I would order pizza and sit on my couch watching tutorials and coding and failing, and coding and failing testing, reloading and learning from my mistakes for hours on end at the beginning of my career.
Because at the time, it wasn't even a career.
It was just a hobby, something I was interested in doing.
And that intrinsic motivation far outweighed anything that anybody could pay me, at the time at least,
Of course, maybe there was some distant belief that I could get paid for this one day, but the value was obvious to me.
It wasn't something that somebody had to explain to me.
It wasn't something that somebody had to coach into me.
Learning and producing and building and being creative and exploring all of these things just kind of came naturally because I had some kind of reward that wasn't coming from outside.
It was coming from inside.
And this concept of intrinsic motivation is so different.
It feels so different from extrinsic motivation.
And I want to talk to you more about this because it could be a potential unlock for you in your career if you've stalled out.
My name is Jonathan Cottrell and my goal on the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective and purpose and purpose, in particular, in this episode in your careers.
And driven developers like you, you were probably driven in the beginning like I was.
You had intrinsic motivation that felt like boundless energy, that it was exciting.
And not everybody necessarily started out this way.
There may be some folks who immediately your goal was to set yourself up for a career.
And you know, maybe there was some kind of mix between interest originally and then eventually some kind of motivation.
You know, maybe in school, for example, you had some kind of extrinsic motivation by way of grades or feedback from your teacher.
Yeah.
But most people that I've talked to, especially senior engineers, at some point they have stories of how they would stay up hours into the night, time would disappear and they would enter into flow state.
And flow state is something that's been... pretty well studied by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
I'm trying to get the name pronunciation correct.
And if you just Google flow state, he's going to be the first person to show up because he is the one who did all of the research on this.
And there's this list of essentially flow state, you know, how to set yourself up for flow state.
We're going to talk about that list after we talk about today's sponsor.
But this idea that we had intrinsic motivation, that went away.
I want to talk about why that happens.
What exactly is going on there?
There's another effect that I want to talk to you about called the over-justification effect.
And we're going to kind of put these two things together.
First, over-justification effect.
The idea of over-justification effect, this was studied by a man named Edward Deasy in the 1970s.
He was the first one to study this.
He came up with this concept called the self-determination theory.
And the over-justification effect essentially says that once we receive an extrinsic motivator for doing some kind of work, some kind of task, that the intrinsic motivation that may have previously been our reason for doing that thing becomes weaker and sometimes is eventually completely replaced by the extrinsic motivator.
So at some point in our careers we shift from Creating these things, you know, writing code, learning how to write tests, learning about test-driven development.
That was, you know, one very late Friday for me is seeing my first red-green.
You know cycle and you know writing test-driven code for the first time.
I remember that vividly.
At some point we move from doing that with no one watching To doing that as a job to fulfill a JIRA ticket, to get a performance review and eventually to get a paycheck.
And so now we have an extrinsic motivator.
And the question really becomes what is the balance between those things and how much of that extrinsic motivation is necessary to kind of replace and totally supplant our intrinsic motivation?
We're going to talk about how these things relate.
Why is this even important for your career?
As long as you're getting paid, why does it matter that it's an extrinsic motivator?
All of these things actually do matter because your goal if you're listening to this career growth accelerator series your goal is ostensibly to move past a sticking point, right to move past wherever you are today and grow again in your career.
And I want you to think you know right here, before we go to our sponsor break, I want you to think about what your greatest period of career growth was.
When did you grow the most?
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So today we're talking about this concept called the over-justification effect.
And what this is really pointed at is the idea that our motivation, our fuel, our interest, our reason for doing something can change over time, even if the actual thing we're doing, the actual output, the activity itself, doesn't necessarily change very much, right.
But there's something important about this shift.
When you were doing something originally with intrinsic motivation, it's very likely that the boundaries that you had on that activity were fluid.
So as your skill in that activity grows what you actually do your activity may change to adapt to the skill.
And part of the reason for this is because of flow state.
And I mentioned in the first half of the episode that we would talk a little bit about the flow state, kind of the ideal situation or ideal setup for flow state.
You know, in order to encourage flow state, you want to have a handful of things in place.
And this is a list that I found published about flow state.
One is clear goals exist, right?
So you know exactly, you know, what you're trying to accomplish.
Two, you're getting constant feedback.
This means you know you do something and immediately.
Ideally, the system itself is giving you immediate feedback, right.
There's a balance between your challenge and skill, and this is the important thing related to what we were just talking about.
As your skill grows, you will take on, naturally, take on more and more challenging things, right?
Because otherwise you're not experiencing flow state.
And you're actually optimizing for flow state when you have higher intrinsic motivation.
We'll talk about why that is in just a minute.
But because your skills are growing, you're naturally going to continue ramping up your own challenge.
Without anybody telling you you have to.
Without anybody coercing you.
This isn't coming in feedback.
It's not coming as review.
You are naturally... regulating the challenge that you're taking on based on your skill, right?
Uh, that's.
That's what happens when you're seeking flow state is you're going to go for something that's a Action and awareness are merging right.
So this means that, as you are doing this thing, you're less thinking about what you're doing and kind of just becoming aware that you are doing it.
And there's a little bit of a loss of self-consciousness.
You know you're not really thinking about what you look like, or you know how other people are perceiving you in that moment.
You're really kind of diving into the task.
Right.
And, by the way, I'm not an expert on flow state, but if you want to learn more, Csikszentmihalyi has published a book about this subject.
So go pick up that book if you want to learn more.
There's no concern for failure when you're in flow state.
Again, if you think about the intrinsic motivation of What is the worst thing that could happen?
Well, you fail and you get up and try again.
If you have extrinsic motivation, if the reason you're doing this is coming from outside of you and you are only rewarded with that extrinsic motivation if you succeed, then it's unlikely that you're going to have this particular aspect in place for flow state, which is no concern for failure, right?
If you, you know, if no concern for failure would have to mean that you're still going to get the incentive, that extrinsic motivation incentive, regardless of your success or failure.
And a lot of times, you know, that's not going to happen.
If you have extrinsic motivation, you may lose your job, right?
If you're failing consistently.
Um, Lack of distraction.
This one's pretty straightforward.
You know, you're setting yourself up in an environment for flow state.
A feeling of timelessness.
We already kind of talked about this at the beginning.
You know, hours will pass and it feels like I haven't really even paid attention to the clock.
Not really, you know, recognizing that time is passing.
And then the final and perhaps the most important aspect here is that the activity becomes autotelic.
All right, this is a new word for me.
I hadn't really encountered this word before I started doing the study for this episode.
Autotelic means it is worth doing to you based on the reward you get for doing it.
Just by doing it, right?
It's worth doing for the sake of doing.
It's worth doing because you enjoy it is the kind of simple read for that, right?
If the activity becomes autotelic, then you are rewarded by continuing to do the thing.
The activity of of writing code and seeing that code you know actually develop, like build something with code for the first time and you get some kind of you know intrinsic reward from that.
That is autotelic.
And so the autotelic personality is something that Csikszentmihalyi talks about.
And it is at direct odds with this over-justification effect.
So hopefully you can see the autotelic intrinsic motivation that accompanies flow state, which would naturally have you taking on more and more challenging things.
That's directly at odds with the over-justification effect and extrinsic motivation, which would not, by default, would not have you take on more and more challenging things, right.
Especially if that extrinsic motivation can't keep up.
So again, we're talking about career growth acceleration, right?
The whole concept here is that you may be stuck.
Well, if you're stuck, why is it that you're stuck?
One possible theory for why you're stuck is because you're doing the same things over and over.
And in order to do something different.
If you are a victim of this over-justification effect, if you have really fully shifted into extrinsic motivation, being the only thing motivates you which, by the way, is very common then you haven't found a reason recently to do something more than what your job absolutely requires you to do.
This is where a totally unmotivated to change what they do in their, in their work, totally unmotivated to grow, totally unmotivated to, you know uh, extend beyond what the basic kind of requirements of the job are, and there's plenty of justification for this.
Um, you know, most people would say well, of course, i'm not going to do more than what i'm paid for.
But a good question um, still should be asked, which is why.
Not because you should do more in order to prove that you can get to that next level, right?
I'm not suggesting that that's the case, but rather that you're going to grow only when you change.
And if you don't have a reason to change because your extrinsic motivation has stalled out, then there's kind of a chicken and egg scenario here, where you're not going to be able to get a promotion, for example, because you're still doing the same things that you've always done.
So, in order to get promoted or in order to move past a roadblock, something has to change and you need a reason to change it.
Finding intrinsic motivation, finding something that you want to do, Finding something that gives you a reward, without a paycheck or without some kind of other extrinsic.
You know somebody else telling you to do it.
Somebody else giving you the direction, right?
Giving you some kind of support through feedback can increase that intrinsic motivation, by the way.
So if you can find an intrinsic motivator, it's very unlikely that this is going to be kind of competing for the things that have already moved on to extrinsic motivation.
This is, you know, part of this.
Research essentially showed that it's very hard to reverse that right.
It's hard to go back once you've moved on to extrinsic motivation being paid for something, for example.
It's hard to move back to, you know, finding love again in the work.
I don't even recommend necessarily needing to be passionate about your work in order to do good work.
But I do think that your most likely shot at growing is to find something that is intrinsically motivating.
Find something that you do have enough internal reward that you will go and do it.
Without somebody having to tell you how to do it or why to do it.
So finding and here's another kind of you know a good reason to do this is because this is one of the only pathways to getting into flow state again right.
And you're much more likely to enjoy your work.
You're much more likely you know to do high quality work, especially if your work requires you know new and creative insight.
For example,
You're more likely to do higher quality work if you can find yourself in flow state.
This is really hard to do.
Of course we've said on the show many times recently if you're here to find easy pathways, this is not the right place to be.
I'm not going to give you easy pathways.
This is difficult to do.
Finding things that you genuinely enjoy enough to go and do them without having to be paid for them.
That's hard to do.
But once you build this habit, You don't even have to necessarily do this as a part of your job, by the way.
The autotelic personality is the differentiator for people who find ways to get into flow state.
So you're looking for intrinsic motivation, even if it's ancillary to the work you're doing.
You're finding the intrinsic motivation and that changes the way you approach your work and you can find flow state through that process.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode.
Hopefully this is helpful to you.
If you've kind of found yourself stuck and wondering, why do I not love this work anymore?
What has happened?
Well, it's actually very normal.
It's very normal to stop loving something because you've lost your intrinsic motivation for it, because it was replaced by extrinsic motivation.
That is the over-justification effect.
Go and Google it.
It's really interesting to dive into what some of these studies have said and found, And you can probably start to gain more insight into what kinds of things would give you more intrinsic motivation and lead you back to more commonly having the opportunity to get into flow state.
Thanks so much for listening.
Thank you again to today's sponsor, SERP API.
You can get started for free. at SERP API.com.
Uh, SERP API is the real time web search API for whatever app you're building right now.
Go and check it out.
S E R P A P I.com.
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