Page 104 - The Power to Change Anything

Make the Undesirable Desirable 93

CREATE NEW MOTIVES

The “try it, you’ll like it” strategy assumes that people will find
a new activity rewarding if they just give it a chance. But many
activities produce few natural rewards. They’re also very diffi-
cult to transform into a game through constant feedback.
What can you do when neither the activity itself nor the natu-
ral feedback the activity produces are inherently pleasant or
motivating?
This is an important question because many important
human endeavors fall into this “not inherently pleasant” cate-
gory. For example, if you’re a villager with five Guinea worms
burning their way out of your body, your sole focus will be on
finding relief. You’re in pain, and you want it to stop. “Try gut-
ting it out, and you’ll like it” won’t work here. Adding a score-
board (how long can you stay away from the water?) is equally
unlikely to change your experience. So what’s left? How can
you help people not want to run and plunge their body into
the pain-relieving water supply when they crave relief right
now?

Connect to a Person’s Sense of Self

Unpleasant endeavors require a whole different sort of motiva-
tion that can come only from within. People stimulate this
internal motivation by investing themselves in an activity. That
is, they make the activity an issue of personal significance.
Succeeding becomes more than the challenge of reaching the
next level on a video game—it becomes a measure of who they
are. They set high standards of who they’ll be, high enough to
create a worthy challenge, and then they work hard to become
that very person.
For example, meet Grigori Perelman. Grigori worked his
head off for years in his dingy apartment in St. Petersburg,