When we talk about finding a meaningful career or hitting our long-term goals, we often think about the results of our actions, yet skim over what actually gets us through each day.
Motivation is a seemingly simple idea that gets complex once you really start to explore it. Some days we wake up with an abundance of it. Others, just getting out of bed can feel like trying to hold onto a fistful of sand.
But in order to meet our goals we can’t be at the whims of motivation. We need to understand what gives us our get-up-and-go and make sure we build our life and career around whatever that is.
And while there is tons of fantastic research available on just what motivates us (which we’ll cover as well), sometimes it’s best to just go to the source. To help us start the new year off on the right foot, we surveyed hundreds of RescueTimeusers about what drives them to do their best every single day.
We all have different levels of motivation based on the work we do and our values. But after surveying our users, it’s clear that motivation is something many people have issues with. On a scale of 1–10, people rated their motivation to do daily work as a 6. Interestingly, only 3 people said they were 100% motivated every single day.
When you think of motivation, you probably think of rewards. If you’re rewarded for the work you do, you’ll want to do more of it. However, our survey showed that it isn’t that simple.
When asked what motivates them the most about their work, 32% of our respondents said they were motivated by the freedom to work how and where they want versus 9.5% who said it was their salary and other perks.
However, when asked point blank how much of a motivating factor their salary was, 45% of people said it was significant, 41% said somewhat and 3% said it was the only thing that mattered. So, while we’d like to think our salary doesn’t motivate us, we can’t say it isn’t an important factor.
Motivation is often easier to uncover when we think back on why we worked so hard. When we asked users to reflect on a recent goal they accomplished, 50% of people said overcoming a challenge was the most rewarding part while another 32% said it was learning something new.
That leaves only 18% of people who felt that recognition or some sort of prize or award was most rewarding.
It’s clear from our survey that we don’t have a great grasp on what truly motivates us at work. The problem is that without knowing this we’re prone to feeling disillusioned and stressed and can even become burnt out.
So, using our survey results as a starting point, let’s dive into the bigger pool of motivation research to understand just what keeps us motivated and learn how to recognize what is (and isn’t) motivating us in our own lives.
For years, the classic approach to motivation looked something like this:
- If you are rewarded for something, you’ll be motivated to do more of it
- If you are punished, you’ll want to do less
While that might seem to make logical sense, unfortunately we’re not always the most logical creatures.
Studies have consistently found we aren’t motivated by reward (or punishment) alone. But why is that? If we’re rewarded for an action, we’ll want more of that reward and continue to do it, right?
“Desire hath no rest,” wrote Robert Burton in 1621 quoting St. Augustine. And if you’ve ever experienced a bit of good luck or some level of success you know what he was talking about.
You get a raise or a smart investment pays off and you feel on top of the world. But what happens next? Pretty quickly, that glow starts to fade. And before you know it, you’re back where you started.
Psychologists call this the Hedonic Treadmill — the phenomenon where the more success we find, the harder we have to “run” just to keep up with it. We adapt to change quickly, and those temporary boosts of motivation and happiness from a good event are just that: temporary.
Sure, this might be true for small rewards, but what about large ones?
Unfortunately, size doesn’t matter in this case. Studies have even shown that a higher reward actually decreases our motivation when it comes to tasks that take mental energy, like writing, coding, designing, or conceptual thinking.
Not only does the increased motivation from a reward not last, but the reward itself can actually cause us to lose motivation. (Remember what I said before about us not being logical creatures?)
You can’t simply rely on rewards to keep you motivated. While we all love to be recognized for our work, these incremental increases aren’t enough to sustain our motivation.
This isn’t to say that money isn’t a motivator, because it is. But only to a point.
If you don’t pay someone enough to cover their basic needs, that paycheck becomes a pretty big motivator. But once money is off the table and our needs are being met, our relationship with motivation changes drastically.
The science backs this up, too. Studies consistently show that we’re driven to do our work by intrinsic motivation — the internal drivers or values that we connect with. For example, if you have a deep connection to helping others, you probably won’t be intrinsically motivated to work 100-hour weeks as an investment banker. Rather, your purpose would most likely motivate you to do charity or social work.
What makes intrinsic motivation so difficult to understand is that it’s often at odds with how other people (and jobs in general) measure success. Money, prestige, status — most people see these as symbols of growth. So how do we discover what’s beneath those rewards and what truly keeps us motivated?
In his book, Drive, author Daniel Pink defined the 3 basic qualities of intrinsic motivators share:
Autonomy: Our desire to be self directed. When we have the ability to choose what kind of work we do or we know that there is openness to change and growth in our environment it increases engagement over compliance.
Mastery: Our urge to get better at skills. Money is a fantastic motivator when the tasks are repeatable. But once some level of conceptual thinking is involved, it’s important we feel motivated to get better at it.
Purpose: Our desire to do something that has meaning and is important. Going back to the opening conversation, being “just in it for the money” rarely gives us this meaning. This goes for businesses as well. Not only will employees with low levels of purpose be unmotivated, but businesses that only focus on profits without valuing their own larger purpose will end up with poor customer service and unhappy employees.
