Our third drive—our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
“Figure out for yourself what you want to be really good at, know that you’ll never really satisfy yourself that you’ve made it, and accept that that’s okay.”
ROBERT B. REICH
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor
With a learning goal, students don’t have to feel that they’re already good at something in order to hang in and keep trying. After all, their goal is to learn, not to prove they’re smart.
“Try to pick a profession in which you enjoy even the most mundane, tedious parts. Then you will always be happy.”
WILL SHORTZ
Puzzle guru
“Nothing is more important to my success than controlling my schedule. I’m most creative from five to nine A.M. If I had a boss or co-workers, they would ruin my best hours one way or another.”
SCOTT ADAMS
Dilbert creator
“Throughout my athletics career, the overall goal was always to be a better athlete than I was at that moment—whether next week, next month or next year. The improvement was the goal. The medal was simply the ultimate reward for achieving that goal.”
SEBASTIAN COE
Middle-distance runner and two-time Olympic gold medal winner
As wonderful as flow is, the path to mastery—becoming ever better at something you care about—is not lined with daisies and spanned by a rainbow. If it were, more of us would make the trip. Mastery hurts. Sometimes—many times—it’s not much fun.
But in the end, mastery often involves working and working and showing little improvement, perhaps with a few moments of flow pulling you along, then making a little progress, and then working and working on that new, slightly higher plateau again. It’s grueling, to be sure. But that’s not the problem; that’s the solution.
Another doctor, one who lacks a Ph.D. but has a plaque in the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, put it similarly. “Being a professional,” Julius Erving once said, “is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.”16
Over lunch, Csikszentmihalyi and I talked about children. A little kid’s life bursts with autotelic experiences. Children careen from one flow moment to another, animated by a sense of joy, equipped with a mindset of possibility, and working with the dedication of a West Point cadet. They use their brains and their bodies to probe and draw feedback from the environment in an endless pursuit of mastery.
Then—at some point in their lives—they don’t. What happens?
“You start to get ashamed that what you’re doing is childish,” Csikszentmihalyi explained.
What a mistake. Perhaps you and I—and all the other adults in charge of things—are the ones who are immature. It goes back to Csikszentmihalyi’s experience on the train, wondering how grown-ups could have gotten things so wrong. Our circumstances may be less dire, but the observation is no less acute. Left to their own devices, Csikszentmihalyi says, children seek out flow with the inevitability of a natural law. So should we all.
Many of the key tenets of a Montessori education resonate with the principles of Motivation 3.0 that children naturally engage in self-directed learning and independent study; that teachers should act as observers and facilitators of that learning, and not as lecturers or commanders; and that children are naturally inclined to experience periods of intense focus, concentration, and flow that adults should do their best not to interrupt.
Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility BY JAMES P. CARSE
Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else BY GEOFF COLVIN
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success BY CAROL DWECK
Learn to listen for a fixed mindset voice that might be hurting your resiliency.
Interpret challenges not as roadblocks, but as opportunities to stretch yourself.
Use the language of growth for example, I'm not sure I can do it now, but I think I can learn with time and effort.
Type I behavior concerns itself less with the external rewards an activity brings and more with the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself.
Mastery is a mindset: It requires the capacity to see your abilities not as finite, but as infinitely improvable. Mastery is a pain: It demands effort, grit, and deliberate practice. And mastery is an asymptote: It's impossible to fully realize, which makes it simultaneously frustrating and alluring.
Nonroutine work: Creative, conceptual, right-brain work that can't be reduced to a set of rules. Today, if you're not doing this sort of work, you won't be doing what you're doing much longer.
Routine work: Work that can be reduced to a script, a spec sheet, a formula, or a set of instructions. External rewards can be effective in motivating routine tasks. But because such algorithmic, rule-based, left-brain work has become easier to send offshore and to automate, this type of work has become less valuable and less important in advanced economies.
Type I behavior: A way of thinking and an approach to life built around intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, motivators. It is powered by our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
Try to encourage a kid to learn math by paying her for each workbook page she completes-- and she'll almost certainly become more diligent in the short term and lose interest in math in the long term.
Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrisic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.
Praise effort and strategy, not intelligence. As Dweck’s research has shown, children who are praised for “being smart” often believe that every encounter is a test of whether they really are. So to avoid looking dumb, they resist new challenges and choose the easiest path. By contrast, kids who understand that effort and hard work lead to mastery and growth are more willing to take on new, difficult tasks.
Make praise specific. Parents and teachers should give kids useful information about their performance. Instead of bathing them in generalities, tell them specifically what they’ve done that’s noteworthy.
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