The Overjustification Effect
The Misconception: There is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love.
The Truth: Getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will sometimes cause your love for the task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feelings.
Office Space - Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox
Money isn’t everything. Money can’t buy happiness. Don’t live someone else’s dream. Figure out what you love and then figure out how to get paid doing it.
Maxims like these often find their way into your social media; they arrive in your electronic mailbox at the ends of dense chains of forwards. They bubble up from the collective sighs of well-paid boredom around the world and get routinely polished for presentation in graduation speeches and church sermons.
Money, fame, and prestige – they dangle just outside your reach it seems, encouraging you to lean farther and farther over the edge, to study longer and longer, to work harder and harder. When someone reminds you that acquiring currency while ignoring all else shouldn’t be your primary goal in life, it feels good. You retweet it. You post it on your wall. You forward it, and then you go back to work.
If only science had something concrete to say about the whole thing, you know? All these living greeting cards dispensing wisdom are great and all, but what about really putting money to the test? Does money buy happiness? In 2010, scientists published the results of a study looking into that very question.
The research by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzed the lives and incomes of nearly half-a-million randomly selected U.S. citizens. They dug through the subjects’ lives searching for indicators of something psychologists call “emotional well being,” a clinical term for how often you feel peaks and valleys like “joy, stress, sadness, anger and affection” and to what degree you feel those things daily. In other words, they measured how happy or sad people were over time compared to how much cash they brought home. They did this by checking if the subjects were consistently able to experience the richness of existence, by whether they were tasting the poetic marrow of life.
The researchers discovered money is indeed a major factor in day-to-day happiness. No surprise there. You need to make a certain amount, on average, to be able to afford food, shelter, clothing, entertainment and the occasional Apple product, but what spun top hats around the country was their finding that beyond a certain point your happiness levels off. The happiness money offers doesn’t keep getting more and more potent – it plateaus. The research showed that a lack of money brings unhappiness, but an overabundance does not have the opposite effect.
According to the research, in modern America the average income required to be happy day-to-day, to experience “emotional well being” is about $75,000 a year. According to the researchers, past that point adding more to your income “does nothing for happiness, enjoyment, sadness, or stress.” A person who makes, on average, $250,000 a year has no greater emotional well-being, no extra day-to-day happiness, than a person making $75,000 a year. In Mississippi it is a bit less, in Chicago a bit more, but the point is there is evidence for the existence of a financiohappiness ceiling. The super-wealthy may believe they are happier, and you may agree, but you both share a delusion.
If you don’t already have it, money can improve your life and make you happier, but once you have enough to go to Red Lobster on Tuesday night without worrying about paying the water bill that month, you’re good to go. Or, as Henry David Thoreau once said, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” In the modern United States the ability to let most things alone, according to Kahneman and Deaton’s research, costs about $75,000 a year.
If you find that hard to believe, you aren’t alone. A study in 2011 at Cornell asked Americans which they would rather have, more money or more sleep. Most people said more money. In a choice between either $80,000 a year, normal work hours, and about eight hours of sleep a night versus $140,000 a year, routine overtime, and six hours of nightly dreams – the majority of people went with the cash. It’s unfortunate, because although it looks good on paper and feels right in your gut, the research has never agreed. No matter how you turn it, the science says once your basic needs are taken care of, money and other rewards don’t make you happier, and you can appreciate why after examining a psychological jewel called the overjustification effect. To understand it, we must travel to 1973 when a group of psychologists poisoned a few children’s love of drawing in the name of science.
Time Magazine in 1971
Throughout the 20th century, as psychology came into its own as a scientific discipline, many psychologists emerged from the halls of academia and ascended to the rank of celebrity after delivering open-palmed scientific slaps to the face of mankind. Sigmund Freud got people talking about the unconscious and the malleable, hidden world of desires and fears. Carl Jung put the ideas of archetypes, introversion, and extroversion into our vocabulary. Abraham Maslow gave us a hierarchy of needs including hugs and sex. Timothy Leary fed Harvard students psychedelic mushrooms and advocated that an entire generation should use LSD to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” There are many more, but in the 1970s, B.F. Skinner was the rock star of psychology.
Skinner and his boxes made the cover of Time magazine in 1971 underneath the ominous proclamation, “We Can’t Afford Freedom.” His research into behaviorism had made its way into the public consciousness, and he was intent on using his celebrity to convince all of humanity there was no such thing as free will. You’ve seen his findings in practice. The Supernanny and The Dog Whisperer reward desired behavior and either punish or ignore undesired behavior – and they get impressive results. Skinner could make birds do figure eights on his command, or train them to pilot guided missiles. He invented climate-controlled baby boxes in which infants never cried. He created teaching machines that still influence user interfaces today. But, he also scared a romantic generation of freedom seekers into thinking freedom might be an illusion.
Skinner said all human thoughts and behaviors were just reactions to stimuli – conditioned responses. To believe as Skinner did is to believe everything you do is part of seeking a reward or avoiding a punishment. Your entire life is just a stack of evolutionarily selected against quirks and desires seasoned with programmed interests and fears. There is no self. There is no one in control. Those things are illusions, side effects of a complex nervous system observing its own actions and cognitions. In light of this, Skinner advocated we build a society through setting goals and then condition people toward those goals through positive reinforcement. Skinner didn’t trust human beings not to be lazy, greedy, and violent. Humans, he said, were inclined to seek and reinforce status through institutions, class warfare, and bloodshed. People can’t be trusted with freedom, he told the world. Psychology could instead design systems to condition people toward positive goals that ensure the best possible quality of life for all.
As you might imagine, the proclamation humans have no soul, or at least no special spark, caused a great deal of mental indigestion. Many psychologists resisted the idea that you are nothing more than chemical reactions on top of physical laws playing themselves out no differently than a rock slide crashing down the side of a mountain or a tree converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into wood. Skinner claimed what goes on inside your head is irrelevant, that the environment, the stuff outside your skull determines behavior, thoughts, emotions, beliefs and so on. It was a bold and terrifying claim to many, so science set about the task of picking it apart.
Among those who wanted to know if the mind was just a pile of reactions to rewards and punishments were psychologists Mark Lepper, Daniel Greene and Richard Nisbett. They wondered if thinking about thinking played a bigger role than the behaviorists suggested. In their book, The Hidden Costs of Reward, they detail one experiment in particular which helped pull psychology out from under what they called Skinner’s “long shadow.”
In 1973, Lepper, Greene and Nisbett met with teachers of a preschool class, the sort that generates a steady output of macaroni art and paper-bag vests. They arranged for the children to have a period of free time in which the tots could choose from a variety of different fun activities. Meanwhile, the psychologists would watch from behind a one-way mirror and take notes. The teachers agreed, and the psychologists watched. To proceed, they needed children with a natural affinity for art. So as the kids played, the scientists searched for the ones who gravitated toward drawing and coloring activities. Once they identified the artists of the group, the scientists watched them during free time and measured their participation and interest in drawing for later comparison.
They then divided the children into three groups. They offered Group A a glittering certificate of awesomeness if the artists drew during the next fun time. They offered Group B nothing, but if the kids in Group B happened to draw they received an unexpected certificate of awesomeness identical to the one received by Group A. The experimenters told Group C nothing ahead of time, and later the scientists didn’t award a prize if those children went for the colored pencils and markers. The scientists then watched to see how the kids performed during a series of playtimes over three days. They awarded the prizes, stopped observations, and waited two weeks. When they returned, the researchers watched as the children faced the same the choice as before the experiment began. Three groups, three experiences, many fun activities – how do you think their feelings changed?
Source: Benedikte on Flikr
Well, Group B and Group C didn’t change at all. They went to the art supplies and created monsters and mountains and houses with curly-cue smoke streams crawling out of rectangular chimneys with just as much joy as they had before they met the psychologists. Group A, though, did not. They were different people now. The children in Group A “spent significantly less time” drawing than did the others, and they “showed a significant decrease in interest in the activity” as compared to before the experiment. Why?
The children in Group A were swept up, overpowered, their joy perverted by the overjustification effect. The story they told themselves wasn’t the same story the other groups were telling. That’s how the effect works.
Self-perception theory says you observe your own behavior and then, after the fact, make up a story to explain it. That story is sometimes close to the truth, and sometimes it is just something nice that makes you feel better about being a person. For instance, researchers at Stanford University once divided students into two groups. One received a small cash payment for turning wooden knobs round and round for an hour. The other group received a generous payment for the same task. After the hour, a researcher asked students in each group to tell the next person after them who was about to perform the same boring task that turning knobs was fun and interesting. After that, everyone filled out a survey in which they were asked to say how they truly felt. The people paid a pittance reported the study was a blast. The people paid well reported it was awful. Subjects in both groups lied to the person after them, but the people paid well had a justification, an extrinsic reward to fall back on. The other group had no safety net, no outside justification, so they invented one inside. To keep from feeling icky, they found solace in an internal justification – they thought, “you know, it really was fun when you think about.” That’s called the insufficient justification effect, the yang to overjustification’s yin. In telling themselves the story, the only difference was the size of the reward and whether or not they felt extrinsically or intrinsically motivated. You are driven at the fundamental level in most everything you choose to do by either intrinsic or extrinsic goals.
Intrinsic motivations come from within. As Daniel Pink explained in his excellent book, Drive, those motivations often include mastery, autonomy, and purpose. There are some things you do just because they fulfill you, or they make you feel like you are becoming better at a task, or that you are a master of your destiny, or that you play a role in the grand scheme of things, or that you are helping society in some way. Intrinsic rewards demonstrate to yourself and others the value of being you. They are blurry and difficult to quantify. Charted on a graph, they form long slopes stretching into infinity. You strive to become an amazing cellist, or you volunteer in the campaign of an inspiring politician, or you build the starship Enterprise in Minecraft.
Extrinsic motivations come from without. They are tangible baubles handed over for tangible deeds. They usually exist outside of you before you begin a task. These sorts of motivations include money, prizes and grades, or in the case of punishment, the promise of losing something you like or gaining something you do not. Extrinsic motivations are easy to quantify, and can be demonstrated in bar graphs or tallied on a calculator. You work a double shift for the overtime pay so you can make rent. You put in the hours to become a doctor hoping your father will finally deliver the praise for which you long. You say no to the cheesecake so you can fit into those pants at the Christmas party. If you can admit to yourself that the reward is the only reason you are doing what you are doing – the situps, the spreadsheet, the speed limit – it is probably extrinsic.
Whether a reward is intrinsic or extrinsic helps determine the setting of your narrative – the marketplace or the heart. As Dan Ariely writes in his book, Predictably Irrational, you tend to unconsciously evaluate your behavior and that of others in terms of social norms or market norms. Helping a friend move for free doesn’t feel the same as helping a friend move for $50. It feels wonderful to slip into the same bed with your date after getting to know them and staying up one night making key lime cupcakes and talking about the differences and similarities between Breaking Bad and The Wire, but if after all of that the other person tosses you a $100 bill and says, “Thanks, that was awesome,” you will feel crushed by the terrible weight of market norms. Payments in terms of social norms are intrinsic, and thus your narrative remains impervious to the overjustification effect. Those sorts of payments come as praise and respect, a feeling of mastery or camaraderie or love. Payments in terms of market norms are extrinsic, and your story becomes vulnerable to overjustification. Marketplace payments come as something measurable, and in turn they make your motivation measurable when before it was nebulous, up for interpretation and easy to rationalize.
The deal the children struck with the experimenters ruined their love of art during playtime, not because they received a reward. After all, Group B got the same reward and kept their desire to draw. No, it wasn’t the prize but the story they told themselves about why they chose what they chose, why they did what they did. During the experiment, Group C thought, “I just drew this picture because I love to draw!” Group B thought, “I just got rewarded for doing something I love to do!” Group A thought, “I just drew this to win an award!” When all three groups were faced with the same activity, Group A was faced with a metacognition, a question, a burden unknown to the other groups. The scientists in the knob-turning study and the child artists study showed Skinner’s view was too narrow. Thinking about thinking changes things. Extrinsic rewards can steal your narrative.
As Lepper, Greene and Nisbett wrote, “engagement in an activity of initial interest under conditions that make salient to the person the instrumentality of engagement in that activity as a means to some ulterior end may lead to decrements in subsequent, intrinsic interest in the activity.” In other words, if you are offered a reward to do something you love and then agree, you will later question whether you continue to do it for love or for the reward.
Source: www.trollandtoad.com
In 1980, David Rosenfield, Robert Folger and Harold Adelman at Southern Methodist University revealed a way you can defeat the overjustification effect. Seek employers who dole out reward – paychecks, bonuses, promotions, etc. – based not on quotas or task completions but instead based on competence. They ran an experiment in which they told subjects the goal was to find fun and interesting ways to improve vocabulary skills in schools. They placed participants in two categories and two groups per category. In one category, subjects would be paid for being good at their task. In the other category, the subjects would be paid for completing a task. The subjects received 26 dice with letters on their faces instead of dots and a stack of index cards each with 13 random letters. The subjects hit a timer and used their dice to make words from the letters on the cards. Once they had used nine letters or spent a minute-and-a-half trying, they moved on to the next index card and kept repeating until the experiment ended. It was difficult but fun, and as the players kept going they started to improve in their abilities.
In the payment for competence category, Group A was told they were being payed based on how well they did compared to the average score. In Group B, the subjects were told the same thing, but there was no mention of any reward. In the payment for completion category, the scientists told Group C each completed puzzle would increase their payout, and Group D was told they would be paid by the hour.
After the games, the experimenters pretended to tally up the subjects’ scores and showed Groups A and B how well they did. No matter how they actually performed, the scientists told half of Groups A and B they did poorly and half they were amazing at the game. Groups C and D, the ones who were paid for completions, were also split. Half got low pay and half high pay. The subjects then filled out a questionnaire and sat alone in the room with the dice and cards for three minutes. During that alone time the real study began. The scientists wanted to see who would keep playing the game for fun and for how long.
The people in Groups A and B, the ones who were paid for being better than average, they picked up the game and played it for over two minutes, but slightly less than that if they were told they weren’t that good. The people in groups C and D, the ones paid for completions, didn’t play it for fun for as long as did the people in the competency groups, and they tended to play longer the less they were paid.
The results of the study suggested when you get rewarded based on how well you perform a task, as long as those reasons are made perfectly clear, rewards will generate that electric exuberance of intrinsic validation, and the higher the reward, the better the feeling and the more likely you will try harder in the future. On the other hand, if you are getting rewarded just for being a warm body, no matter how well you do your job, no matter what you achieve, the electric feeling is absent. In those conditions greater rewards don’t lead to more output, don’t encourage you to strive for greatness. Overall, the study suggested rewards don’t have motivational power unless they make you feel competent. Money alone doesn’t do that. With money, when you explain to yourself why you worked so hard, all you can come up with is, “to get paid.” You come to believe you are being coerced, paid off, bought out. In the absence of what the scientists called “competency feedback” there is no story to tell yourself that paints you as a badass. Quotas and overtime and hourly pay don’t offer such indications of competency. Bonuses based on a reaching a specific number of completions or reaching a quantified goal make you feel like a machine.
If you pay people to complete puzzles instead of paying them for being smart, they lose interest in the game. If you pay children to draw, fun becomes work. Payment on top of compliments and other praise and feeling good about personal achievement are powerful motivators, but only if they are unexpected. Only then can you continue to tell the story that keeps you going; only then can you still explain your motivation as coming from within.
Consider the story you tell yourself about why you do what you do for a living. How vulnerable is that tale to these effects?
Maybe your story goes like this: Work is just a means to an end. You go to work; you get paid. You exchange effort for survival tokens and the occasional steampunk thong from Etsy. Work is not fun. Work pays bills. Fun happens at places that are not work. Your story is in no danger if that’s how you see things. In an environment like that Skinner’s assumptions hold true, you will only work as hard as is necessary to keep getting paychecks. If offered greater rewards, you’ll work harder for them.
Maybe your story goes like this though: I love what I do. It changes lives. It makes the world a better place. I am slowly becoming a master in my field, and I get to choose how I solve problems. My bosses value my efforts, depend on me, and offer praise. In that scenario, rewards just get in the way of your job. As Kahneman’s and Deaton’s study about happiness showed, once you earn enough to be happy day-to-day, motivation must come from something else. As Kahneman and Deaton’s research into happiness and money showed, the only material reward worth seeking once you have a bed, running water and access to microwave popcorn, are tributes, symbols to all of your merit, stuff that demonstrates your effectance to yourself and others. Ranks, degrees, gold stars, trophies, Nobel Prizes and Academy Awards – these are shorthand indicators of your competence. Those rewards amplify your internal motivations; they build your self-esteem and strengthen your feelings of self-efficacy. They show you’ve leveled up in the real world. Achievement unlocked. They help you construct a personal narrative you enjoy telling.
The overjustification effect threatens your fragile narratives, especially if you haven’t figured out what to do with your life. You run the risk of seeing your behavior as motivated by profit instead of interest if you agree to get paid for something you would probably do for free. Conditioning will not only fail, it will pollute you. You run the risk of believing the reward, not your passion, was responsible for your effort, and in the future it will be a challenge to generate enthusiasm. It becomes more and more difficult to look back on your actions and describe them in terms of internal motivations. The thing you love can become drudgery if that which can’t be measured is transmuted into something you can plug into TurboTax.
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Links:
The Starship Enterprise in Minecraft
The WSJ’s Writeup on the Happiness Study
Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being
The Official Website of B.F. Skinner
RSA Animate: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Steve Jobs’ Commencement Speech at Stanford
A Meta-Analysis of The Overjustification Effect
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OMG. I think you just changed my life, right there bro.
I am having this exact problem!, working at something I’m supposed to love and somehow I managed to lose all my motivation. Thanks for giving my problem a name and giving me a way to figure out a solution
I always told my daughter that she shouldn’t hit people. One day she asked me if there’s a time when it’s appropriate to do so. I replied, “When someone says, ‘If it was supposed to be fun, they wouldn’t call it work!’”
Absolutely fascinating – one of your best yet!
Here’s the thing though. I’ve always somehow ‘gotten’ this – That is, I’ve always felt I’d prefer to just make enough money to live comfortably and spend my time doing what I *really* enjoy, but at the same time having no desire to participate or feel engaged with my job is stressful and ultimately detrimental to my overall wellbeing, not just my “off-time”, where I do what I really want to.
But here, if I make my job something I love to do… then I’ll end up disliking that too! Argh.
The “Find a good employer” road really does seem to be the only road out…
You can have it both ways. As long as there are intrinsic rewards to doing what you love to do, not just payment, you will still enjoy doing it even if you are being paid to do it.
I can give you an example from my own life. I am a photographer and a teacher. For a while I did photography professionally, working freelance on other people’s fashion projects. It sucked all the joy out of one of my deepest passions. In that scenario, I was being paid, but there wasn’t much personal satisfaction coming from doing my work, because I had no creative control and didn’t feel fulfilled as an artist. Now I mainly work as a teacher, and I simply take photos as I see fit, enjoying myself immensely, and sell my finished photos online. There is a deep feeling of satisfaction that comes from working on my art and improving myself as an artist. Sometimes my photos sell and sometimes they don’t. I guess I would be like “Group B” from the preschool art class experiment above.
Teaching is also one of those professions where there is a natural intrinsic reward for many (if not most) people who do it. It’s not easy, but I absolutely love what I do even though I am paid very well to do it. Being paid has not ruined it at all for me.
So the challenge is to figure out a way in which you can get an intrinsic reward, whatever that feeling might be to you, at the same time as earning money. It’s a tricky problem, but probably not impossible.
I would have to agree that doing what you love will eventually just become a job and you will hate it. So instead of doing what you love, love what you’re doing. Small difference but great results. A good employer would be good too.
As someone currently attempting to transition from doing the work someone will pay me to do to the work I really want to do, this is timely. Will I lose the thing I love the most in the act of achieving it? Possibly. I hope I’m inured against this because I’ve been doing what I love to do, for free, for so many years now that there’s no doubt I’m in it for love. But I wonder about this; when the paycheques start to roll in, when I suddenly have deadlines and expectations to meet, what used to be fun could easily become just another grind.
Still, I’ll go on chasing that ‘electric exuberance’. Being good at something you love is worth all the money in the world.
This piece accurately describes why I used to make music, quit making music, and then started making music again (on different terms.) I have a lot to think about now…
So, Abraham Maslow was right :)
Well…he was onto something. We’ve learned a lot since then.
I wonder how much this affects professional sports. Does getting a huge salary to play in the NFL reduce the amount of personal enjoyment a player gets from playing football? Do they enjoy it less than they did in college and high school, when they weren’t getting a paycheck? Sports are the kind of thing many people start out doing because they enjoy it, but this effect suggests that this enjoyment can go away once they start getting paid to do what they enjoy.
First, I found myself distilling this into :
Do what you love, and have become competent in through the 10,000 hour rule, on condition that :
a) You are sufficiently rewarded for it.
b) You are rewarded for your qualitative output and not quantitive output.
c) You are paid at least $75,000 p.a.
d) The rewards are not merely financial.
Then it occured to me that that you can replace the “what you love” by “anything” and the end result will be the same. Maybe it’s simply advantageous from the point of view that you’re more likely to achieve competency in something you “just can’t stop doing because it’s so much fun”.
Careerist Blogger Penelope Trunk wrote a related blog entry called, ‘Bad career advice: Do what you love’:
“One of the worst pieces of career advice that I bet each of you has not only gotten but given is to “do what you love.”
Forget that. It’s absurd. I have been writing since before I even knew how to write – when I was a preschooler I dictated my writing to my dad. And you might not be in preschool, but if you are in touch with who you are, you are doing what you love, no matter what, because you love it.
So it’s preposterous that we need to get paid to do what we love because we do that stuff anyway. So you will say, “But look. Now you are getting paid to do what you love. You are so lucky.” But it’s not true. We are each multifaceted, multilayered, complicated people, and if you are reading this blog, you probably devote a large part of your life to learning about yourself and you know it’s a process. None us loves just one thing.”
Read more at:
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/12/18/bad-career-advice-do-what-you-love/
My response:
Do what allows you to live a happy life. Whether or not you love what you do for a living doesn’t matter as much. Should you happen to love your job that provides you with happiness, then great! But you have to be realistic. Most of us are not superstars and aren’t good enough at the things we love to earn enough money.
As for myself, I am mediocre to sub-mediocre at most things. I do not have the aptitude nor the skills to make money from the few things I love. So I just make do with a ‘good enough’ job that allows me to live decently while I pursue my loves on the side.
For people who excel at a high level at what they love and can realistically earn a living doing it, they should really do some soul searching to find out if they want to earn money by doing what they love. But it’s difficult to determine if the pursuit of money will taint their love or allow it to continue. But some people can have a hunch about. You have to ask yourself is it worth the risk hating what you love by making money from what you love?
I do think the “do what you love…” advice applies to a minority of people, such as the Steve Jobs of the world. It’s nearly impossible for most people to do what they love to earn enough to live a comfortable life and to have a decent work/life balance due to the realities of the economy and society. Most will have to settle for ‘good enough’ jobs and some will have to settle for ‘bad jobs’ or even ‘no jobs’. All jobs have trade-offs and having that itch to do what you love can really put a damper on ‘doing what you merely like’, as it can lead to the notion that your dream job just lies somewhere nearby for you to find. I think a better advice that applies to the majority is, “Do what’s at least good enough and makes you content. Try to find a job with co-workers you can at least tolerate. Find a job that allows you to have a decent work/life balance. Don’t expect to much from work, but embrace the good stuff that comes your way.”
Video of Dan Pink discusses studies that demonstrate the more one gets paid, the lower their performance for cognitive tasks that are at least moderately challenging,
That’s in the links section. Thanks!
Fantastic post indeed.
Incidentally, I’ve just understood my mistake with my kid (he is 5): a couple of month ago he asked us some gifts (for no particular reason) – something I’m not really willing to do. At that time he was helping us quite willingly to help us set the table, so I thought that giving him a small fixed sum for helping us would enable him to do some saving and at the end buy whatever he wished.
It worked a couple of time, before he almost stopped helping us. I didn’t understood why (nor spent some time trying to analyse why, just noting that in fact, as a child I never did anything for money for my parents and even resisted it!)
Well, well, as it happens, I’ve just spoiled his pleasure and internal motivators!
Ok then, I need to think at something better…
Thanks for this post.
Starting praising him i.e. like “Son, you’re a credit to this family and your labour is greatly appreciated.” Of course, you can’t back out on the money now because he’ll smell a rat but draw his attention to the valuable contribution he’s making.
Praise as a reward is almost as bad as material rewards. The kid doing it for praise is just as bad as him doing it for cash.
The exception is when it’s unexpected and incidental – but that works for material rewards as well.
“Punished by Rewards” by Alfie Kohn discusses this issue.
Really? I thought praise enhanced intrinsic motivation, unlike financial rewards. At least that’s what wikipedia says on the subject.
However, I must say that scanning this article again, it seems that praise is listed in the paragraph “Extrinsic motivations come from…” as an extrinsic motivation. Yet in the following paragraph we get :
“Payments in terms of social norms are intrinsic, and thus your narrative remains impervious to the overjustification effect. Those sorts of payments come as praise and respect, a feeling of mastery or camaraderie or love. Payments in terms of market norms are extrinsic, and your story becomes vulnerable to overjustification. Marketplace payments come as something measurable, and in turn they make your motivation measurable when before it was nebulous, up for interpretation and easy to rationalize.” This is clearly saying that praise is an intrinsic reward.
So which is it? Is praise extrinsic or intrinsic? Or are there different kinds of praise, some of which is intrinsic, some of which is extrinsic.If it’s the case as you say that the difference is whether it’s expected or unexpected, this might be made clearer in the article.
I believe the difference may be in the quid pro quo aspect of it. It’s in doing a thing to get a response, versus doing a thing because it’s part of the steady state of your life. Acting versus being.
There’s also the aspect of it about being manipulated. Pursuing a carrot being dangled by someone who wants you to chase it motivates differently than pursuing a carrot that just happened to be there. So if people are praising a kid to make him do something, he’ll know and he’ll feel controlled and his motivation will collapse. If they’re praising him just because he’s worthy of praise, in a completely non-manipulative way, then it won’t.
My interpretation is that David’s social norms point about praise applies in situations where it is not quid pro quo and not used as a tool by one person to manipulate another.
See, I have an advantage here – my wife is a Ph.D. sociologist from a top school and I am a three bullet power point guy. So I recognize the symptoms of over-thinking-itis. As my lovely and talented spouse says: “you can spend a lot of time doing experiments to prove what everyone already knows. And then replicate it in a different form for publication.”
How about this: Money can’t buy happiness, but a Mercedes is warmer than a park bench.
Everyone here who couldn’t make their rent consecutive months, raise your hands.
Yep, it’s important to like your job, but it’s a lot more important to have a good paying job that can’t be outsourced and that has transferable skills. And that pays as much as possible.
-XC
PS – Want to be happier making more money? Save more.
Perhaps it’s worth nothing that Steve Jobs said “love what you do”, not “do what you love”:
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” – Steve Jobs
“noting” even.
It looks like Steve Jobs just refuted this article. Let’s all read that again — find your motivation, and do “great work.” As Yoda said, “there is no try, do — or do not.”
Okay, but you’re missing one excruciatingly important point. Retirement. There’s a longer and longer period at the end of the average American life during which one is no longer able to work full time (if at all) but still needs money to spend.
If you’re at that $75K magical point where you’re happy are you saving ~20% of that income (or more) to ensure that you have a comfortable retirement, or are you screwing your future? Even if money over $75K doesn’t improve today’s happiness, I suspect that you need quite a bit over that to ensure a happy senescence.
It’s not enough to save for the average case either – especially in America, if you get sick as an elderly person, contract an illness that requires long-term care, you’re truly fucked if you don’t have a large amount of money, or the means and foresight to pay for supplemental insurance up the wazoo. So you really need to save for the reasonable worst case and not for the average. I don’t think you can do that happily, in America, for $75K/year unless you’ve been making that $75K/year since the day you got out of college and you’ve been saving religiously since then.
Thanks for the comment!
I don’t address retirement in the article because I’m working over the course of the text toward explaining the overjustification effect. But, this is an interesting point to consider and I’d be interested to see what Kahneman and Deaton have to say about it. I can, however, tell you that there is a lot of evidence out there suggesting that people find a way to be happy no matter their circumstances unless totally crushed by poverty, violence, and/or sickness.
I’m reminded of a story in the book” Flow” about a Jew in a concentration camp in World War 2 feeling overjoyed about something or other.
My over-compressed but TV-friendly slogan-theory is: your happiness level responds in changes to your circumstances, not your absolute circumstances.
Nice slogan.
I’ve had that exact same thought. A slightly more mathematical way to put it is that our perception of happiness of related to the derivative of the function describing how “successfull” you are.
I’m a parent blogger and this is one of the most misunderstood dangers of rewards. There is a right way to use rewards so as not to damage intrinsic motivation. Other dangers of rewards include creating cognitive load (such that the child or adult actually becomes dumber, performing complicated tasks worse when there is a reward involved) and incenting unintended behaviors. Wrote about it at http://www.perfectingparenthood.com/content/rewards-without-psychological-damage-essential-tool-parents You are completely right that it is the intelligent child, or person, rationalizing the world around them in light of misapplied rewards, that change inside. Free will can, but to be free you have to be wise enough to see the construction of your own mind. You are what you think!
…Never realized it before, but while I read this and look back, I know your post is so true.
During school tests where the scores don’t go to the report card, I feel easier to give up when facing a difficult question/problem. Not strangely, the score wasn’t as good as the ones where the score go into report card.
About the art experiment… I’m moved by it, because I also like to draw since I’m little and aspires to be a pro artist when I grow up. Fortunately, I haven’t experienced what the kids in Group A experienced, I’m so lucky that I read your post first before something like that could happen to me.
Your blog has been, and still is wonderful… I love this blog. Keep going bro, the day will come when you might even change society =))
Premature midlife crisis averted.
Thank you!
i must be missing something – there is a leap in logic here that does not compute. getting paid for doing something you love does not equate that you love money. what it means is, quite simply, that you love doing something – and if people will pay you for it, that is great. why? because it will never feel like work. i disagree with the column from the outset. people complain about their jobs all the time. they hate what they do. if you get to do something you love and get paid for it, you’re very lucky, in my opinion. look, most of us have to work, that’s the reality. so, we can imagine the choice: “do something i do not really like but can bear” to pay the bills or “something i love” and pay the bills, I’m sorry, i don’t see the problem with the choice there. sure, many people will have to do jobs they really don’t like – and it’s completely ridiculous to think that somehow someone will love to pick up garbage or clean toilets (tho who knows, really). but if you want to tell me that working 8 hours a day 40 hours a week or something close to that doing those crap jobs is somehow more satisfying or better than working the same amount of time doing something i like doing, say, playing baseball, i think you’re nuts. again, somehow you jump from loving what you do to loving money. i can see that issue but that gets everything backwards. i don’t love money any more than i love cleaning toilets. and if someone said, hey clean toilets for $150,000 a year, sorry, i’m not going to love cleaning toilets any more than say playing baseball. now, if you’re saying, well you’re doing something you love but it’s for someone else (because someone’s paying you) – again, that’s a different issue. and i’m not even sure i agree with that either. i mean, you have to spend 8 hours a day doing something, even if it’s ostensibly for someone else’s profit, i’d still rather do that and get some satisfaction and feel creative and fulfilled than be cleaning toilets that benefits no one and gives me no satisfaction. ok, now tell me how i missed the entire point here, because i really cannot understand the logic going on here.
Don’t worry, I also missed the logic here and was looking in the comments section for a kindred spirit. It seems everybody else got the point except for us. I am doing what I love and get paid for it. I earn enough to pay my bills and live decently. I am way happier than I was when I had a crappy job I hated getting paid just enough to get by. But what does “happy” mean anyway? Happiness isn’t a state of being you reach, like a finish line, a state that becomes permanent once obtained. Some days are better than others. Bad things happen. You miss your bus to work, your car breaks down, you get sick or have a fight with someone or break up with your boyfriend. Then something happens that makes you happy. Sometimes you’re just neutral, not really feeling anything intense. I have days when I am not necessarily enjoying my work, I feel stressed and everything, but I still appreciate it more and feel myself to be in a much better position than when I had that other job. I think when they say do what you love it has to do with 1) levels of personal happiness -if you do what you love you will feel more fulfilled as a person (somebody else’s dream job might be a nightmare job for me); 2) you do it better (well, not always, but in general). I just didn’t very well see the connection between the different parts of the article. Before I began what I love for money, I’d do it for free. I’d still do it for free and offer my services on a pro bono basis to projects I find interesting. The story I tell myself hasn’t changed: I do not attribute my motivation to getting paid. I still atribute it to deeply enjoying what I do.
Geez, if I would get the equivalent of 150000$ a year for a non-dangerous, no-brain, hands-only job with regulated 40h weeks, I would take it instantely. I expect to be met by others with the high-status corresponding to that amount of money, of course.
I would drive to my job in a sports car. My whole equipment would be very professional, and I knew I would make a great contribution to mankind, since everybody hates shitty toilets and feels good on a clean one. Giving other people that feeling of luxury and that they really can relax in one of their daily most intimite moments, that’s just great.
It is one of those small daily things that really count.
And best of all, I would have all of my time to think about MY projects and things interesting to me, all my freetime and all my working time. There would be no overtime and no thinking all evening and before I go to bed, even while I brush my teeth: “Did I clean that one toilet well enough?”, because the very next day I could just clean it again.
I got this when I was barely 20. I remember a campus interview with a grey soul from IBM who asked me what I wanted after five years on the job. I said that I wanted to be working on stimulating projects that were worthwhile and taught me something, and working with interesting committed people.
He stared at me and said “what about a sports car or ski holidays?”
I said that I expected to be remunerated according to the value I brought to the company but none of those things determined which company I worked for.
He stared harder at me, and after a pause said “I think you should go live in a monastery”.
I get it, makes perfect sense – but I don’t relate completely.
I’m a designer and I make my living doing what I love. I still have passion for it 10 years later. I still get giddy with excitement when I design… I do personal projects, and I do client projects, and I’m equally excited by both. Of course, my biggest reward is when my client is happy with what I deliver. Client appreciation gives me more joy than money does, for sure. But getting paid hasn’t killed the passion in me yet. So I guess there are exceptions?
You have to remember, as you do in all posts on this site, as well as all matters “psychological.” When you make a statement like this (the article’s, not yours) it is based off of studies in which the majority (most of the time a LARGE majority) of subjects tested positive for X or whatever.
While it’s not YMMV, it’s close. Not every person is going to be turned off by being rewarded for something, Just most. There will always be exceptions, and It’s noted when he says, in the article:
Getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will __sometimes__ cause your love for the task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feelings.
But then you’re not motivated by the money as much as you are by the internal rewards. So you actually fit what this article describes. If you didn’t enjoy what you do and you were still motivated because of the money, that would be a different story.
Since you have passion for it and you already know who you want to be when you grow up, you are motivated internally and unlikely to give it up just because you’re getting paid.
that’s right
Hey people who love what you do for a living, the article isn’t claiming you aren’t experiencing what you are experiencing, it’s questioning the universal relevance and simplicity of the cliche. Enjoy being exceptions. :)
David, great post.
This is an issue that’s been getting more attention in the video game design world as well. There’s been a movement in the last few years towards designs that focus around offering the players rewards like points, badges, shiny magical swords, and so on.
But more recently we’ve seen a pushback from designers noting that while dangling baubles in front of people does add one kind of motivation, it may destroy another. It may even kill fulfillment. Especially in creative, open, freedom-driven games, motivations tend to make people laser-focus on a goal instead of experiencing the game in a less-directed, exploratory way.
People assume that wanting and liking are the same thing, but I’m starting to believe that they may be two totally separate circuits.
And when one is keyed on and the other isn’t, you can get “player’s remorse” – a feeling of emptiness after a long session of reward-driven play, when you realize that while you were motivated, you were never actually fulfilled.
There’s even a moral aspect to this idea. Is it okay to create a game that motivated players but doesn’t ever provide any enjoyment?
you mean like farmville?
Great post! One thing, though, I think at least in the beginning of your post “science” is a little over sold when what you are referring to is statistics. The reality is there should be more room for reasonable doubt and less hard sell on “this is fact”.
I often hear people out in the world saying, “But no one ever polled me,” like they were so astonishingly unique that no survey of the world could be complete without asking their opinion. And here I see a lot of people saying that these things (not just on this topic) don’t apply to them. Understanding your own motivations is difficult and sometimes crippling. But it’s necessary. If you’re wondering why this particular one doesn’t apply to you, ask yourself what your reward system is. Personally, I could give a rat’s about money, but I always have to know that I’m doing a good job. That is my reward. (Oh, and pun definitely intended.) I was rewarded quite well financially for a creative piece way back when, but that reward screwed up my motivations and actually wound up screwing up my life.
Let’s hope our gracious host doesn’t sell any copies of his book so he can keep on doing this work he and we so enjoy… Just kidding. I’m buying one, at the very least.
I’m a student at a music university, and the running story with a lot of students is the university has “destroyed their ability to play.” This didn’t make logical sense to me, but the overjustification effect seems to explain a lot of this behaviour.
I don’t mind admitting I’ve found it much easier to motivate myself to practice and I’m enjoying it more now I’ve decided I don’t want to become a pro muso.
Absolutely love this blog.
I can tell you are under 40 or on a defined benefits pension plan. I do like what I do but I worry every day that I will live past 100 and at 57, I cannot afford to take a 40 year vacation. So Yeds I am driven by money and this “security blanket” is not taken into account in your explanation. But I do understand a little better how to motivate my people, so – good
“Effectance”? “Effectance”??
I think the author makes some assumptions. It might not be that “you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feelings,” but that internal feelings are just a stronger motivator, period, in many cases than external rewards are.
In that sense, Skinner is still right. It’s just that what motivates people might not be money and awards as much as joy.
So, David, for some of us that still do not have a long-term job (i.e. College students), how would you suggest we look at jobs? Something that just gets the necessary funds for fun things or something that we can relate to and are passionate about? What kind of pay-scheme would you suggest we try to find when looking for a job? This is really a life-changing topic.
75.000 US Dollars a year: what a vague sum!
Is this net of taxes? Then its quite high.
Is this for every working person in the household? Then it’s very high!
Is it for the head of a standard family, say 4 persons? Then its low!
Is it for a retired person? It seems low if he was a big spender, high if he doesn’t spend at all.
is it for a single 30-40 year old? Then it seems a lot.
How vague!
Reminds me of the Motivation-Hygiene theory of Frederick Herzberg, and the writing of Peter Drucker on the subject. As someone who was moved into a management position and constantly struggles on how to motivate employees, the ideas here definitely hit home. Another fascinating read.
“Sometimes” is the key word.
We should all be so lucky to find a job that we like to do let alone love.
Hell, I write songs no one hears and I’m intrinsically burnt out from writing and recording them, I need external motivation (not necessarily monetary) to continue.
Go figure.
People out there always figure out on their own how to make someone fall in love with you. The reality is they always fail.
If you just figure out how to do it on your own, it is same as leaving your love life to the fate.
I’m a comic artist, illustrator, graphic designer and that’s what I’ve always been as a hobby, while I couldn’t live on it and had another job that was just to be able to say that I was employed and had a regular income. It was a job I hated, and did only the minimum required not to get in trouble.
Now I’m planning to make a living of my artist skills, and what stopped me so far was the fear that doing it for job would spoil the fun of it. So this article strikes a soft spot and these were words I needed to hear.
On the other hand there is an aspect that I don’t find addressed here, but I think was very remarkable in my experience.
Some five years ago I started doing some freelance illustration works for a publisher that I had always liked, up to having something akin to brand loyalty for them. So when they offered to have my illustrations featured in their books, I was thrilled. Notice that it was the first time for me of being paid for what I had always been doing for fun.
But more than that, I experienced a dramatic increase of skill in my techniques. Usually I would have been satisfied with drawing portraits with no background, but now I had a commissioner who asked me to draw very specific scenes.
I started drawing background in an accurate way, much more than I was used to do, and I became increasingly good at it. I am a harsh critic of my own artwork, and that realization could not escape me.
Now I am also starting to work as comic artist, and I had a chance to do some test pages for Marvel. First time that I ever draw comic pages, and I have a chance with Marvel. Whoa! I thought.
And that spurred yet another dramatic change. I became immediately bolder and better with perspectives and angles, because the comics industry requires that. While before I’d choose safer, one-point perspectives, now I do not refrain from three-point ones even when not requested to do it. And I enjoy the improvement immensely.
So I’m being paid for what I do, but that does not ruin my enjoyment of doing it because I enjoy the improvement that it is bringing to me. People ask me to draw things that I find difficult, and I see that as a challenge that I want to overcome.
Maybe that is another way to shortcircuit the overjustification effect. What do you think?
This is an interesting topic, and from what I have read the folks who have nailed the ‘science of happiness’, hands down, are whoever wrote the Upanishads! Their analysis of desire and happiness, and the conclusions they draw from them are far more subtle and perceptive than anything I’ve come across in Western psychology (let’s face it, they’ve had a few thousand years’ head start). That their insights are buried in ‘religious’ texts makes them a bit inaccessible, and easy to overlook. But the West has been, over the past 100 years or so, very gradually been noticing the wisdom of the East.
This research is out of date. The $75,000 figure was miscalculated based on a linear relationship with income. When log income was taken into account, the positive correlation between happiness and money continues indefinitely. The catch is that there is a deminishing marginal utility. You need more money at higher incomes to achieve the same increase in happiness as before. http://qn.som.yale.edu/content/economics-of-happiness
I’m completely speechless. You just blow my mind. All your articles are just amazing. Seriously, you are my hero.
Thanks for being so awesome and writing these awesome articles.
Paragraph 14, line 3-4: ‘your entire life.. ..fears’. Is there something (grammatically) wrong with that sentence? help me out here. Thanks!
This is reminiscent of Stuart Sutherland’s “Irrationality” (CH 8).. 1992, 2007
I have to call BS on this – I make between 200-225k/yr and for me, Red Lobster just doesn’t cut it. There are many fine things out there that 75 a year can’t buy, and if you’re really passionate about those things, it’s inadequate. For me, it’s cars and racing – to live in a big city comfortably with parking and a place well built enough that I can’t hear my neighbors farting, I need at least twice this supposed limit. And to make payments on my sports car, for track days and competitive racing with friends, things that I dearly love to do, that alone takes nearly half my annual income.
I would argue that if you’re an average person of average intelligence and no exotic or deep passions then 75k is probably okay, since you don’t really care about what you’re missing. But if you have something you really enjoy, be it food, flying, racing, travel, or even something as droll as golf, to really get into it you need more than a few hundred bucks left over each month. This goes doubly for people who live in expensive areas where property prices are artificially inflated, like in California.
It’s also a myth that a high paying job takes up all your time. In my industry, enterprise software, I work *less* than I did in the days when I made 70-100k as an IT chimp. Was I happy then? Not hugely, I had to put up with roommates and living an hour from work, my car wasn’t terribly fast and I couldn’t afford much else. Moving into the big city made that worse, to the point where I had to move out after threatening the company that owned my apartment with a lawsuit following a string of early morning disturbances I had a signed contract guaranteeing against. Not to say that paying more necessarily guarantees you won’t be woken up at 7AM by a jackhammer, but it certainly reduces the risk.
I could go on, but really, there are only so many first class seats on airplanes. If everything was equal, then nothing would be special, and I don’t want to live in a world like that.
Some ‘average’ folks of ‘average’ intellect for whom the contemporary equivalent of $75,000/year or less proved to be sufficiently “OK” with regards to the fulfilment of their ‘passions’ :
Benedict de Spinoza
Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Karl Marx
Antonio Gransci
Vincent van Gogh
Franz Kafka
Emily Dickinson
Enjoy your little cars and examine why it is you need to feel so supremely ‘special’.
I earn 49K a year. I think I’ve done OK. My house is paid off, my rental property is paid off, my truck is paid off, and I own a 31 acre farm, and that’s paid off too. I’m not unhappy. But dang I’d sure love to be earning 225K a year. I’d fix the farmhouse and get some help with my persimmon orchard, rather than buying 1st class airfares.Golf and sports cars? Yuck.
Wow. Just FYI, people, not *all* Californians who live in the city are as big of d-bags as this.
Ugh… did you really have to weasel in an advertisement for Apple products? Spoiled the whole article for me.
In other words one must be rich to be happy – the average yearly income in the US is about ~50 grand.
Agreed. I do what I love and was found success and acknowledgement more of an overbearing problem than anything else. I was just doing what I wanted to do- and people started noticing. Now I run a much smaller company, struggling in this economy, and I am more creative and happier than I have ever been. I’m somewhat thankful for the economic downturn.
Great piece. The paradox of prosperity, however, is that discontent increases with opportunities for acting on it.
A thoughtful post indeed! I, however, think you can mention that if people are rewarded for their competence, they will be less likely to try more difficult tasks than people rewarded for their efforts. Thus, psychologists suggest we praise children for completing an assignment because they were hard-working, not intelligent or they may lose the incentive to try harder assignments. Jonah Lehrer mentions this hypothesis in his book, How We Decide.
Oh, I forgot to mention that this is so because the students praised for their IQ fear their failure to complete the more difficult task will threaten others’ perceptions of them as smart, so they prefer to avert risk of failure than overcome it.
Thank you for this great piece.
This is incredible. I’m three months into a PhD, and I think I’ve already succumbed to the overjustification effect. Thank you for enlightening me.
amazing article, every sentence has a weight attached to it, and urged me to rethink… on so many aspects. thanks!
The studies only seem to contradict B.F. Skinner’s claims about rewards and punishments. This really doesn’t go anywhere towards “proving” the existence of free will or that we have a soul. I really think that free will is a barbaric philosophy anyway, one that encourages hurting people for the sake of hurting them instead of trying to understand what causes their behavior and fixing the problem. Thank God there is not free will in the universe, for that would be a dark universe indeed. I really don’t see how people who believe in free will go on living – I would kill myself in such circumstances.
Please explain, as I do not understand what you are saying.
I heard you this morning on the radio – and I welcomed almost all that you said. I just finished “Brain and Culture” by some guy at Yale and am very interested in the delusional power of modern day (?) social life. Do you know if there would have been the same issues with us as hunter-gatherers? Or are these tendencies originally minor and have been heightened by the Neolithic changes in our lives?
I think the conclusion of your article cannot match the conclusion of the study about kids drawing. There is a fundamental difference between being offered money to do something you love while you’re already doing it and when you’re not doing it. If they offered that awesome reward to kids who WOULDN’T have spent their free time drawing? Then it would be ok, it would be an incentive to start drawing and perhaps even begin to like drawing.
For people working a dead end job, being offered a job doing what they love IS better and they SHOULD take it. For people making enough money to afford to do what they love in their own time it ISN’T better. Fundamental difference.
For the first category it’s a no-brainer. For the second category it obviously depends on the specifics of their situation, but a decent high-paying job that leaves enough free time to fully enjoy your hobby shouldn’t be exchanged for chasing a dream. It’s greedy. You already have your cake and you’re eating it too. You don’t need to stuff your face in it, because it can get messy and you might get to a point where you feel like you don’t even love cake anymore.
demotivation… do not like… in style of “why should i do something, everything in this world comes to ashes…”
$75,000 is a lot of money. I’d come across that research before, but hadn’t seen an amount attached to it, just ‘more than enough to get by’. I certainly believe I could happily get by on substantially less than $75,000.
Oh, and I already have ‘a bed, running water and access to microwave popcorn’, but I still struggle to get by, and I’m a long way off $75,000.
I wanted to hate this. Then I spent 30 minutes reading it, absolutely rapt, nodding my head.
On between money, work and happiness: I couldn’t agree more. I have come to the conclusion, in just the few years since getting out of college and started trying to figure out this so-called real world around me, that it’s better to do what you like, and save what you love for yourself. If I love something, isn’t that payment enough? Why should I want to make money off it. I don’t believe in needing to love what you do, because I don’t believe what you do should define you. Work is but a means to an end.
The problem with asking people if they prefer money to sleep, is that the question was posed to Americans. And Americans are work-obsessed. Happiness must have a bottom line. And since America is a country where you are essentially on your own, you need to work to keep yourself out of the fiscal abyss. What little vacation is given to American workers goes often unused out of fear of looking “lazy” — now that is twisted.
Come to Germany, where I live, and people work hard (the wunderkind that is Germany’s economy is well known). But people live well. Work is not of chief importance. It’s what people do so they can do other things.
tl;dr
I heard your interview on CBC’s Q, and was hooked. The things you discuss on your blog and in your book are some of the really interesting things that I learned about in my undergraduate degree in Psych, but written in a very accessible and fun way.
I especially like this post (and it seems I’m not alone) because I am in a “figuring out what to do with my life” stage.
Thanks for doing what you, and keep up the great work. I hope that getting paid hasn’t soured you on it!
Not having a personal teleology for why you do things is equivalent to handing your free will and well-being to external (to oneself) forces to do with as circumstances allow. It’s moot whether we do indeed have free will or not. Since most if not all things we fill our heads with are second-order experiences, I find it absolutely essential to create your own meaning to ‘guide’ your behavior toward positive goals and happiness. Otherwise, the world is what happens to you when you’re not paying attention.
Love this post… As a writer, I find a great deal of Truth here. I look back at times when I was being paid for writing gigs that I found petty, or unrelated to things I love and find important, and it became mechanical; during these times I found myself questioning if I did indeed actually love to write, as I had previously believed. On the other hand, when writing about topics I value and believe are important and purposeful, getting paid for such an article is just an added bonus, and also helps me believe that the “purpose” that ignites and fuels me is also being “validated” by the external compensation…and the love for the writing continues on.
Leigh
http://www.aspiritfull.wordpress.com
My husband has been reading this book visciously and as of late, is reading it aloud to me. It’s truly amazing! To be honest, I want my own copy! So I can read it myself instead of just listening to it. This excerpt is fantastic. And generally explains the huge lack of motivation at my work place. We aren’t paid massively well, and we live in nj so things are very expensive and stressing. I am lucky enough to have a very easy financial circumstance so while I too want more money, a bigger place, and more apple products… I have quite enough really so I’m fine. Since reading this, I’ve realized that that’s probably why I actually like my job, despite the poor wages. More importantly, I have been given the understanding to why others do the bare minimum … And so thanks to these findings, I won’t be so bitchy about it. Cheers
“A person who makes, on average, $250,000 a year has no greater emotional well-being, no extra day-to-day happiness, than a person making $75,000 a year.”
True, but it doesn’t take time into account. The $250K person can stop working tomorrow, and have the $75K worth of security for a little over 3 more years. If they make $250K for 2 years, then their security extends to over 6 years.
We keep perceiving ourselves in the moment. Things don’t happen ‘in the moment’. We must plan for them because they will be happening in the upcoming moments, we have little influence over the current one.
I think it’s a smilar reaction when someone gives advice. There is a blurry boundary between changing your behaviour for a happier outcome, and feeling as if you are manipulating a situation. maybe it doesnt matter, and any authentic motivation is impossible. i dont know – any ideas ?
I am confused. What if “great work” to you is the career that you are interested in but you know you cannot get because you are not capable? What if loving what you do is in the career that you want and that is great work to you. That is, in the field of profession, you are interested in you are able to do “things”. So why is doing what you love a bad thing?
I think a lot of people are getting confused. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with getting paid for what you love to do, it’s the idea of the motivation. For instance, I love what I do, and I don’t really give a damn (or, for that matter, even know) how much I get paid. The pay has never been part of the mental reward structure. If you work at something you love, you have to divorce the extrinsic rewards and the intrinsic.
When I was about thirteen, I finished a chore, and my step-father handed me ten dollars. I asked, “Why didn’t you say thank you?” and he said, “Take the ten dollars. In the real world, that’s all the thanks you’re ever going to get.” I refused to believe the world was like that, and I’ve never let it be like that for me. So all of my value is in what I do. (And I always make it a point to say thank you to anyone I see doing a good job.)
Am I the one misreading this study?
What if wanting to be good at something is your motivation? When you know you are competent to pursue in the career you want or a task, you start to enjoy what you do because you have the skills to do whatever. Is that extrinsic?
No, I think that is intrinsic — your motivation is coming from your own perception of your own competence. I get a sense of soaring satisfaction when I play Moonlight Sonata because I always thought I was a crap pianist. I AM a crap pianist — a five year old could play better than me — but I get the joy of knowing that I’ve learned to play something and the satisfaction of playing it for my friends.
A lot of careers are like that too — at each new stage you demonstrate skills and competence and you learn as you go along, and that’s what gives people the satisfaction.
I think one of the reasons so many people in my field choose to work ridiculously long hours outside of what they are paid for is to “prove” to themselves (and everyone else) that they are doing the work because they love it. Unfortunately that then becomes the norm, and those few people who aren’t able or prepared to put long hours in are kind of sneered at behind their backs. Like they aren’t doing it for the “right” reasons. It becomes a bit of a pathetic cult, if you ask me.
It’s an interesting point about spontaneous reward becoming a greater symbol of success than financial reward. More and more people seem to be motivated specifically by the hope of winning certain awards in my field, and hitting certain career milestones to prove they are valued. I wonder if the perceived worth of those awards and milestones have mushroomed up everywhere BECAUSE of all those trite maxims about following your dreams etc. If the maxims went something like, “do what you love… even if you never get a scrap of recognition from anyone, anywhere, ever,” I think the uptake rate of certain degree courses and volunteer schemes would drop sharply.
That would be an interesting social experiment, right there.