Motivation

        What motivates you to do things? Is it a reward? Self-entertainment? Are you willing to do what you want without a reward because of how much you enjoy what you do? We live in a world where money is something rather important. You can’t do much without money. So yes, people would believe our motivation in life is simply money. In Canada, we study hard to get into good schools, to get a good job, to get money. That’s what we believe though.

          People did a research: they would give you a task to do, and depending on how well you finish your task, you’ll be given a certain amount of money. If you finished it well, you’d receive a fair amount of money. If you did it a bit better than ‘well’ you’d receive a small amount more than a fair amount. If you finished exceptionally well, you’d receive the highest level of reward.

           The results? When people were given straight forward, mechanical tasks, they did pretty well. But once they had to problem solve, to think, they did really poor-even when the rewards were higher. We were always taught that the higher the pay, the better we do. So people suggested that maybe the location is the problem. Maybe the money amount here (USA) isn’t the high enough to make people think more. So then they took the research to somewhere else, where the money would be more valuable. The results were the same. People who were offered the higher amount of money did the worse while people who were offered little or medium wage did better.

         Probably the best way of motivation is when you’re self-directed, when no one is giving you a set of rules to follow. I agreed with that statement. No one likes being bossed around with a set of rules to follow, they’d probably prefer letting themselves choose what they’d like to do, which in most cases what they enjoy. If I was given something to do, and I disliked it, I’d probably just skim it, not putting effort or little effort at all, no matter how much the reward was. If I got a chance to do what I enjoyed, I’d probably give more attention and care on whatever I was doing, even if the reward was little or nothing. I still got to do what I wanted to do, and that makes me a happier person. I would definitely choose happiness over money. You can’t force yourself to do something you don’t like.