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I would encourage people to be more aware of the overjustification effect. I used to lecture about it often when consulting, and despite that it still reared i
by kromem 3y ago
I would encourage people to be more aware of the overjustification effect.
I used to lecture about it often when consulting, and despite that it still reared its ugly head in my own life.
I used to love talking about tech. Because I loved talking about tech and was often right in what I had to say about it, I ended up getting paid a crazy amount of money to talk to senior management at very large companies about tech.
And after I left the industry because I didn't want to be a professional Cassandra for the rest of my life, I pretty much stopped talking about tech to my professional peers, because I was no longer being paid for it.
It took about a decade to realize that I'd effectively cut off my nose because I'd gotten used to profiting off my face. I missed out on what were I'm sure many conversations I'd have intrinsically enjoyed simply because I'd removed the extrinsic motivation for having them.
In an ideal world, the things we enjoy doing that create value wouldn't be extrinsically compensated because they wouldn't need to be as we'd have our needs taken care of by fair distribution of collective profit in an ever less scarcity driven world. Unfortunately it's not a perfect world and likely won't be in my lifetime, so instead I just try to be more mindful to not let extrinsic motivators too deeply into the parts of my life I care about or enjoy.
Work (doing a task for extrinsic reward) is toxic to intrinsically motivated passion.
- maximus-decimus 3y agoI don't think there's much you could do. I remember someone on HN mentioning that "extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation". I think for them it was something as banal as using a an app motivating them to jog or something like that. They were able to jog on their own just fine, tried the app, and when they tried to get off the app they couldn't do it anymore. I'm trying to learn piano using an online course and I'm actually scared to even get a real teacher because of that. I'm afraid having somebody else push me and keeping me accountable will kill my inner motivation to learn.
- kromem 3y agoThe overjustification effect doesn't occur if the extrinsic reward is a surprise or isn't known/expected in advance. So there are ways to improve it. I'm actually toying with going back into consulting for fun, in which case I've been thinking of essentially providing clients with payment details to a separately managed account and asking that they pay what they think my services are worth (or what they would have paid a competitor), and directing the management of that account to invest it for retirement. There's value in having people pay for a thing because they then value it more than if it were free, but I don't want to know about it and my not knowing would allow me to take or reject business based on how much I think I'll enjoy the project or not. This only works with it being a side gig for me, but luckily I'd have the freedom to keep it as that. But yes, it's extremely hard in general to avoid the overjustification effect, and it's not very well known at all despite being quite destructive.