Forget Yourself In Function

Back in the 1960s, psychology as it pertains to human motivation was largely based on tying a carrot to a stick and encouraging people to go after it. Once it was reached, a new stick, and new one after that, and so on and so forth. A steady drip of incentives to solicit the desired behavior. Said differently, it was entirely extrinsically based.

All of this encapsulated by the concept of sales goals as we know it. Hit your mark, earn a bonus. Effective, certainly. A psychologist named Csikszentmihalyi thought, surely we can do better when it comes to examining what motivates people and why we choose to perform certain tasks. He believed that there was greater creative satisfaction at play in our work than most were giving credit, or even aware of, and that if we could match creative challenge with attached purpose, we would achieve a state of flow where work output is optimal.

That in states of hyper-focused creativity, where the challenge level to our work was just right, the work began to transcend and we would get locked into a state of what he called, flow.

This part is critical: In flow, the work challenge is attainable, but just slightly above our current reach causing us to be simultaneously motivated and challenged. This happens with artists, athletes, chess masters, musicians, marathon runners, rock climbers, even business people. In flow, we live so deeply in the moment that we “forget ourselves in a function.” We are lost in creating a design, building a training program, putting together a client proposal that we are not focused on the end of the task, only the task itself. In flow, the moment itself is fulfilling, not the outcome.

It is intrinsic, not extrinsic, and it is in this state that Csikszentmihalyi suggests we create our best work.

Once we are able to view the journey and the work it involves as inherently self fulfilling in and of itself, we undergo a paradigm shift and we no longer need to be motivated. We no longer view task as work that require satisfactory outcomes, but instead we see them as productive play and in that state we achieve flow.

Unless you find your flow, that carrot on the stick will constantly need to be refreshed.

-Dave