Op-Ed: Demythologizing motivation, and why it must happen

Wysa visualized American Psychological Association data to illustrate the toll AI developments are already taking on workers’ health.
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If you in a moment of madness search the news for “motivation”, be prepared for a rough ride. The terminology alone is like 40 miles of a lousy road that doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

Motivation is a cash cow for HR psychology. It infests business seminars. It’s slavishly taught to novice managers who may or may not know anything at all about business or anything else.

People are supposed to be motivated. There’s even a thing called Self Determination Theory which explains why people should be motivated.

Not all that awe-inspiring, is it? Imagine somebody having their own motivations. Apparently, some people can’t imagine other people having their own motivations. In the name of supporting this level of ignorance, we have theories.  

Then there are young people, those happy insolvent people you may have heard about. Their motivation is apparently a serious issue requiring more than hearsay, and also more uninformed verbosity than all the dictionaries and thesauruses on Earth combined.

You don’t say. Meanwhile, the countless absurd stories about the Mills and Zoomers being “lazy” and “unmotivated” could fill libraries. These two generations, with arguably the worst possible role models and most unnecessary economic environments in history have little to inspire them.

How are you supposed to be motivated by a corrupt, nepotistic, insane, and incompetent society? Are you a “money mad Zoomer” because you can’t possibly afford anything you actually need?

This is where motivation is important and must be properly managed.

We have two totally demotivated generations. We can expect them to act accordingly. Oddly, and sleepy demographers and statistically inclined people should note this, the society as a whole isn’t exactly motivated, either. Add to this the quality of motivational tools.

For example – Shopify’s 200+ motivational quotes all have one thing in common. They’re mainly by highly successful people, most of whom are dead. They’re not necessarily relatable. They’re not directly in context with the needs of some poor bastard trying to survive.

OK, so much for where motivation isn’t going and what it’s not doing. It’s too annoying a subject.

So is motivation itself in too many ways. If you’ve just been hit by one of life’s many asteroids, you need more than “sayings from the grave”.

One of the things that caught my eye while trawling the unspeakable quantities of fluff for this article was “motivational interviewing” That link is to a perfectly forgivable article by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

It’s an overview of the subject, and I’ve written stuff like that myself, and it’s not just empty terminology, which makes it difficult to write. You have to fit in the useful stuff into the space available, much like motivation itself. That article could be a book and probably should be. Some of the terminology is unavoidable, but it covers what motivational interviewing is and what it does.

You can’t really say that about a lot of motivational stuff. It’s like the person to be motivated was some sort of plugin or optional extra, not directly related to the subject.

That doesn’t work.

It can’t.

Imagine someone in a major lifetime crisis, or the usual barren wastes of the job market, and the total sum of information is “You should be motivated.”

So what, may one enquire ever so sweetly?

You’re not going to fix someone’s broken life with “sayings from beyond the grave”.

The point about motivational interviewing is that it involves the person to be motivated. That’s all too obviously lacking.

(I spent years working in the employment sector in the US and Europe, and I promise you motivation was basically extinct. The people I was talking to wouldn’t have believed they were being motivated if you hit them with an electric cow prod.)

Motivation must be:

Directly relevant to the person.

Practical in terms of solutions.

Motivation must equate to solid positive achievements.

Nuance is required and probably a lot of it. There’s no One Size Fits All for motivation. You have to connect with the person. Not all heartbroken, confused, lost, frustrated, and deprived people are the same.

It looks to me that motivation science is getting out of the Underachieving Ditchdigging era.

Let’s help it along, shall we?