What is motivation?

Without defined motivation your brain won’t be thrilled to spend any amount of effort on the task you defined. And sometimes this part is overlooked, so you might not even recognize why it is so hard to bring yourself to complete a task. You will want to do literally anything else but what you set out to do. Well, the good news is that your brain is not broken, it’s actually doing you a favor avoiding tasks that don’t have this motivational foundation defined.

So what does it mean? This is my rendition of basically any action that humans take. It’s simplistic, but I think it works for now:

  1. Needproblem
  2. Emotionthat signals that you have this need
  3. Ideashow to satisfy the need
  4. Actionsspending resources
  5. Rewardneed satisfied, emotion dealt with

But none of these individual components is motivation. I don’t want to jump into examples here, maybe in a more detailed discussion. One thing though I wanted to point out, because it feels like people make this mistake quite often — reward is not motivation. If it worked like that, I’d just need to imagine something of great value to immediately start working to get it. But this doesn’t happen.

Here’s where we get to motivation:

  1. Need
  1. Emotion
  1. Idea 1
  2. Idea 2
  3. Idea 3
  1. Action 1
  2. Action 2
  3. Action 3
  1. Reward 1
  2. Reward 2
  3. Reward 3

You can come up with multiple ways of solving a need that will require various types and amounts of effort. Your natural filter picks the path that looks like the best deal. And the best deal is usually the most reasonable amount of effort to get a good enough reward.

Motivation is a compromise between potential reward and the effort needed to get it. It’s our innate balancing mechanism that makes sure we don’t pursue unachievable goals. It’s the filter that decides which ideas are bad and removes them from our field of attention.

Compromise is achieved by me (I don’t really want to spend my resources) arguing with me (I want the reward to answer my need) for the greater good (happiness, but ultimately survival, that’s a whole different can of worms that I’ll open in some other place). I like to call those 2 sides of me the employee and the employer. These guys need to talk to each other and get to a solution that works for both.

“Can you please do this? Because I decided I want this”

Effort

employee

Reward

employer

“Can you explain why? Because I don't think it's worth the effort”

The ultimate goal is survival for both of them, but they understand it differently — the employer comes up with ideas and wants to act upon them, the employee does the actual work so they need to be convinced that it’s the right path, because the wrong one could have potentially killed you, at least until modern civilization emerged.

Look, it’s a bit too much. I’ll go deeper into this model in You decide and you do.

The only way the conversation happens is if both sides are talking and listening to each other, while being nice to each other. The employer needs to find a way to explain to the employee why their idea is worth doing. Remember the famous Gollum scene? Kind of like that, but without verbal abuse :)

So what? I just don’t want to do it

Yes, because you probably picked the path (Idea—Action—Reward) without understanding why it is better than any other option or even doing nothing at all.

What can you do to find motivation:

  1. Talk to yourself and explain why you think this is worth your effort and how it benefits everyone (both of you). Imagine you’re talking to a child: explain everything in simple terms, be caring and attentive to their reactions. Talk through the solution step by step. State what realistically could happen if the need is not satisfied. Be nice, be honest, be patient. Don’t force it, don’t exaggerate the risks, don’t blackmail or manipulate. After all, what kind of monster blackmails a child?!
  2. Still no? Try to spot what part of the plan provokes an unpleasant emotional response. This is your inner child reacting to something scary or unpleasant. Ask them what they like and dislike about your idea. As they are responsible for actually doing the task, they surely have things they enjoy doing and things they don’t. Highlighting enjoyable parts might convince them; on the other hand, figuring out what feels bad is valuable information that could be used to reinvent some approaches, switch to a different idea or just talk about it again.
  3. Still no? Fall back on other ideas, think outside the box, offer more solutions, go through upsides and downsides until you feel that you found a good compromise between effort and reward. If you have done the exercise of breaking down the task into steps as described in Make complex tasks look trivial you can work out alternatives and change the steps directly in the flowchart.