There’s an outbreak of interest in motivation.

It sounds like a truism, baldly stated:  motivation is everything for everything.  Of course it is. Without motivation, no one would get out of bed in the morning, let alone show up for a workout or learn a new skill.  The fact that motivation is everything for everything isn’t news.  

What is remarkable is just how deeply misunderstood motivation remains.  Motivation occupies a space in our psyche just next door to how we think about God and morality. Most of the outcomes in our lives flow directly from our motivations, but as a species, we’re loath to dig in too deeply into what drives us, possibly for fear of what we might not find.  There’s a paradox at the heart of the state we find ourselves in: our ability to manage our motivations is what defines our ability to accumulate value in the world, but as a group, we’re unwilling to examine the mechanisms that drive our behaviors. This creates a lot of problems for virtually everyone on the planet. 

So why don’t we understand how it all works?  Surely if we had any sense at all as a species, we would have already solved the motivational puzzle.  If we could successfully motivate ourselves, we would all speak four languages, get to bed on time, and exercise daily.  Obesity would be obsolete, and the negative impact of most metabolic diseases would be radically curtailed, right?  

There have been some interesting transformations to our understanding of motivation over the past century.  Psychoanalysis opened the door to the subconscious, giving us a pathway to relocate motivation to that part of the psyche that isn’t readily accessible.  More recently, social determinism has opened up the aperture on Freud’s model, dislocating much of our individual responsibility to societal forces that are deterministic to the outcomes in our lives.  

All that said, especially in the United States we remain big fans of pure individual motivation as evidence that we stand next to godliness. We credit our heroes, whether they be Michael Jordan or Simone Biles or Taylor Swift, with preternatural motivation that elevates their talents to deserved superstardom.  The facts on the ground, however, are deeply contradictory to the myth-making we engage in around motivation and behavior.  Each of us has a deep well of motivation that is affected by dozens of factors, and if we can start to untangle them, we can build a pathway to a healthier, more satisfying life.  

As a career CEO and a former National Team Coach, I think the most highly leveraged area to invest in is an attempt to build effective motivational tools that are accessible to everyone. Behavioral scientists are studying not just the brain science of short- and long-term rewards but also the impact of intrinsic and extrinsic inputs that generate action.  We’re entering a golden age (or a dystopian hell? it remains to be seen …) of machine learning, and we can use the remarkable ability of LLMs to manage the complexity of motivation on an individual level for the first time ever.  It’s an exciting moment as a species, and I feel incredibly lucky to be on the front line of an effort that has almost infinite potential to help people achieve true congruence between our sense of self, our values and our actions.