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Motivation, Fixed · Humanity Working

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, Paul, today's quick fix is motivation.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: How do you define it?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, Matt.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, everybody.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, we think of motivation as the ability to sustain meaningful effort, um, even when the conditions around you are changing.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: So you know how like last week we were talking about uh balance, weren't we?
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I uh and and we discussed there about this this idea of like sustaining energy for the uh for the different parts of your life.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you can have energy.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: You can have energy in terms of like you know, you're not falling asleep on the couch.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um but are you able to direct that energy into some form of of meaningful effort?
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, as I say, even as uh as those conditions are changing.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: I always kind of think of motivation around like feeling inspired, motivated, inspired to do to do something.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: Like you have to be moved.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's a component.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it's often it's often misunderstood.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: There is a lot of research that has been done into motivation, I would say, really, over the course of the um of the last 20 or 30 years.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: And before it, it was like very, very closely linked to the positive psychology movement, you know, et cetera.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: It was like you had to rah-rah people and cheer people up and all that kind of stuff.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then people started looking at situations where people were incredibly, unbelievably motivated.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't always, you know, things are things are amazing, and you're it's amazing to be part of this amazing thing.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, think about Churchill in the Second World War, right?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: Churchill had an extraordinary ability to to motivate people, but in but often he was motivating people through very pretty accurate descriptions of really, really dark times.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that ended up being a uh being a powerful motivator for people.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: And you see it actually even online now, right?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: You see people that are motivated in very positive ways, but people are also kind of motivated by pretty negative ways, right?
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, pretty negative ways, like the country's going to hell and my place in it is blah, blah, blah.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that kind of thing.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so that first thing is is, you know, it's not all centered around inspiring and posit and positivity.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: But also it's not while that is a component to it, there's also a bunch of it that is actually just really centered around knowing the reality, knowing what matters to you, why it matters to you, um, and how you're gonna make meaningful progress.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so the leader that stands up in front of a bunch of people, uses very animated, excited tones, and uses the classic phrase that I heard a million times when I worked at Microsoft.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm super excited by this, or I'm super excited by that.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm sure soon to be replaced by mega excited by this and mega excited by that.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: They're not they're not actually accomplishing what is really necessary.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: What they're doing is they're acting as a hype machine, but that is very different to a uh to actually somebody that is inspiring motivation.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a good distinction because I guess you know, if you get inspired by a great talk at one of those keynotes or something or at a product launch, how long till that wears off and you now have to do the work that was laid out, right?
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: So um you have to sustain it.
• 4:12
  unknown: Yeah.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: The answer is not very long at all.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh and so and by the way, if you fix that by just simply showing up again and again and again and again, then the effect the effect wears off, right?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: So it's almost like a drug, right?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: You give people the the initial hit of the of the drug, and then the next drug, the next hit doesn't work as well, and the next hit doesn't work as well.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: So it does, it's much more uh it's much more nuanced, I suppose, and it's related to what people do, and it does ebb and flow significantly.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so what do you think's making motivation difficult now?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think that um the one thing is is the lack of clarity.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um we have moved from a bit from a world where our jobs were very tightly defined and they were tightly linked to extrinsic motivators.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um we'll probably get into the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic a little bit in a moment here.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: But um it was work for this number of hours, you'll get this reward, work a few more, you'll get some overtime, you know, that sort of stuff.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was like do this, get this, do this, get this.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that allowed people to tie the hard work they were doing to a specific reward.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: And much of that has gone, and the majority of people, I know I mentioned this on the podcast before, majority of people lack clarity as to how what they're doing and how that contributes to something that is bigger.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and many people on a day-to-day basis don't even remember what they have done on a day-to-day basis.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: So, how can you be, you know, collectively inspired to do that?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, mindset plays a role here.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah, but not in, as we discussed, right?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Not in this sort of like just think positive thoughts thing, right?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right, right, right.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: And and so where motivation improves is actually kind of in two ways.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um so one is when you have the mindset that you believe that progress is something that you can uh can generate, right?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: So that you can actually create progress.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: What that implies is that you're looking for things as you do your daily work to materially move yourself forward.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then the momentum of the work that you're doing is in itself acting as some form of motivator, which is why a lot of people talk about, you know, understanding what that first step is.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: I've got this thing that I want to accomplish in the future.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: What's the thing, what's the thing I'm gonna do right now that isn't gonna advance, uh, advance me to that?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then keep repeating that process and generating some momentum associated with that.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's important that you can generate it.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: Like you you can you're the you're the source of that generation, yeah.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now the second thing, which at least isn't is at least as important, we found that people that sustain the best motivation over time are what I would r almost refer to as like momentum surfers.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um so so their motivation is higher generally, but they know that their motivation uh dips and rises, it ebbs and flows.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: So they're basically when when they're at a point in the week or a point in the month where the motivation is strong, they're maximizing that.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: When motivation is weaker, they're accepting it and they're writing it out.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: So they're not trying to push against this, oh, I've got, you know, terrible motivation after lunch on a Wednesday, right?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I just need to get better and I need to push through.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: No, instead, they're rearranging their calendar and they're doing something mind-numbingly boring at the time of at the time of which or something that doesn't really matter or whatever, but they're doing something different at that time when their motivation is naturally ebbing.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: So they're sustaining higher overall because they're getting more dumb when the motivation is higher and they're writing out without a level of guilt the times when the motivation is lower.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: They are never thinking of it as sub like a statting thing that they can maintain.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: Now I know there's been concepts like Dan Pink talks about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: Is that helpful to the discussion?
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: It kind of is.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: So let's just talk briefly about what those two things are.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: I already mentioned extrinsic motivation generally.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: So you can think of extrinsic motivation as being um the external factors um that can cause you to be motivated.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: So that tends to be things like pay, uh recognition, for example.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: So somebody saying, come up on stage and get this award, you know, those particular types of things.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: Pay is probably the one that people think of most often.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: Intrinsic motivation is when you are when the work itself is uh is motivating you to continue.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: So you're you're like, oh, you know, this is a something that is important to me in its own right.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: And most intrinsic a good proportion of intrinsic motivation comes from being connected to a higher purpose.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's like, um, yes, I I benefit from it in this way, but it's making the world better in a in a particular way, shape, or form.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's why you and I are motivated to do this podcast, right?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because we hope that there are people out there listening that can benefit from it, right?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: So we're so we're being intrinsically motivated um by that concept.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: A little bit complicated, because right, you think about if you're connecting it to a higher purpose, that sounds extrinsic, but it is that, but that's sort of it's like, what's your what's your why?
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: What's your the reason why you're doing this thing?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: So um when I said when you ask, is it is it helpful to the conversation?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: It sort of is, right?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: There are some things that we know about the uh about these two things.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um we've have in the past, we thought, okay, almost like extrinsic motivation bad, intrinsic motivation good.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's a little bit more complic complicated than that because almost all of us have extrinsic factors and intrinsic factors that govern what we do.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, we'd all work for free and and struggle to eat.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so we tend to have, you know, we tend to have both of them at play at any one time.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: And how down on our luck we are might lead us to be more extrinsically motivated for a period of time, or the nature of the work we do might lead us to be more intrinsically motivated for a period of time.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: So the important thing is to recognize that both of those things exist, recognize that without judgment, and then use the various extrinsic and intrinsic motivators that are uh that are helpful for you.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: The one thing I will say though about extrinsic motivation that people really do need to watch out for is if you tend to err on the side of extrinsic motivation, um, that can be really problematic because you are you're thinking, oh, if I do X or if I do Y and if I do Z, then having done those things, then I'll get a promotion or a pay rise or something along those lines.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, guess what?
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes that promotion doesn't come.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes that pay rise doesn't come.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so you need to really avoid the idea of like now having a motivation crash, which happens as a result of you not getting those things, and therefore, of course, reduces the chance that you'll get them in the future.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: So having some like cultivating that intrinsic motivation um over time is going to lead you to better results.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: So what's one simple thing someone can do this week?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we talked about that idea of a first, um, of like a first step.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think that that's something that people really need to sort of take more seriously.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: So look at the work that you do, look at any aspect of the uh of the work that you do today.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: Start by interrogating, if you like, the reasons why you get something from it, right?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so that could be that, you know, by doing X or Y the result is that a customer's life is better, for example, but something that is kind of like uh external and a bigger thing that benefits from what you do.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: Literally everybody can do that.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: We've we've never found a case where where somebody's it's not possible to make that connection.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: But then once you've done that, then start thinking about how you could do it just a tiny bit better.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: And what would be your even if it's 1% better, and then what would be your first step to accomplish that, even if it's like a five-minute step or a 10-minute step, and do it.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: Do that first step.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then that will start to get you more motivated about the work that you do on a day-to-day basis.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: Excellent.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: Motivation fixed.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: We fixed another one, Matt.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: All right, we'll be back next week.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Bob.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, we'll see you next week with another one.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced by Matt Neal.
• 13:55
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• 14:01
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• 14:04
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• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: See you next time.