How Extrinsic Motivation Ruined My Life

and why you should rethink why you're doing things.

It’s 2013. Life is pretty different now than it was last century. Yet, here we are still doing things the old way. I’m talking about extrinsically motivated lives. It’s not really anyone’s fault. After all it just kind of seems intuitive and we’ve been told this is how it is for our entire lives. It’s how people have motivated you. It’s how you’re supposed to motivate others right? Well, this style of thinking ruined my life. I’ll tell you all about how this managed to make me wreck my grades, kill my creativity, and make my bank account tank.

Luckily, we’ve actually done some research. We’ve found being extrinsically motivated and motivating people extrinsically is terribly inefficient (depending on what you’re doing). You may have heard of the famous candle task, otherwise known as Duncker's candle problem, after Karl Duncker, a kickass Gestault psychologist. Sam Glucksberg set up with the candle problem, and ran an experiment seeing what kind of an effect incentives would have on performance. They had a setup like the one below

They gave participants a simple task of setting the candle up on the wall so the wax doesn’t drip on the table. For the first group, they told them they were just setting up averages and norms to see how fast this could be done. The second group was given incentives, they would be given $5 if they could finish in the top 25% and 20$ if they could be the fastest. Alright lets have a little quiz here. Who do you think finished faster on average (bonus points if you can say by how much)? I’ve already given you some clues, so I feel like i’ve pointed you in the right direction already. Yes, it was the group that was not given incentives that performed the task quicker. They finished, on average, three minutes faster than the money group! Amazing! So what does this mean? I’ll tell you in a while after I provide some more evidence.

Dan O’reilly (economist) did a test with several games, and found that if the game required any type of cognitive skill. then incentives pretty much screwed your performance. It’s not just lab experiments either, when we use real world studies we get the same thing. A different O’reilly and his colleague Caldwell looked to see what happens when we decide on a job using extrinsic factors vs. extrinsic factors. They found a significant negative correlation between job satisfaction and deciding on taking that job due to salary. Not only do we perform better when we’re not about cash money, we’re also happier.

Alright let me get real here, no more experiments, now it’s time for life. I’ll give you guys my history and why I always had a distrust of selling my soul for money. It probably started when I got my first job. My parents (well mostly my Dad really) are some good hard working people. They believe in working for money, and I do too, but I know there is more to it than that. They put the pressure for me to get my first job during the summer when I was 15... as a janitor... at an elementary school... oh joy. If I needed the money, then I would have no quarrels with such a thing, there are times when people need to suck it up and get to work. This wasn’t one of those times. I like exploring the universe on my own and I didn’t much care about buying things. Of course, I was young and my parents put the pressure on my brother and I. I took the job and proceeded to have one of the worst and least productive summers of my life. All for minimum wage. I believe had I been left to my own devices I would have found another useful skill to apply later (I’ve always been kind of an autodidact) that would have been worth much more than minimum wage which turned out to be like 5.25 or so an hour at the time. It sucked, whatever, I guess I had some spending money (hardly) and a newfound work ethic (actually it took a ding after realizing most of what I did was useless. I can’t wait til cleaning is automated in the future).

Skip to college, I’m kicking ass my first two years. I’m taking courses that I love and flourishing. I am starting to get older now though, the real world is knocking on my door. I have occasional talks about money with my mom and how much i’m going to get paid after. I start to wonder if my psych/bio degree is the way to go. Maybe I should try to be an engineer. Maybe I should just cut out this whole University Honors program and zoom through my degree to get a job. Maybe I’ve been a kid too long. Well, I stop thinking about learning for learning’s sake and kind of disconnect from the honors program mentally. It’s not helping me. It’s not pragmatic. Pragmatic, practical you have to do useful things, stop being so childish and work, I think. About that time, I just so happened to miss a couple of classes or my honors course. I was sick, then my car broke down on the way to class. It only met once a week, so missing two weeks was huge. The prof decided to drop me even though I was passing the course. Due to the missing hours on my schedule, my scholarship was cancelled. Suddenly, money took on a whole new importance. I felt like a complete fuck up. I dipped into depression. Thoughts about making a living (just living really at that point) and paying for school consumed a lot of my thoughts. I call this time “The Lost Years” because it was a time where pretty much nothing happened, I didn’t really learn much, I didn’t produce anything valuable. I was having a pretty hard time because the pressure to pay for everything and having a career was getting to me. Instead of ideas coming to me because I knew what was valuable, I got stuck with the recurring thought, I need money. I was passing classes only because I was good passing, meaning I could take tests and cram like a champ, but the actual learning was lacking. When I started doing assignments, I didn’t approach them like I did in the past. I take a clear easy, no risk method of approach. I would passively do the assignment with minimum effort and zero caring. Just get it done and turn it in. Get your grade. I started going to school to get a letter on a paper at the end of the semester saying I could pass this class, not looking to learn cool things. I had a job, but I wasn’t doing spectacular at it. More and more, it seemed I was getting asked what I was going to do for money. How am I going to make a living? All super practical things, but the thought of doing my best work or contributing to the world was gone. I knew I had to act, but I wasn’t driven to act, because I didn’t really know why I should. I tried to get the idea that if I just had money I’d be fine. This of course kept me more stuck than ever.

I had no happiness in my life at this point, really. I started looking into positive psychology. If I could understand happiness, then perhaps I can attain it, I thought. I also luckboxed a job at Intel during this time. The people at Intel were really cool. I could tell that a lot of them truly liked doing their job. A lot of the guys talked about the programming or new technologies happily. They talked about projects as if they were their projects, not the company’s. They were all about what they do. It wasn’t like any other job that I’ve worked at. They weren’t really micromanaged. They had the autonomy to do what they wanted. My position was the same way. I got to do it the way I wanted. It wasn’t a particularly glorious position, but I got do it my way. I was able to see my own goals in doing it, not some nazi demanding certain things of me. I had the freedom to choose my methods and be creative about it. I got to mix my own intrinsic interest and let the project become my own. Life was starting to look a bit brighter. I was actually starting to feel what I remembered as happiness. I started to think more positively. I was getting paid, but I hardly noticed this, it’s really just a side effect. I was doing good work. Well, at the end of the summer the job ended for me, but I was feeling better.

I started to feel better about life, and I now had some cash (I never really spent much of it. I didn’t need to because I was doing my own thing and didn't need money for distraction from my day to day.). I’d liked poker starting from high school. It’s a really deep game with a lot of strategy. I start playing tournaments casually at casinos. I made pretty deep runs when I started, but I didn’t win big or take first in a lot of tournaments. I started analyzing the game a little bit more. I soaked up a few strategy books, and started working on the details of the game, and loving the intricacies of playing. It’s a game, and I was learning how to play. Money wasn’t even a thought here. I only cared about getting good at the game, and about being a good player. As I read more and practiced I started winning more. This is amazing! When I sat at the poker table I was fully engaged in playing. My chips were just units that were used in winning the game (this is true to a degree in life). When I was only focused on playing, I was unstoppable. My mom noticed that I was playing a lot. She commented, saying it was cool that I found a nice way to supplement my income. After she said that I got totally reframed. I knew there were tons of people playing poker professionally. I was sitting in a cash game once, and was pondering that. My head was stuck on this idea of money and valuing it. I got distracted from thinking about just playing. I lost my zen. I proceeded to tank. I played awful. My reads were bad, my bet sizing was atrocious, I got bluffed out too easy in obvious places. When I got unlucky and lost a pot because someone sucked out on me, I started thinking about how much money I was losing and that got me tilted (when you lose your temper and your play suffers). That never happened to me before. When I approached it like a game, I would never get tilted. I would always see it as part of the game and take my beats in stride and rally back. Here, when I cared about how much money I had, I would just end up losing even more and walk out hating myself for getting out control. This never happened to me before. I went back and worked on my mental game. When I don’t focus on the money, I play great. If I go in with the mindset of, “Oh I’m going to make so much tonight”, I play shitty. When I love the game like I originally did, when I just enjoy playing and focus on that, I clean up. Ironic isn’t it?

I'm all in. Even though I can never win flips.

So here is what I think of it all. We need rethink why we do what we do. Intrinsic motivation needs to take a primary role. Not only will our work improve as a result, but the whole world benefits when you’re doing better work. If we stopped this extrinsic approach of money making the world go round we’ll all be better for it. This applies equally to school. Before you start thinking this is some idealistic rant, let me qualify a bit. I’m not saying you should refuse to do work if it’s boring. Sometimes getting through the crappy stuff is necessary. Not everything can be a thrill. This is where the extrinsic motivators come into play. Incentives work as we expect in this territory. If there is no creativity or thinking, if the task is a mechanistic clear cut procedure type of job, then people will do more if you pay them. If you want someone to mow more lawns give them a bonus if they reach a certain amount. You might quality issues there though. However, you should rethink your motivation for why you do what you do, you might just find yourself doing better and doing more for the world.

If you want more check out this TED talk by Dan Pink, he talks a lot about the stuff that I did.

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