The term motivation has been misunderstood by many people. When we are asked what motivates us to do a certain thing or behave a certain way, most of us would come up with a common answer: a reward. To be more specific, they would think of money. Money is extremely important to all of us; to most people, surviving is hard without money. This is why we come to the conclusion that money can get us "motivated". However, I think that a very strong desire to accomplish something or behave a certain way (getting an intrinsic reward) would be the main motivator, not money (an extrinsic reward).
The theory that money or a reward leads to motivation has been tested and proven wrong in a video we watched on Wednesday. In the video, there was an experiment; people were asked to perform tasks with three levels of difficulty--easy, medium, and hard--, with cash as a reward. The better you performed on a task, the more money you would get. It turned out that as long as the task involved mechanical skills (physical tasks), the bonuses worked as expected. The higher pay you got, the better you performed overall. On the other hand, if a task involved even a little bit of thinking, it was the exact opposite. The larger the reward, the poorer the performance. This sort of behavior wasn't an occasional one either; the experiment was tested many times again, with many different types of people, yet the results remained the same. Higher incentives led to poorer performance. So it turned out that money wasn't the main motivator in this case. Which begged this question: what is a good motivator?
Later in the video, we found that the best way of motivation is to be self-directed. In other words, to do something independently, without a certain set of rules to follow. For example, if you truly liked doing something, you wouldn't do it for a reward; you would do it for your own satisfaction, for pure enjoyment. Science showed that there were three factors leading to better performance as well as personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Many people who are constantly motivated to do things are motivated simply because of these three things, not because of money or laptops or getting grounded or any type of reward or punishment.
Of course, Nelson Mandela is a prime example of self-directed motivation. Mandela fought for what he believed wasn't fair and wasn't right. He fought for a dream--that blacks and whites would be treated as equals--he'd had ever since he was young, and kept fighting for that dream until the day he died; not even twenty-seven years of his life wasted within prison walls was enough to stop him from achieving that. And even when Mandela and failed more than once, he did not give up; instead, he found a new way to approach the problem. The point is that Mandela's motivation was not based on a reward; when he was fighting against the apartheid, he was not doing it because he knew there would be a cash prize at the end of it. Mandela's goal was to fight injustice, and make life in South Africa fair for everyone--not just for blacks, but whites as well. He was motivated by himself, and his beliefs to make South Africa a better place. Nelson Mandela, along with the results of many experiments, can further prove the fact that rewards don't have everything to do with motivation. It's the person itself, and only the person itself and his or her beliefs, that are the main motivators.
--Alice
(Definition credit to Google.)
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