Motivation. What is it, exactly?

If you take a moment to ask, literally everyone has an opinion about motivation.  People usually start with some high-level concept of moral energy, a well of decision-making that sustains us as we do something that maybe we don’t really want to do.  If you ask the next question, what does it actually look like, what are the tactics, the conversation frequently turns to some aspect of social accountability or gamification. Meet you at the gym tomorrow at nine, or win some points or log on to keep the streak going.

I think the truth about motivation is difficult to grasp.  It is a profoundly complex soup of brain chemistry that aggregates incentives from many different vectors and subsequently turns them into behaviors.  The critical question that we need to answer is how that process actually works.  What triggers the process? How can we gain mastery over our own motivations?  Do we have to submit ourselves to 7 years of psychoanalysis to reveal our true motivations and gain some level of control over our actions, or are there other strategies out there that might actually be helpful?  One thing is for sure: the “just try harder” strategy is going to fail for most of us.  Some really smart people are working on this problem, most notably BJ Fogg at Stanford, Angela Duckworth at Penn, and many others, but obviously, as a group, we haven’t made very much progress.  To wit, fewer than 75% of Americans get a reasonable amount of exercise.  

Being precise about what we are trying to influence may be the most helpful first step, so let’s start with a simple taxonomy of motivation’s function in our daily life.  When we do something, one of two things is happening:  either we’re using a heuristic that shortcuts any real intention and we take relatively unconscious action in the world, or we are making a conscious decision that will benefit us in one way or another.  We can influence the first process just by surfacing the decision and making it a conscious process.  Grabbing a soda?  Take a couple of seconds before you grab the usual sugar-filled soda, and you can change a lot of behaviors.  This is a rich vein to mine for attention-depleted humans, and we’ll spend a lot of time over the next few months exploring this aspect of motivational change. The second process, where we take thoughtful action, offers a critical clue about what motivation really boils down to. 

To understand what’s going on with agency, we need to have a brief framework of how humans’ consciousness is structured, and we are super fortunate that we can lean on Max Bennet’s very useful book A Brief History of Intelligence.  Bennet makes a compelling case, standing on the shoulders of several centuries of thought and research, that what gives us a sense of agency is our ability to construct a narrative within our brains about our past, present, and future selves.  This is the substantial differentiator between us and our very near neighbors in the animal kingdom.  Creative agency, the single biggest differentiator between humans and the rest of the living world, relies on an ability to abstract the world and reconstruct not just one version but many versions of it in our own minds.  From a motivational perspective, the keyword here is narrative.  We don’t make decisions about our current body and blood, or the conditions we’re actually facing in the world; we make decisions to affect the story we tell ourselves.  If you skip that key step in understanding, you’re going to miss the mark every time you try to motivate someone.  

Case in point:  every single person who buys a piece of exercise equipment knows they should use it.  That’s why they are buying it.  They bring it home, then put it together, and then they hide it in the basement or use it to dry their clothes on Saturday.  They bought the exercise bike to support the idea they have in their head:  I’m someone who exercises!  I’m fit, I have some proof, a stationary bike that I bought.  But that story doesn’t extend the last mile into action, and that’s where we have a sliver of an opportunity.  Building motivation doesn’t mean hammering on the truth; everyone knows that they should exercise every day.  We need to help people to do what every great coach has done from the beginning of time.  To motivate, the only real pathway is to appeal to the idea we have of ourselves.