Can we reward ourselves without undermining our #lifegoals?

Self-improvement requires an intrinsic desire to grow and a steady discipline to make it happen. Some would have us believe that rewarding ourselves along the way undermines our purpose. As designers of products that help motivate people to attain their goals, should we be worried? Nah. Listen to Jerry instead.

Photos by slgckgc, shared on Wikimedia Commons

I once meditated every day without fail for an entire year.

No, that’s not exactly true.

Okay, I listened to a meditation session in my Headspace app every day for a year, even if sometimes I was distracted.

Still no.

Fine. I played a meditation on the app every day for a year, even on days when I didn’t actually stop whatever I was doing to listen, let alone meditate.

To be fair to me, I would usually find a quiet place where I could meditate undisturbed. But, when I did cheat the system, it was purely for the sake of my running streak.

Once I hit the year mark, my little brain character leveled up and the next milestone was nowhere in sight. I abruptly stopped. That was years ago, and only recently have I started up again in earnest.

The Headspace meditation milestones

My motivation to meditate was pure. I wanted to feel more at peace, to manage my ever-present feelings of anxiety and worry, to stop white-knuckling my way through life. That goal never lost its appeal nor its urgency, and yet, despite the sense that I was making progress, my habit dropped off. Why is that?

There are a lot of products out there, designed by smart and thoughtful people, that aim to guide us toward our life goals: to be more mindful, to be physically fit, to save money, to learn a language, to read more. These are things that we earnestly, sometimes desperately want, and yet the level of intention, time, and work required to realize them can make them feel unattainable. It’s hard to get out there and run two miles before work, knowing that you’ll have to do it all over again, day after day, each time making slow, barely observable progress. It takes no effort at all to lie in bed, doomscrolling on your phone.

Created with DALL·E 2

The unmeasurable quality of motivation

A tricky thing about motivation is that it’s a construct, meaning that it can’t be observed or measured directly. Instead, it must be inferred from things we can measure, like behavior, opinion, and competency, which leaves a lot of room for interpretation and disagreement.

From a Google search on “motivation.” We can’t even agree on how many types of motivation exist!

A popular and influential school of thought about motivation says that when we introduce rewards into the equation, those rewards will replace whatever it was that spurred us to set a goal in the first place. It’s a theory that maps nicely onto my experience with the Headspace run streak: I started building a habit because of an intrinsic motivation to achieve a certain outcome; I introduced a reward for a behavior that I hoped would lead to that outcome; soon the reward incentive crowded out my original motivation; the initial spark was lost, maybe forever.

This phenomenon, known as the Overjustification Effect, is unlike most conventional wisdom in that it has an academic lineage and a sheen of scientific veracity, largely due to the work of a psychology professor at the University of Rochester more than 50 years ago. In 1971, Edward Deci published the findings of a landmark study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in which he asked 24 college psychology students to participate in a series of puzzle solving activities (a task which was chosen “because it seemed that most college students would be intrinsically motivated to do it”). Half of those students — the experimental group — were paid for successfully solving puzzles during the second of the three sessions. Those in the control group were not paid at all.

The crucial piece of the experiment occurred in the middle of each session, when the experimenter made an excuse to leave the room for a few minutes and the participants were told they could spend that time however they chose from a variety of available activities. Unbeknownst to them, their behavior during this free time was carefully monitored.

As you may suspect, Deci found that the paid experimental group was more motivated to continue working on the puzzles during the session in which they were paid, but less motivated to do so than the control group in the subsequent session. In other words, before the introduction of the incentive, those in the experimental group showed a natural interest in the activity. After the incentive, the natural interest was diminished.

Over the ensuing years, a raft of similar experiments followed in a variety of contexts, reinforcing the theory as it crept beyond the confines of academia and took hold in the public consciousness.

The headline and the correction

If you’re a schmendrick like me, you might find it all a bit suspect: this is the evidence for the grand theory of motivation? Luckily, folks with actual, bona fide qualifications had similar doubts. Enter Judy Cameron and David Pierce, two professors at the University of Alberta, who in 1994 published a meta-analysis of the body of research purporting to substantiate the Overjustification Effect. Cameron and Pierce went deep into the weeds of dozens of these studies, and emerged with serious concerns, ultimately claiming that the findings were exaggerated and the phenomenon was much more limited than the claimed.

Thus began a deliciously antagonistic war of words between the two camps, filled with accusations of bias, ill-intent, and ineptitude, playing out over the course of years in the pages of august psychology journals. Both sides dug in ever further as they lobbed grenades at each other from within their ivory towers.

So what are we, the schmendricks, to believe? While it’s difficult to say for certain, it’s even more difficult to emerge from this rabbit hole feeling confident in the merits of Deci’s theory. In fact, subsequent studies, particularly those that have looked at longitudinal effects of rewards on motivation, seem to undermine the notion they have any long-term effect at all.

Still, a good theory is impossible to resist. Once Deci set the snowball rolling, it continued to gain mass and momentum, unabated by the large but obscure body of counter-evidence. 2009 saw the publication of a book called “Drive,” by Daniel Pink, which was widely influential among the business bro set, and which essentially translated Deci’s ideas into a Hudson News-friendly format. Pink’s central thesis is that, by making reward and punishment the foundational drivers of behavior in essential social systems like education and business, we severely limit our potential. To evolve as a society, we must upgrade our operating system to one built on the qualities of intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Pink backs up his argument with constant reference to what “the science” tells us, as if the research is monolithic and unambiguous. Deci’s work makes a compelling story with a great headline. The corrections to the story are conveniently overlooked.

Listen to Jerry

Created with Midjourney

You never know where you’ll find insights into deep questions. It may surprise you to learn that Jerry Seinfeld has said some interesting things on the topic of motivation. Here’s Jerry waxing philosophical about how one must rely on intrinsic motivation (better referred to as “love”) to achieve greatness:

“What Michael Jordan uses and what I use, is not will. It’s love. When you love something, it’s a bottomless pool of energy. That’s where the energy comes from. But you have to love it sincerely. Not because you’re going to make money from it, be famous, or get whatever you want to get. When you do it because you love it, then you can find yourself moving up and getting really good at something you wanted to be really good at.”

Who could argue with such a heartfelt and inspiring message? As it turns out, Jerry himself can. Here he is again, as told by a comedian seeking Jerry’s advice on how to be a better writer:

“He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

“He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. ‘After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.’”

If love is all you need to drive you, why the reliance on this proto-run streak? Could it be that, contrary to conventional wisdom, extrinsic rewards can supplement our intrinsic desires, rather than supplant them? Maybe sometimes we need a little nudge to get to a place in which we can achieve the level of autonomy, mastery, and purpose that we crave?

The joy of automaticity

To get good at a big thing, we must do the little things: practice, recite, memorize, over and over and over. We must be disciplined and consistent. It’s not easy, and our dreams can only provide so much fuel.

How do we keep ourselves going when our tank is low? We find smaller milestones to mark our progress, even if they’re artificial. We give ourselves a tangible reason to continue when doing the work has lost all appeal and yet the goal still feels so far away.

Let’s say I want to become a guitar god. I can’t rip an epic solo without having spent hours upon endless hours practicing techniques, learning scales, developing coordination between my left and right hands, all while enduring physical pain as I build up calluses on my fingertips. In other words, to truly shred, I’ll need to struggle through and synthesize a bunch of discrete, lower-level skills. There is no shortcut to obtaining these skills; they can only be mastered through hard work over a long period of time, through consistently performing repetitive tasks until they become automatic.

A wonderful thing happens when, after a certain amount of time spent practicing, we have reached a threshold of automaticity in these low-level skills. We begin to put them together and see all those hours of work materialize into something resembling the thing we’ve been dreaming of. The experience is profound, and, yes, deeply motivational: Holy crap, I’m playing Little Wing! This is really happening!

We worry that rewarding our effort will extinguish our flame, but sometimes it’s the opposite: you can’t fall in love with a thing without doing the thing. When we do whatever it takes to keep going, we see our dreams become real. Observable progress breeds motivation, but in order to progress enough to observe, we sometimes need to give ourselves incentives.

Love doesn’t conquer all

A major arena in which the conflict between the intrinsic motivation purists and the extrinsic reward pragmatists plays out is in the field of education. Here’s Daniel Pink in Drive, tilting at the windmill of schools’ use of external rewards to drive student behavior:

“…too many schools are moving in the wrong direction. They’re redoubling their emphasis on routines, right answers, and standardization. And they’re hauling out a wagon full of ‘if-then’ rewards — pizza for reading books, iPods for showing up to class, cash for good test scores. We’re bribing students into compliance instead of challenging them into engagement.”

So, what happens when we shift focus away from the emphasis on routines and right answers? This is not a rhetorical question; it is at the crux of an educational philosophy with real consequences for students. A particularly striking example can be seen in how we teach kids to read, where the last few decades have seen a dramatic shift away from hardcore phonics instruction — the slow, rote, and generally unfun process of teaching students to be automatic at translating sequences of symbols on a page into sounds and words — and toward a hyper-focus on fostering engagement with text and love of reading.

From a certain perspective, this all makes sense. Kids typically don’t like drills and memorization, and for the adults charged with instructing them it can feel bad and wrong to make them endure these things. Much better to design a literacy education aimed at growing their passion for reading, around a romantic notion of students being swept away to fantastic worlds and exciting adventures, of getting lost in literature. While the impulse is admirable, the problem with this approach is that, for many students, especially those with the least support outside of school, it just doesn’t work to skip the hard and boring parts.

As Judy Cameron writes in one of her responses to Edward Deci: “In education, a major goal is to instill motivation and enjoyment of academic activities. Many academic activities are not of high initial interest to students. An implication of our finding is that rewards can be used to increase motivation and performance on low-interest academic activities.”

It seems common sense that students must actually learn how to read words before they can engage deeply with text, and yet so much of our literacy curriculum is in denial of that fact. As a result, a shocking number of children never develop critical reading skills, a story which is told compellingly in the podcast Sold a Story. Episode four of the series features Lacey Robinson, an educator who witnessed this phenomenon firsthand. Here’s what she says:

“Listen, I devour words. I love literature and books. But everybody don’t have to love to read and write. But everybody has a right to learn to read and write. So that whole, ‘I want them to love.’ I don’t want them to love. I want them to know how to do it. Love comes later.”

Hopefully love will come later, but that can only happen if the conditions needed for love to blossom are met. It’s ironic and sad — by fixating on intrinsic love, we can end up sabotaging it.

Created with DALL·E 2

Keep the baby, lose the bathwater

This debate is not about what we should try to achieve, but about how we give ourselves the best chance of success. It’s a debate about tactics, and about the right tools for the job.

While I believe that extrinsic motivation does belong in our toolbox, please do not take this screed as a blanket and unconditional endorsement of external rewards for any purpose. A tool can always be misused.

When considering the use of rewards, we must always think about the ethics. Run streaks are often associated with manipulative and predatory behavior, due to the many high-profile cases in which they are used to benefit the provider of a service, rather than the user of that service. While the technique itself is not inherently unethical, its application can be. We must guard against misuse.

Even when designed ethically and in good faith, if this tool is wielded clumsily or in the wrong setting, it can be counter-productive. When milestones are inconsistently spaced and increasingly infrequent, for example, then what is meant to be motivational becomes deflating and self-defeating. Once again, the potential for misuse does not equate to the absence of valid and effective use. We should not feel compelled to abandon run streaks altogether, but we must take responsibility to design them better.

If extrinsic motivation is a tool, the effective and responsible use of it is a skill. The design of motivation, like all design, takes time and practice to learn.

Outro

I once meditated almost every day for a whole year. Silly as it sounds, the desire to see my run streak hit 365 was what kept me going. After a while of regular practice, the benefit was noticeable. My family will tell you: I was less high strung and easier to live with during that time.

It took a while after I dropped out of the habit for the effect to wear off, for my anxiety to once again become a defining part of my daily experience. Even then, though, what remained from my year of meditation was the knowledge that it is a skill I can relearn and have available when I really need it.

I’ve started up again recently, and it’s going pretty well. The Headspace folks decided to remove the brain character. What’s left is just a number, which I’m encouraged to interpret and use however I want. The stakes are not too high and the milestones are whatever I make them. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.

A weekly resourceful newsletter that helps designers stay in the know, be productive, and think more critically about their work. Take a look.