Page 40 - Hard Goals

Heartfelt 31

But what about the situations where you don’t get to choose
your goals? What if your goal has Shoves and you can’t avoid
them? In those cases you’re going to need another level of moti-
vation; you’re going to need a Personal or Extrinsic connection
to your goal.
Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. is doing something
extraordinary—he’s studying how to get inner-city kids more
connected to the goal of succeeding in school. You may have
2
heard of his latest study. One of the largest studies regarding
education policy ever undertaken, it involved using mostly pri-
vate money to pay 18,000 kids a total of $6.3 million in various
fi nancial incentives in the classroom. The fi nancial motivators
used varied in amount and included payments for positive
behaviors such as good grades, reading books, or not fi ghting.
It’s a political hot potato, to say the least, but it under-
scores one critical issue: When you’re having trouble building
an intrinsic connection between a person and a goal, what else
can you try? Sure, we all want kids to learn for the love of learn-
ing (in other words, to be intrinsically connected to the goal of
academic success). But as Fryer says, “I could walk into a com-
pletely failing school, with crack vials on the ground outside,
and say, ‘Hey, I went to a school like this, and I want to help.’
And people would just browbeat me about ‘the love of learning,’
and I would be like, ‘But I just stepped on crack vials out there!
There are fi ghts in the hallways! We’re beyond that.” 3

PERSONAL CONNECTION

When I was a teenager, my great aunt Norma was diagnosed
with terminal cancer. She was in her eighties at the time and