Page 95 - The Power to Change Anything

84 INFLUENCER

n this chapter we examine the first and most basic source
of motivation—intrinsic satisfaction. This source of influ-
Ience asks the question: Do individuals take personal satis-
faction from doing the required activity? That is, does enacting
the vital behavior itself bring people pleasure? If not, how can
you get people (yourself or others) to do things they currently find
loathsome, boring, insulting, or painful?
For example, how could you ever convince a lifetime drug
addict to withstand the pain of withdrawal long enough to get
clean? Or for that matter, how might you motivate a terrified
nurse to tell an intimidating doctor that he needs to wash his
hands more thoroughly before examining patients?
If you can’t find a way to change a person’s intrinsic
response to a behavior—if you can’t make the right behaviors
pleasurable and the wrong behaviors painful—you’ll have to
make up for the motivational shortfall by relying on external
incentives or possibly even punishments. You know what that’s
like. Your son hates taking out the garbage, so you load on the
“pretty pleases” or threaten to ground him through puberty.
Your employees despise completing quality checks, so you
have to harp on them every few hours. The guy who owns the
empty lot next to your house hates keeping it neat (as required
by the community code), so you have to keep ratting him out
to the local authorities. And guess what. If you stop grounding,
harping, or ratting folks out, they’ll stop doing what they’re sup-
posed to be doing because they don’t like doing it.
The point? If we could only find a way to make a healthy
behavior intrinsically satisfying, or an unhealthy behavior
inherently undesirable, then we wouldn’t need to keep apply-
ing pressure—forever. The behavior would carry its own moti-
vational power—forever.
So here’s our first question. Can you actually change how
humans experience a behavior? Naturally, we’re not talking
about simply adding a spoonful of sugar. That’s cheating. We’re
asking whether it’s possible to change the meaning of a behav-