers have discovered that most people work harder (investing
more effort, time, and money) to qualify for an uncertain reward (such as a 50%
chance of getting either $150 or $50) than they do for a certain reward (a 100%
chance of getting $100), perhaps because the former is more challenging and
exciting. Uncertain rewards are harder to set up at work, but not impossible. You
might “gamify” a task by keeping two envelopes at your desk—one containing a treat
of greater value—and picking only one, at random, after the job is done.

Finally, loss aversion—people’s preference for avoiding losses rather than


acquiring equivalent gains—can also be used to design a strong external motivator.
In a 2016 study scientists from the University of Pennsylvania asked people to walk
7,000 steps a day for six months. Some participants were paid $1.40 for each day
they achieved their goal, while others lost $1.40 if they failed to. The second
group hit their daily target 50% more often. Online services such as StickK.com
allow users to choose a goal, like “I want to quit smoking,” and then commit to a
loss if they don’t achieve it: They have to donate money to an organization or a
political party that they despise, for example.

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