Intrinsic Motivation: A deep dive

[neo von retorch]

https://erringtowardsanswers.substack.com/p/intrinsic-motivation

Quite similar to the concepts of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink, this explores autonomy, mastery / competence, and relatedness. It dives into self-determination theory (SDT) -- a macro theory of human motivation and personality regarding individuals' innate tendencies toward growth and innate psychological needs.

I'm reminded me of the core principles of Mustachianism... freedom to choose what to do with your time, getting good at things to improve your self-reliance, and...

... well relatedness is harder when the world around you is the opposite of what you strive to be. But that's what the forum is here for! Find like-minded people we can relate to.

[Metalcat]

https://erringtowardsanswers.substack.com/p/intrinsic-motivation

Quite similar to the concepts of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink, this explores autonomy, mastery / competence, and relatedness. It dives into self-determination theory (SDT) -- a macro theory of human motivation and personality regarding individuals' innate tendencies toward growth and innate psychological needs.

I'm reminded me of the core principles of Mustachianism... freedom to choose what to do with your time, getting good at things to improve your self-reliance, and...

... well relatedness is harder when the world around you is the opposite of what you strive to be. But that's what the forum is here for! Find like-minded people we can relate to.

It's actually when you are struggling with your social reality that relatedness is most critical.

The divisions among us as people are largely constructed. They're real, they have real impacts, but they're frameworks of thinking that can be pretty easily bypassed if you know how.

All humans have enormous shared experiences and ability to connect, even when divided along highly socially tense lines.

Again, it all comes down to intrinsic motivation. When we are intrinsically socially motivated, we are genuinely curious about others and their lived experience, regardless of social categorization. But the more we divide along social construct lines, the less intrinsic our social motivations are and the more controlled they are through social constructs.

Really, no matter who the human being, what their experiences, opinions, or allegiances, you share an astronomical amount in common with that person

This comes back to a key point in the essay posted, which is that verbal rewards are tremendous fuel for intrinsic motivation. We actually have to be nice to others in order to motivate them effectively.

Fear is a tremendous tool for social control specifically because it damages intrinsic motivation, which is why it's such a common industrial and political tool. Autonomous humans are difficult to control, so societally, we don't actually want people to be terribly intrinsically motivated.

Which means we don't actually want social harmony and interconnectedness, because people who have positive regard for one another make each other more autonomous.

This is the very foundation of the entire profession of therapy. Approaching a person with positive regard empowers them and is in and of itself an agent of healthy change.

This was my approach in business. I didn't want to control my staff, I wanted to empower them and harness their intrinsic motivation. My basic premise was that they were smart people who intrinsically wanted to accomplish meaningful, difficult things. So I focused on a management style that heavily focused on praise and support.

I aggressively snuffed out bureaucratic systems and organizational lags that made staff feel unheard and under-valued for their efforts, constantly seeking feedback as to what frictions they experienced in their days, and heaped gobs of praise and respect on them for performing their job tasks well.

I became well known for cultivating teams of just monster efficiency packed with extremely driven and mutually supportive staff who were willing to bend over backwards for the job and for each other, so long as the conditions for intrinsic motivation were maintained.

Intrinsic motivation is unfathomably powerful, but it is tricky to cultivate in self and others within systems designed to suppress it.

The trade off of fostering intrinsic motivation is that you cannot control it. I couldn't control my staff in a traditional sense. I couldn't decide I wanted the business to go in a certain direction and then just dictate that it would. I had to consult the staff as stakeholders, thoroughly research how changes would impact them, and always co-create change with them based on shared priorities.

If I couldn't align my business priorities with their autonomous priorities, I was fucked. A world where intrinsic motivation is cultivated is one where reality cannot be dictated in a top-down power dynamic. Which is why we live in a world where the ingredients for autonomy and intrinsic motivation are generally in short supply.

This is why one of my most quoted taglines is that happiness and health are epic acts of rebellion.

[FireLane]

Good article. I bookmarked this to read later.

This research sounds useful as parenting strategy. I'm still figuring out how to get my son to do homework and chores when he needs to, but without teaching him to be dependent on regular reminders from me.

[twinstudy]

Metalcat's post is an insightful one.

Tangential to what she says, I don't think modern workplace practices could survive if people were actually intrinsically motivated. So much of the current work environment - showing up for the sake of doing so, having to bend to a manager's will on authority alone, communicating politely even in situations where it's thoroughly not earned - are artifacts.

[Metalcat]

Metalcat's post is an insightful one.

Tangential to what she says, I don't think modern workplace practices could survive if people were actually intrinsically motivated. So much of the current work environment - showing up for the sake of doing so, having to bend to a manager's will on authority alone, communicating politely even in situations where it's thoroughly not earned - are artifacts.

There are layers of motivation.

You can cultivate intrinsic motivation for a larger goal, which then requires external motivation for smaller elements of the goal.

For example, if you are intrinsically motivated to do well in law school, you will have the motivation to do assignments you think are stupid, to be deferential to faculty you think are assholes.

Too much of that bullshit can erode someone's intrinsic motivation though, which is why it is challenging to run a business while cultivating intrinsic motivation because as I said in my post, you lose a huge element of control, and most large companies want an iron fist of control these days.

That wasn't always necessarily the case though. The book The Meritocracy Trap illustrates really well the process and motivation behind businesses moving away from an internal power distribution where talent and motivation of staff were actively cultivated towards a top-down power grab for the sake of more executive control.

But just because that's the way it is now doesn't mean that that's the way it has to be. I outright reject your position that business must run that way, it's just how it *is* run and there are plenty of reasons for that, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily good reasons, at least not for the public in general.

To actively cultivated intrinsically motivated staff would mean to share a lot of control with the staff and create more collective managerial structures where decisions are made with a ton of stakeholder engagement where the staff are the stakeholders.

I'm currently in Denmark where that's closer to how the work culture is. Workplaces are very close knit here, workers are considered stakeholders because of a flatter hierarchical structure, independent thinking is encouraged, and people don't readily leave jobs here, their skills are actively cultivated within organizations not just recruited from outside. Also, work-life balance is expected, which means so is efficiency. Working long hours isn't considered an acceptable solution to a project needing to be done, so collective, creative solutions are expected.

There are obvious cultural reasons why this approach exists in Denmark and not other countries. As I said, there are reasons a lot of businesses don't cultivate this, control is very desirable.

But that doesn't mean it's the only way things can be done.

[twinstudy]

I agree that you can run a business other than the way it's usually run in the US. But it's not easy. You talk of sharing control with the staff and having a flatter structure. That would be great if it worked, but in my experience it works only for small teams who are all at a similar ability level. If you have a large team or a team with disparate ability levels then there is less interest in a flat structure. If I am 2x more capable of bringing in work and billing it out than another lawyer then I don't want a flat structure because otherwise what's the point of me exerting myself to a greater extent. It's nice to have the intrinsic satisfaction of a case well done but my sense of fairness also demands remuneration in line with output, which then leads to hierarchies developing unless you are all collaborating and at about the same level.

[Metalcat]

I agree that you can run a business other than the way it's usually run in the US. But it's not easy. You talk of sharing control with the staff and having a flatter structure. That would be great if it worked, but in my experience it works only for small teams who are all at a similar ability level. If you have a large team or a team with disparate ability levels then there is less interest in a flat structure. If I am 2x more capable of bringing in work and billing it out than another lawyer then I don't want a flat structure because otherwise what's the point of me exerting myself to a greater extent. It's nice to have the intrinsic satisfaction of a case well done but my sense of fairness also demands remuneration in line with output, which then leads to hierarchies developing unless you are all collaborating and at about the same level.

I was simply saying it can be done and even larger businesses in Scandinavia countries run more this way, which I already stipulated is because of cultural reasons.

My whole point is that it *can* be done, but it cannot be done while maintaining top-down control, which many companies want, which is why they're run that way.

But it's a myth that it can't be done. It's just that companies don't want to make the control sacrifice that it requires to get it done, even though it produces better results and efficiency. Most companies would rather sacrifice productivity for top-down control and are just willing to tolerate the predictable crap that comes with that.