Sometimes you find motivation and sometimes motivation finds you. But most of the days
most people mostly lack motivation. Is that your fault? Sure. But it may be that
the school system unintentionally undermined your intrinsic drive. That wasn’t deliberate,
they just didn't know any better. By giving you rewards and punishments for your involvement in
school they conditioned you to seek external rewards rather than internal. Let me explain
There are two types of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic.
Intrinsic is doing an activity for its inherent satisfaction,
while extrinsic is performing an activity to earn a reward or to avoid punishment.
School systems are designed to heavily focus on the latter, and this can be a problem.
See Psychologists were interested in studying the effect of rewards on children. They
gathered around 50 pre-schoolers who were interested in drawing.
They were chosen in such a way that the researchers can study children who were
ALREADY interested in the activity, or in other words were motivated intrinsically.
The children were separated into 3 groups. Group 1 were told to expect and received a reward for
drawing. Group 2 received an unexpected reward, while Group 3 neither received nor expected
a reward. What they found out is that, a few weeks later the kids in the first group which
were expecting a reward, spent around 50% percent less time drawing, while the other kids who didn’t
expect a reward continued to draw the same. Also the drawing quality of the reward group was less
aesthetically pleasing. So kids who previously liked drawing, were less motivated to draw once
they expected a reward, and kids who didn’t expect anything, continued to draw as they did before.
The children figured out something unusual on their own, that if you’re offered a reward to do
something, than the action you need to do in order to get the reward, is probably something you’re
not going to find very interesting. The selected kids in the experiment, liked to draw, they were
good at it, and they kept drawing because they enjoyed it. But once they were given a reward
for performing the activity, it seemed as the drawing is only a means to get the reward. So they
lost motivation for something they once enjoyed and did without anybody forcing them to do so.
This can pose a problem, because even if you liked a particular subject or field in school,
you we’re constantly reminded to expect a the reward or in some case punishment,
for your studying. Test scores, grades and fear of failing probably replaced any intrinsic motivation
you happened to have. And when the rewards stop coming, the motivation vanished as well.
And this can also happen later in life. As the kids are given rewards for cleaning their room,
or eating their vegetables, adults are given money for performing a task or doing a job. And THIS is
how sometimes what you considered fun can become tedious work. People who once enjoyed their fields
can lose the motivation after being given a reward for it, just as the kids lost theirs.
So how can you get your motivation back and make tedious activities like studying,
or working, fun again. How can you turn work into play?
Well you need to follow the 4 C’s
First one is Challenge. There is a lot of evidence that kids and also the rest of us
seek challenge. When kids are given tasks of various difficulties,
they almost always pick the one that is just above their capability. We are motivated to
do tasks where we’re not certain we are going to succeed, but its not impossible.
Second C is Competence. Your intrinsic motivation increases if you accomplish something at a high
level of competence, OR if you simply improved your competence of that skill.
Third C is Control. You are naturally more motivated when you feel in control.
People of all ages like to feel like they’re in control and they are determining their own fate.
and the last one is Curiosity. Internal motivation is affected by curiosity,
because mysterious things are complex and unknown to your brain,
and this makes you wanting to learn more to fill that gap and close the circuit.
So if you want to make work into play, make your activity challenging,
try to do something that's just out of your reach. By doing so you will engage the second C,
you will either complete the activity at a higher level or increase your competence by trying
something you never did before. Try to control as many aspects of your activity as possible,
customize it to make it feel more personal, and that you’re more in control.
And finally always try to be curious about new stuff that's related to your activity.
These steps may not always make tedious work feel like the most enjoyable thing on the planet,
but they can balance out the negative effects of rewards on our intrinsic motivation and make you
feel more motivated to perform activities you once found interesting. However, its important
to say that external motivation is not inherently bad, and rewards in some cases can be useful. For
example if the intrinsic motivation is irrelevant, in activities like taking the trash out,
then a reward in that circumstance can be helpful. But external rewards and how to use
them PROPERLY to gain competence or build a habit without undermining your intrinsic motivation
requires its own video.
So to conclude the video, the researchers,
Lepper and his colleagues found out that intrinsically motivated children learned better,
showed higher levels of perceived ability and had desire for more difficult tasks. They also found
a fundamental law of the human nature, that we consider work something the body is obliged to do,
and play what the body is not obliged to do, and this can help explain why sometimes riding
a stationary bike can feel like tedious work, while climbing a mountain is considered fun!
By the way motivation can also be affected by your energy energy levels, and your energy levels
partly are the result of your sleep habits. So you can click this video here if you want to
learn how to fall asleep faster at night and wake up more focused and alert, or click THIS
video here if you want to learn the fundamentals of building good habits and breaking bad ones.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.