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Why Did You Stop Doing the Thing You Loved?
Are you motivated intrinsically or extrinsically, or both?
Make a quick list of the things you loved doing as a kid: drawing, building, roaming the neighborhood with your friends, asking “why” forty times a day (this one might be hardwired but you get the idea). Now ask how many of them you’d still do if nobody paid you, praised you, or gave you a grade for them.
Fast forward to adulthood. For me, when I check my calendar on Sunday night to plan for the upcoming week, there are the things I get to do and the things I have to do. The patients I’m curious to see, and the form that has to be filed. The paper I want to write, and the one that would be “good for my career.”
How are these childhood and adult “funs” (and chores) linked?
Back in the early 1970s, Edward Deci and later his longtime collaborator Richard Ryan built a whole framework, Self-Determination Theory, around the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Here’s how they are defined. Intrinsic motivation is when the activity is its own reward: you do the thing because doing the thing feels good. Extrinsic motivation is when the reward sits somewhere outside the activity: you do the thing to get a paycheck, a grade, a gold star, a flat stomach. Carrots and sticks live in the extrinsic pile. Playing in the woods as a kid lives in the intrinsic one.
So far so good. Now let me complicate it, using my own dinner as an example.
