Motivation

While playing football at CSU-Pueblo, I witnessed the reality of hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard. I watched incredibly talented athletes squander their NFL dreams by doing stupid things off the field - like obsessively partying or not getting the grades they needed to to be able to play. I watched people get kicked off the team for testing positive for smoking weed or smoking vapes in front of our facility prior to workouts. 

These were all people motivated to maximize their careers as college athletes and the reality of how close we were to the NFL was evident in the scouts that would come to watch our practices. 

Despite being so close to the ultimate goal or dream, none of the most objectively talented people made it to the NFL. The people that I expected to make it didn’t. One person that I played with has had a long career in the NFL. Don’t get me wrong, he was incredibly good but not one of the people that I thought without a shred of doubt had the ability to go.  

But he busted his ass day in and day out and has had a long, successful career in the NFL. I honestly have no idea what motivated him as we weren’t close - the closest we ever got was me missing a put back dunk on him in a game of pick up basketball in the summer before my first season or both sitting with the anxiety of having to pee in front of the NCAA drug testers… This is a super invasive and uncomfortable experience - talk about pee anxiety… Whatever he used as motivation was the correct motivator for him to work his ass off, make the right decisions that enabled him to pass that drug test, and ultimately helped drive him into the NFL. 

This pattern of motivation determining success made me particularly interested when I came across a video collaboration between Simon Squibb and Patrick Bet-David, Patrick stated that there are four types of motivations for people. 

Lifestyle

Purpose 

Next-Step 

Madness

On the surface, this is contrary to the overarching principles of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. 

For those that aren’t familiar, intrinsic motivation is being motivated because you find something to be internally rewarding. You are doing it because it is fun, enjoyable, and satisfying. 

Extrinsic motivation assumes that you are motivated to achieve a goal based on the outcomes. This could be status, power, items, or avoiding consequences.

As he defines them, lifestyle motivation is pursuing a specific lifestyle. Fancy clothes, nice car, nice house, etc. Purpose is finding a sense of purpose and fulfillment in the work that you do. Next-step is being motivated by the next step from where you are at. Madness is wanting to crush records, your enemies, etc. 

I stated that on the surface, this looks to be contrary to intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation because you can categorize them into those two buckets with relative ease. Lifestyle and next-step are external motivations where purpose and madness are internal. 

We will circle back to this in a moment but understanding the two main sources of motivation are incredibly important as they can help you distinguish what actually motivates you. 

Patrick indicated that it is important to understand the motivation of the people that you are trying to motivate as if you speak to a person motivated by purpose and another motivated by madness the same way, your messaging won’t be effective. It won’t resonate. 

The same goes for how you motivate yourself. At the end of the day, if you are leaning into the wrong type of motivation for yourself, you won’t achieve what you want out of life. 

Growing up, I remember being told repeatedly that I was money motivated. I had a motivation to work for money and a desire to earn that money so I could spend it on something else. I carried this belief into adulthood and into my career. 

Thinking I was money motivated, I bet on myself to build relationships so I could sell products and make money. 

I ran into a problem, though. Working for a company where I was expected to sell products to anybody that could fog a mirror didn’t work with me ethically. I constantly ran into friction and ended up only making money from the training that I had. I didn’t realize it then, but money motivation wasn’t strong enough for me to achieve my goals. 

I transitioned to a different company where I didn’t feel the constant need to sell my soul for money. I was also significantly less desperate for cash. 

Again, I went down the sales route and realized that even at this company, it wasn’t for me. I didn’t feel that I was compromising my ethics like I had at the previous company, I was saving more money than I ever had in my life, but the career path I was on didn’t feel right to me. 

I was starting to realize that I wasn’t super motivated by money (especially because our bonus structure barely incentivized us with how it was structured). 

I had gotten into my industry due to my strong desire to make an impact on others and thought that might be my motivator. I pivoted to leadership at our organization and now get significantly more fulfillment out of my daily life. 

I still don’t believe that this is my strongest motivator. My strongest motivator is my desire to prove to myself that I can achieve what I believe that I can. To make progress in my life on a daily basis, growing and refining who I am along the way. 

There are other intrinsic and extrinsic motivators to me such as my unwavering desire to have land where we can rescue animals (which is both intrinsically and extrinsically motivating), but the strongest motivator by far is living up to the person I know I can be. 

It took me a long time to figure this out. Many years longer than I ever would have anticipated. I thought I was highly self-aware, but I wasn’t. Or at the very least, my motivators have slightly shifted since I was a child. That’s shocking. 

What’s wild to me is how much I saw this along my journey into leadership. I mentally roll my eyes when people tell me that they are money motivated. 

Working with over 100 people in my time in leadership, I can think of exactly one person that actually has stood out to me as being money motivated (at least from his actions aligning with him stating his motivations to me). This person told me that he was money motivated in one of our first meetings and has consistently been at the top of my variable compensation in the time that I have supported him. 

He put his money where his mouth was and worked to constantly be in the right position. 

For the rest of them? 

Just as in football, I have seen the same pattern play out in people’s careers. Most of them don’t progress nearly as quickly as they could through their career. They don’t get paid as much as they could. Some end up feeling stuck. Some get burnt out. Others lose all of the motivation they had and simply decide to coast. The longer this goes on, the more resentment and disappointment you can hear in how they talk about their work and the harder it becomes to help them find what motivates them and move the needle in the right direction.

It is equivalent to rolling a giant boulder without leverage. The boulder at some point stopped where it was and dirt accumulated around it, making it harder and harder to move. The person that decides to move it has to put in extraordinary effort to make it budge, sometimes relying on tools depending on how stuck the boulder has become. 

You don’t have to be included in this group. 

You are going to start by making two columns and labeling the first intrinsic and the second extrinsic. We are going to create a list in each column of what you have been motivated by historically. This will help you get a better understanding of past motivators so we can reflect on what motivated you the most. There is no particular order that you need to go in here, just let your mind go from topic to topic. 

Intrinsic

• Helping people interview prep and the joy that goes with seeing them get promoted.

• Coaching people and watching them refine their process (knowing that I contributed in some way to their success). 

• Writing this in the hope of it helping you figure yourself out so that you can get more fulfillment out of life. 

• The desire to prove to myself that I can accomplish anything I believe that I can. 

Extrinsic

Trying out for the basketball team my junior year because my dad offered me $100. 

Saving up for my first pair of Etnies as a kid. 

• Saving up for my Nintendo DS Lite as a kid.

•  

  My desire to have a house. 

• My desire to be completely financially independent. 

• Working in the same role for a few years to get a promotion into the next role. 

• My goal of making $100k a year in my 20s. 

• My goal of graduating with my MBA at 21 from a program that should have taken another year (this was partly intrinsic with the pride I knew I would feel and partly extrinsic in the reward of getting a job and my degrees). 

You’ll notice that my list for extrinsic is longer than my list for intrinsic. This isn’t because I am more extrinsically motivated - these are easier goals to find and set for yourself. At its most basic level, extrinsic motivation are the physical, tangible rewards that you receive on the back end of accomplishing a goal.

While these goals are easy to find and set, for me, they aren’t strong drivers. Aside from a house or a car, I can buy many/most things, with relative ease if I want it so I don’t need to trap it behind delayed gratification. When my goal gets hard to accomplish, the things I want don’t help me sit down and do the hard thing. My intrinsic motivators do. 

My desire to help others and my desire to reach my potential (my summary of the last bullet point under intrinsic motivation) are what keep me going. 

When I am tired and want to go to bed instead of typing another paragraph, I don’t pause and think about the house. I think about the impact that I can have by putting out more content. I think about the version of myself that would finish typing the next paragraph and how that differentiates them from the version of myself that wants to go to bed. 

As you reflect on your list, think about which of the bullet points have helped you push yourself the most. What bullet points left you the most fulfilled? What bullet points did you achieve that left you dissatisfied? How could you alter those goals so that you would be more satisfied when achieving them? 

I encourage you to write this list out periodically. I would do this as little as once a year to check in and see if the goals that you are setting for yourself are actually motivating to you. Not achieving your goals doesn’t necessarily indicate that you aren’t motivated if you are putting the underlying work in to achieve the goal. Achieving the goal doesn’t necessarily mean that your motivation was strong.