In which Wolf discusses learning who he was, even as a little kid. Watch this episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/5LaH8fW6snc
This morning after breakfast as I was taking my handful of supplement capsules, I thought back to a much earlier time of my life...
When I was 7 or 8 years old, I came down with a urinary tract infection and my parents took me to see a doctor, who prescribed an oral antibiotic. We got home with the medication, and then my mother faced a parenting problem that was completely new to her: how to get her first-born son to take his first pill.
All I knew is that it really hurt to pee, and I wanted it to stop. I believed my mom when she told me that taking this pill a few times would make it better, but I couldn't bring myself to actually swallow the pill. The first problem was that I really didn't know how. Of course to a kid at my age eating and drinking were second nature, and like walking and talking, we learn how to do these things before we even develop a mental theory of what it means to "learn" a new skill.
But taking a pill? That's not eating (you don't chew it first) or drinking (it's not a liquid, it's a frickin' solid object) so even though I didn't have the words for it back then, I realize now that my instinctual fear of choking was being triggered by the very idea. It may have been just a small pill, but to my young mind it might as well have been a brick.
This led to an hours long struggle session where my mom tried everything she could think of to get me to swallow the damn pill. Every time I'd get the pill and some water into my mouth I'd start gagging and cough it up. She tried reasoning with me by pointing out how tiny it was. She tried instructing me to just put it far back on my tongue and pretend it wasn't there while I took a big drink. And she warned me that my pain wasn't going to end until I managed to get it down... nothing worked, and we were both miserable. And to me, the thought of taking not just this one pill but the whole bottle of pills over the next week was... well, I couldn't even imagine it.
I remember that later that day we wound up at my grandma's house, with me sitting dejectedly at the dining table and my mom at her wits' end, explaining to her mom how I just wouldn't (I had pretty much convinced her I couldn't) take my medicine.
My grandma left the room and came back with her purse. I watched as she opened it and then withdrew a $10 bill, which she laid on the table in front of me.
"If you take that pill, dear," she said, "you can have that ten dollars."
At that age pocket money was hard to come by. I think my dad might have been giving me a $1 per week allowance or something like that. Nobody had to explain to me that $10 was, like 10 weeks worth of allowance all at once.
Suddenly a spark lit up within me that I hadn't felt before. Taking the pill was still just as scary, especially given that I had already tried and failed to take it so many times. But there was also something new: the thought of what I could do with ten whole dollars.
My mother, completely picking up on grandma's tactic, said, "Honey, if you take the pill, I'll take you right to the toy store afterward and you can spend your ten dollars on something you'd really like today."
I suddenly found myself filled with a new resolve. It took a couple more tries, but when it finally went down my first thought was, "Oh, it happened!" The act of successfully taking that first pill was a moment of revelation in my young life. Not just that I could now take the rest of my medication (which I was then able to do with no further inducement) but it was the beginning of a pattern of motivation that I've seen echo throughout my entire life.
For some people, their primary motivators are outcomes they want to avoid. They work because they want to avoid being poor. They eat moderately because they want to avoid getting fat. They stay in relatively unhappy relationships because they want to avoid being alone. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that approach, and everyone does at least some things out of avoidant motives.
But it turns out that people like me are motivated not as much by what they want to move away from as much as they are by what they want to move toward. My younger self wanted that ten dollars more than I wanted to avoid swallowing that pill. I still didn't want to swallow it, but I did, and I got the ten dollars. After that, I still didn't like swallowing pills, but it stopped being such a big deal.
The distinction between being motivated by a consequence we want to move away from and being motivated by rewards we want to move toward is important, and it's important to know which category is more of a motivator for you.
But I actually want to talk about a different, and I think even more important way of thinking about motivators. To do that, I'm going to tell a bit more of my childhood story.
So with the ten dollars in my pocket, my mom made good on her promise and took me to the toy store. I probably browsed for at least an hour, but had a hard time coming up with something that I really wanted that was also within my budget. Near the front of the store was a rack of books containing puzzles, games, and activities. I spent quite awhile looking through a large book of beautifully artistically drawn mazes, but when I realized it was something closer to $12 dollars, I put it back and continued my search.
I knew my mom was getting impatient when, for the third time, she asked me whether I'd found anything. No sooner than I had mentioned the book, explaining that it was out of my price range, then she said, "Oh, is that all? I'll add the difference." I walked out with my book of mazes in my hot little hands.
At that age, solving mazes was a real joy for me. I particularly enjoyed mazes that weren't just a bunch of walls, but that had special rules, like ones that had fewer walls, suggesting multiple paths through, but that also had specific points you had to pass in order. I spent many enjoyable hours with that book, and nobody had to cajole me to spend time doing it or telling me I should learn how to do it.
And this gets me to the real point of this video: the most important distinction between kinds of motivation. Learning to take my medicine was an example of motivation that came from outside of me, what's called extrinsic motivation. I wanted to move away from being sick and toward being healthy again. I wanted to move away from exasperating my mom and toward pleasing her. I wanted to move away from gagging on that pill. I wanted to move toward the ten dollars my grandma offered. All these motivations were coming from outside of me. And, on balance they were enough for me to learn to take pills, and that's where my train of thought started this morning as I was taking my supplements.
But the motivation for my seven year-old self to do mazes? That came from inside of me. When I was eleven I began learning how to program computers, and nobody had to tell me I ought to do it to have a good career, I realized that for me, doing it was just fun for its own sake. When I was fourteen I and getting interested in girls (an extrinsic motivation), I began to care about my body and started to life weights. But I discovered that for me it wasn't simply about looking good to others but that the challenge of weightlifting was also a powerful intrinsic motivation for me. In all these activities intrinsic motivation was present: I found joy in doing the thing itself. And it happened one of them, using technology to solve problems, was also a viable career for me.
Over my life I've witnessed that few people seem to have that deep creative spark of passion in their lives. Seeing that has, I think, kept me from taking my own creative spark for granted. I often find myself wishing that I could bottle it and give it to other people, especially young people who feel directionless. If you're watching this video and you're in that category, please don't give up! Find that spark within you and start finding ways to fan that flame and put it to good use.
With all that said, I want to give you one trick I use all the time to excel at any task, professional or personal, and especially tasks that at first glance might seem boring, tedious, and same-old.
Here's the trick: when thinking about a potentially dull task ahead, ask yourself, "What can I learn that's new or interesting as I do this?" The reason why this is so important is that if you can wake up even a little of your intrinsic motivators and bring them to an otherwise extrinsically motivated task, I guarantee you will perform at a much higher level. I'm always asking myself, "What is there to learn here?" and with a little creativity, I find myself multiplying my existing experience and mastery of a topic with the excitement of lifelong learning. It doesn't matter whether I'm writing an iPhone app or cleaning out the garage: there's always something I can learn or deepen my mastery on, so I focus on that.
I started learning when I was quite young that I am most energized and productive when I have something to move toward, and when I'm activating my spark of intrinsic motivation.
What's your natural motivational style? Let me know in the comments, and if you’re interested in raising the bar on your own thinking and helping the world become a more thoughtful place, please consider subscribing to my channel.
See you tomorrow!