Starting in the early 1970s, psychologist Edward Deci became intrigued by a simple question. What motivates people to do hard things?
This was a theme that had fascinated him since the very beginning of his career. Just one year after completing his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 1970, he published an influential paper in which he asked people to solve a puzzle called the Soma cube (a little like a Rubik’s Cube). He found that those who were offered a financial reward for solving the puzzle were, weirdly, less likely to enjoy the task and were more likely to give up solving the puzzle after the reward was removed, compared to those who weren’t offered any money at all.
The material reward seemed to make people less engaged with a task, not more. This led Deci to conclude that the offer of a material reward can, peculiarly, decrease motivation.
When, in 1977, Deci met another young psychologist, Richard Ryan, the pair embarked on a professional relationship that would transform how the world thinks about motivation. Over the next 20 years, Ryan and Deci developed a completely new way of thinking about why we do hard things. Their contribution culminated in 1981 with their statement of “self-determination theory.”
Until that point, most scientists had thought that motivation was mainly driven by incentives like rewards and punishments. But Deci and Ryan showed otherwise.
They encouraged readers to see motivation falling on a spectrum, with “extrinsic” at one end and “intrinsic” at the other. Intrinsic motivation comes from the inside: driven by self-fulfilment, curiosity and a genuine desire to learn. Extrinsic motivation comes from the outside: driven by pay rises, material rewards and social approval. But these forms of motivation were not equal. According to self-determination theory, intrinsic motivation is substantially more powerful than extrinsic motivation. Lasting motivation comes from within.
But that wasn’t where Deci and Ryan’s theory ended. Because they also showed that intrinsic motivation is something that can be built up. As early as the 1980s, they were demonstrating that intrinsic motivation can be enhanced by a handful of forces, chief among them our sense of “autonomy”. In layperson’s terms, that’s a sense of ownership. And it’s our final contributor to the sense of power that energises us and our work.
Deci and Ryan argued that when people feel they have power over their own actions, they’re much more likely to be intrinsically motivated to engage in them. That’s why the Soma cube experiment found that monetary rewards reduce people’s motivation. They don’t feel like they fully “own” the task – but that they’re undertaking it for some external reward. Their sense of control declines, and so does their sense of motivation.
This rings true in our own lives. Our need for control is why we hate being micromanaged by our bosses and our parents. Our need for control is why we love to decorate our bedrooms when we’re kids (or power design our homes as adults). And when our control over our lives is taken away – if we end up in prison, or shackled to a job we don’t enjoy – it can have disastrous consequences for our physical and mental health.
The trouble is that taking control isn’t always straightforward. Sure, some of us have jobs in which we have plenty of ownership over our day-to-day lives. Successful entrepreneurs have autonomy over the direction of their business. Digital nomads are free to trot around the globe, working from any cafe they come across. Others don’t and can’t. A hotel receptionist has to stand at the desk to greet and welcome guests – he can’t just choose to work from home. A junior doctor on the hospital ward has to see all the patients on the list – she can’t just decide to ignore the patients who are rude to her.
But what makes the concept of ownership so powerful is that you can integrate it into almost any situation. All too often, when we find ourselves in a situation we don’t like, we start feeling fatalistic. “I don’t like where I live, but it’s not in my power to move.” “I don’t like where this relationship is going, but it’s not in my power to alter it.”
“I find this work boring, but it’s not in my power to change it.” Sometimes, we’re right: there is nothing we can do. But often we have more agency than we realise – if not over the whole situation, then over parts of it. We have control even when we don’t know it.
My favourite example of humans’ remarkable ability to take ownership of bad situations comes from FiletOfFish1066.
In June 2016, the gentleman behind the Reddit account FiletOfFish1066 made headlines for getting fired. He’d been working as a software developer at his company for six years, where his work mostly involved testing software in the quality assurance department. It was deeply boring. All he did was run the same old tests on the same old software, following the same old scripts every time
So FiletOfFish1066 came up with a plan. Without alerting his boss, he spent the first eight months of his employment programming software to automate his job. From then on, the custom programs he’d written worked on autopilot, running the quality assurance tests perfectly. His boss never checked on him, because everything was going well. As he wrote in a post on Reddit after being fired: “From around six years ago up until now, I have done nothing at work. I am not joking. For 40 hours each week, I go to work, play League of Legends in my office, browse Reddit, and do whatever I feel like. In the past six years, I have maybe done 50 hours of real work. So basically nothing. And nobody really cared.”
Unfortunately for FiletOfFish1066, over half a decade into his ingenious plan, someone at IT figured out what was going on and reported it to his boss. He was sacked for having the audacity to automate his own job.
I’m not suggesting that FiletOfFish1066 was someone with an impeccable career strategy – nor that he was a paragon of virtue. But I do suspect that FiletOfFish1066’s actions hint at the first way we can build our sense of ownership, even in situations in which we have little independence. When we can’t take ownership of the situation, we can still take ownership of the process.
Excerpted with permission from Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You, Ali Abdaal, Cornerstone Press.