Losing motivation - FunFunFunction #25

Key Takeaways

good Monday morning I am mpj and this is fun fun function I need to be honest with you today I started out doing this episode as an episode about uh the bind function in JavaScript because you know I figured that I would look at a keyword Tool uh see what people search for on YouTube and uh see what what kind of episode would be popular and bind that's up there right in the heavens so bind would most definitely bring in a lot of new viewers so I sat down to do it you know that feeling that you got in um in school when you had to do some homework you know you felt like oh I need to do this I have to do this but I really don't want to I would much rather play Xbox that feeling and that's super dumb because these videos I make these on my spare time nobody is forcing me to do them so it's really a bizarre thing to feel but somehow just optimizing after other people's needs just the simple Act of doing that would just mess up my motivation it would it would just mess up something in my so I just went screw it I'm just going to go out and I'm going to make a video about this instead the loss of motivation that you feel for a otherwise uh pleasurable activity when an external incentive is introduced I want to talk about this because I think that a lot of people will recognize themselves in this feeling probably it's something that you felt when you got your first programming job programming which was previously something that you did on your spare time because you liked it uh is now something that you get paid to do and somehow that makes you less motivated to do it that is fascinating to me this is of course not a new phenomenon this is something that uh the author Daniel pink has basically built his entire career talking about pink talks about uh three pillars of motivation autonomy Mastery and purpose purpose is what it sounds like uh it's that you need to feel like there is a bigger uh bigger plan find what you're doing and that there is that it is a worthwhile thing to do in the grand scheme of things Mastery means that the task that you are doing needs to be uh in skill level it needs to be at the edge of your abilities but not outside of them uh and also not too far within your abilities because if it's too far outside you will be stressed out and you will feel like oh you you won't get a sense of selfefficacy which I will talk about later uh that you you don't get that feeling of I can do this and the opposite of that is if the activity feels too much within your abilities uh you will feel bored because it's not challenging you but the first one autonomy is the one that I want to spend the most time on today because I think it's the it's definitely the trickiest one to pull off you probably felt this when um when there is a task that you feel like this should be done I want to do this nobody's telling you to do it nobody's rewarding you to do it but you want to do it and you do it and it feels so good and you are so energetic and it just flows for you and that is the power of autonomy oh I need to climb this there's a there's a fence but there's a hole in the fence over there Mother where am I oh it's a quarry I've never been here quaries are so cool one of the components of flow is that you feel a sense of control and a sense of agency over the task that you're performing which is the same thing that uh Pink talks about when he talks about autonomy and to me all that makes sense but it it's also very tricky for me to transport that into any kind of professional situation because to me the very definition of a job is that you're doing something that other people need and they are willing to pay you for that how how can this be reconciled with autonomy I think about this subject a lot and it frustrates me to no end see this this is cool there's been a lot of research on this uh in Psychology over the years uh and uh there's actually a theory around this called motivation crowding Theory and it deals with situations like uh the one I'm experiencing today or the situation that you would experience if you say say that you were at uh your partner's uh uh parents house and you've just had a nice dinner that that they offered you and you say that wow this was such a nice dinner thank you so much I would like to offer you $1100 for this dinner even though you're now offering more than just the thanks you have just made yourself a really weird uh person and you have even somehow cheapened the dinner right and this is what motivation crowding Theory deals with there is actually a very specific term for this whole situation and it's called the over justification effect it's when you add a reward to a previously un rewarded activity and that causes the motivation to shift from inner motivation to Outer motivation which then undermines the inner motivation but this doesn't tell the whole story because this doesn't always happen I've done tons of work where I've been rewarded handsomely for them but I've I've still felt in control and autonomous and have been highly motivated while doing them so why does this happen in some cases and in some cases not there are of course some other clever chaps that have uh made another theory about this and it's called the cognitive evaluation Theory and that theory attempts to explain when outer motivation will destroy inner motivation and when it will not so what cognitive evaluation what cognitive evaluation Theory suggests is that there are two factors at play when uh when you're conf conf fronted with an external motivator and how that will affect your motivation and those two factors are our need to feel competent and our need to feel in control let's first talk about our need to feel competent I mentioned selfefficacy earlier and self-efficacy is uh the the feeling that I am capable of this you judge yourself on your capabilities and you determine that this this given task that's with within your abilities self-efficacy is a more specific term than self-confidence which is a more General concept for instance I I don't wear this hat a lot because uh I don't feel self-confident enough to actually pull it off I feel like I feel like a steampunk douchebag however oh my God it's the wind is the wind is picking up my self-efficacy on the other hand that's more specific my self-efficacy around uh solving a complicated programming problem that might be very high I I feel like I could do that I don't know if anybody is here you know I can't see any people and it's Sunday I'm recording these on Sundays by the way uh yet like the things these things they make all kinds of noise all the time that thing over there that's just it's a scary place I wouldn't want to walk here at night but this this is so cool this is so big and your self-efficacy might very well be helped if somebody offers you a lot of money to do something because that you you could interpret that as somebody wow this person really believes I can do this or if you're about to give a talk and a lot of people uh sign up for your talk and it seems like wow they they signed up for my talk they believe in my abilities and that might also cause me to believe in my own abilities my selfefficacy increases and my motivation increases but my need to feel competent is not the only thing that is at play here remember it's also my need to feel in control humans don't like oh my God just look at this building it is so cool and so scary and just have a look at this window here this is where they keep the serial killer humans don't like to feel like we're being controlled maybe it's some evolutionary thing I don't know but we don't we don't like feeling like we're being controlled like we're being coerced into something it's starting to rain a little I'm going to find a roof to stand under so when you're in a situation where somebody offers you a lot of money to do something or if a lot of people sign up for your talk or if a lot of people star your open SCE project on GitHub that might make you feel more competent and admired and that might raise your self-efficacy but it might also trigger that part of your brain that don't like to be controlled if it does it will feel like all of this money or this attention is being somehow used to control you it's pressuring you to do something and then you will not feel motivated Jesus it's really starting to pour down the annoying part is that I don't know in practice how to not trigger the fear of being controlled whenever I get confronted with an external incentive whenever money or deadlines or uh uh view counts or uh likes get involved I tend to like my motivation just tends to go out the window and as lack good tooling to deal with this do you recognize yourself in this at all what is this what was this even useful maybe this is just me and some people writing research papers but if you do recognize yourself have you found some way of dealing with this if so please write a comment down below because I really would like to know that is it for this episode of fun fun function I release these every week on Monday morning 0800 GMT if you like this episode you should watch that one uh or if you don't want to wait that long you could check out an episode another episode here I am going to push through the rain now I am mpj this is fun fun function until next Monday morning stay curious what they have a laboratory really