Page 60 - Hard Goals

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mess up that person’s motivation. But does that mean extrinsic
rewards are bad? Of course not. I could easily design a reward
that would motivate whatever behavior I wanted. For starters,
if my desired goal was that I wanted kids to be happy or cre-
ative while drawing, I’d probably give them a happy or creative
reward, not a “good player certifi cate,” which is neither happy
nor creative.
But all of that is still very academic, and it misses two
important points. First, in the real world, it’s often tough to
neatly separate intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Consider, for
example, a study in which participants completed an assess-
ment that measured their intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. It
was found that these two factors moderately correlate with each
other. Remember your intro stats class when the professor said,
“Any correlation over 0.3 is a moderately large correlation”?
Well, in this particular study intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
were correlated at 0.4. This means that intrinsic and extrinsic
motivations were not diametrically opposed, nor even neatly
compartmentalized; in fact, they were moderately related.
But you know what? Even if you could neatly separate intrin-
sic from extrinsic motivation, you might fi nd another problem.
Sometimes, even if you love doing something, the circumstances
will change and doing that something will no longer be inher-
ently enjoyable. Remember the woman who no longer loved
reading literature because her Ph.D. program was so diffi cult?
Well, what’s the answer here? Stop the doctoral program? Just
give up?
In a few years, what do you think will be more intrinsi-
cally rewarding to her: Being a quitter and maybe going back
to reading Shakespeare on her couch by herself? Or fi nding a
new source of motivation, a deeper emotional connection to