Animesh Kumar {itsAnimesh}

This article, which is worth reading, it talks about two kinds of motivation: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation… Extrinsic motivation is what we are taught at school and by our parents… They force us to do things we don’t like, and after a while we get good at it and we are rewarded… We grow to like those rewards, and as such we grow to like that which we are good at… Extrinsic motivation is easy… Find something to do, find an appropriate reward, and you’re set for life…

Extrinsic motivation is easy, you just have to do what other people tell you, and you can feel that you are satisfied by doing that… But if ever your extrinsic motivation fails you, then you will have to look inside yourself for motivation… And that might not be the easiest thing if your main experience is with extrinsic motivation… You will need to learn to reward yourself for whatever it is that you do, and that seems a bit fake to me…

Intrinsic motivation is what separates the machines from the humans, the juice stall employee from the philosophers, the masses from the enlightened… I would go so far as to say that if you don’t have intrinsic motivation, your life is not worth living… If everything you do is to get praise from others, then what value is there in your life???

Obviously I wouldn’t say this if I was very extrinsically motivated… But the truth is, although I am very intrinsically motivated, I do not have any strong intrinsic convictions or goals… I’ve got a whole list of things that I don’t care about in life, but I haven’t quite found what I do want to accomplish… I’m searching, of course. I quit my job in Pune because I realized it was not motivating me at all, and I decided that working for society for a while is a better match with my intrinsic goals… I still don’t know what those goals are!!! For the moment I’ve put in two placeholders: travelling and learning…

Why traveling??? Because new experiences will open your mind to new ideas, new concepts, that you would never get if you stayed at home… The Travel & Living Channel on your TV is not a substitute, you actually have to go somewhere to experience it… Travelling is not an end goal for me, but I believe I will get a better understanding of the world by travelling, and as such it should help me to figure out what I want to eventually do with my life…

Why learning??? Learning is rather generic… Very practically speaking, when I think about learning, I am thinking about learning new programming languages, new frameworks, new techniques… It is the niche that I am quite comfortable in and in which I can learn new things the fastest and with the least amount of frustration… The other side of learning is actually trying out new things that I know nothing about, like scuba diving, starting a company or investing in stocks…

Some people I know are very extrinsically motivated… But most people I know do have some level of intrinsic motivation… And most of them don’t know what it is that motivates them either… I wonder if people who are both truly intrinsically motivated and know what it is that drives them, are happier than people who are completely extrinsically motivated… Or one might rephrase that as: are stupid people happier than smart people??? Probably they are…

I haven’t posted my thoughts on this blog for a while, but reading about extrinsic and intrinsic motivations made me realize something…