I haven’t sent a post since November 2022, but haven’t stopped thinking about why we do the things we do. This post isn’t me resuming regular posts; I’m fine with sporadic at this time in my life. It’s me wanting to share Three Things that made me think about intrinsic motivation. It feels good to be here!

Here are the headlines:

1. Daisy Jones & The Six

2. Heather Lanier’s essay

3. Eleanor Gordon-Smith in The Guardian

+ An Asics ad

1. ‘It’s more pure’

I enjoyed reading Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & The Six a few years ago, and I loved watching the series. (The songs have made me dig my ukulele out of storage, and sing louder and more often than I had in a long time.)

This particular scene from episode 7 is what made me come here to share with you all. Singer-songwriter Daisy and her friend (and fellow musician) Simone are speaking to art for art’s sake advocates at a party on a gorgeous Greek island:

MARY: Petros won a big prize for his poetry. Four years ago? Stopped publishing after that.

DAISY: Why’d you stop publishing?

PETROS: I didn’t. I just say “no” to the moneymen. But still, I write every day.

SIMONE: How do people read it?

PETROS: Come to our house! The door’s always open.

SIMONE: Sorry, I don’t understand. Isn’t the whole point of making stuff for it to be seen, heard, you know, shared?

GIORGIOS: No, no, the point is in the making, my dear. That’s where the joy is. Our job is to stay in a state of grace. Everything else is just applause.

PETROS: He’s right, you know. Never let other people tell you whether your work has value because then, they own you. Now I write for myself. For my friends, for the waves. It’s more pure.

Later, Simone tells her friend:

Daisy, I know you. You don’t write music just to write. You need to be heard, you need to connect.

PS: I couldn’t find those scenes on YouTube, so here’s a scene of hearing and connecting:

2. ‘it never works to run from ourselves’

In her essay Embrace Your True Subject, writer Heather Lanier describes the meanders of assembling her poems into a book (now published under the title Psalms of Unknowing).

I finally asked a question every artist probably needs to consider at some point in their lives: What if the thing I’m trying to bury is the thing that needs to come forward?

Her insights will certainly resonate with writers, and I believe they also apply widely—to career decisions, to parenting choices, maybe even to low-stakes fashion picks.

It turns out that it never works to run from ourselves—not in regular life, and not in art-making, either. […] I like to think all our good ideas come from our inner wisdom—that faithful compass inside each of us.

The Slow Take

Embrace Your True Subject

Helllooooo, readers! We have some new folks here, courtesy of an essay I wrote for Jane Friedman’s website. In today’s post, I’m resharing that essay, about the stumbling blocks I met while putting together my latest book, Psalms of Unknowing. Kirkus Reviews called it a “powerful poetic reckoning with motherhood and religion,” but at one point, it could…

Read more

2 years ago · 14 likes · 3 comments · Heather Lanier

PS: Heather Lanier also wrote this gorgeous essay, published in 2017 by Vela Mag, that I urge every parent (or every person, really) to read.

3. ‘when you feel most like yourself’

In her weekly column for the Guardian back in November, ethicist Eleanor Gordon-Smith advised a reader who asked: “How do I figure out what I want? I feel like I am good at achieving goals that I care about, but I’m hopeless at deciding what goals to pursue.”

Gordon-Smith starts by clarifying the question: figuring out what we want is not the same as asking what we should want, or how to have an ideal life.

The question of what you want is separate to both. It’s about asking when you feel most like yourself. When do you feel at ease; like you have both feet firmly planted on the floor? When do you feel like the best of you is showing up in your interactions? When are you proud of yourself in that deep, lamp-in-the-soul type way?

[…] So much opportunity can turn into the imperative to never waste any.

But one way to absolutely guarantee wasting it is to let optimisation be the enemy of good. The upside is that once you pick something, anything, things often get more wantable the more you commit to continuing to want them.

It’s not that you got the decision “right”, just that once you’ve made it, you can finally cease looking at life with evaluative eyes, and live it instead.

This reminded me of philosopher Ruth Chang’s take on choices and commitment, which I wrote about here:

Bonus

Here’s an ad by sportswear manufacturer Asics:

I don’t feel the obligation to exercise to look a certain way, but I do feel I should exercise to achieve a certain state—more relaxed, more functional, less something or another. (Obviously, they’re selling shoes and clothes here. But still, touché.)

Thanks for sticking around and I really hope you’re well. xx

A warm welcome to the subscribers who joined us after my interview with the wise Amy Edmondson about psychological safety. (This has been my most popular piece so far! Click here or below to read or listen to it:)

Why Would Anyone

#101: How to create safe teams

Listen now (26 min) | As a PhD researcher, Amy Edmondson studied whether better teamwork in a hospital setting would predict lower error rates. Her results were counter-intuitive: the data showed that better teams had higher error rates. She then understood that the better teams were more open, willing and able to talk about errors and report them. “There was a toxic interpr…

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4 years ago · 9 likes · 1 comment · Tania Rabesandratana

If you’re new to Why Would Anyone, I hope you’ll like it here! I usually alternate between Three Things posts (like today) and essays or interviews exploring why we do the things we do.

For now, here are Three Things that made me think about intrinsic motivation in the past week:

1. Complex career decisions

2. Gamification misuse

3. Ken Sheldon’s book

1. What will it take?

In this opinion article, titled “Why women say no to leadership positions” and published in Frontiers in Pediatrics some weeks ago, a US physician writes about the importance of understanding the values and deep motivations of potential recruits for leadership positions.

Tessie W. October’s comments apply also beyond paediatrics and academia:

When I chatted with a recruiter, she asked, “What will it take for me to move you?” I responded, “The question you should be asking is what motivates me?” She then asked and I responded: “Anything I do has to validate my role as a good mother. Secondly, I am motivated by purpose, not fame, not money, not power.”

She also lists some of the many practical questions that will influence career moves:

Is there a strong swim team? How long will it take to travel to my parents in an emergency? Will we find a French-speaking nanny? And as a woman of color an extra layer of questions arise around safety. Can my son walk in this neighborhood wearing a hoodie? If I do not know the answers to these questions and the hundreds of other questions playing out in my head, I cannot decide if this job is the right fit.

Hat tip: my friend Jessica Wilen’s newsletter A Cup of Ambition.

2. No-learning zone

In May, I wrote about my troubled relationship with the gamified language learning app Duolingo. (I’ve since removed the addictive app from my phone, and only remember random Greek words.)

Two days ago, I was shocked to learn that some people reach insane levels of cheating at Duolingo (aren’t I naïve?) in the latest issue of Caitlin Dewey’s newsletter Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends. She wrote about the phenomenon of “XP farming”—playing the game only to accumulate points that have no value outside the app—and mentioned an (as-yet non-peer-reviewed) study by researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The researchers say:

Gamification misuse is a phenomenon that occurs when users become too fixated on gamification and get distracted from learning. This undesirable phenomenon wastes users’ precious time and negatively impacts their learning performance.

The researchers identify different reasons behind gamification misuse:

• active ones—i.e. the gamers’ own “competitiveness, overindulgence in playfulness, and [drive to challenge] the system” and

• passive ones—i.e. app features that “indirectly manipulate” users: “dark nudges of gamification, compulsion, and herding”.

This all makes me feel vindicated about my gripes with the app, or possibly with gamification more broadly. And also, isn’t this fake learning sad and infuriating? Dewey writes:

It’s also hard to miss the fact, however, that these features are working exactly as intended. In Duolingo’s most recent shareholder letter, CEO Luis von Ahn described several of the app’s gamification features as plays to boost revenue and engagement. Incidentally, the number of paid Duolingo subscribers was up 71 percent [!] from a year earlier.

[…]

“If your goal is to learn a language in the most efficient way possible, you’d be better off using something other than DuoLingo,” one short-lived Duolinguist wrote. “And if your goal is to have fun gaming, then you’d be better off finding a game more fun than duolingo.” 

3. Curious cats

You may have seen me quoting the work of Ken Sheldon, a psychology researcher at the University of Missouri, for instance on the motivations of long-distance hikers and on materialism around Christmas time. He’s just released a pop psych book titled Freely Determined: What the New Psychology of the Self Teaches Us about How to Live, which I’m excited to read.

This excerpt published by Lit Hub is a good primer on the history of self-determination theory, “the world’s most comprehensive and best-supported theory of human motivation,” how it emerged in the late 1960s, and how it contrasts with other theories of human motivation:

Today, the concept of intrinsic motivation is almost1 universally accepted, and it is easily seen even in nonhuman animals (just search for “curious cats” on YouTube). The bigger the brain, the more intrinsic motivation it has—the more it “plays.”

But in the 1960s, intrinsic motivation was a radical idea. Psychologists through the 1950s and into the 1960s (before the so-called cognitive revolution) were not comfortable with the idea that people “moved themselves” or “directed themselves.”

The real causes of our behavior, according to the drive and behaviorist theories of the 1940s and 1950s, had to be some combination of physical factors (one’s biological drives) and historical factors (one’s conditioning). […] A hungry undergraduate keeps returning to a particular snack machine for food, and an underwater swimmer keeps returning to the surface for air.

Today, we know that intrinsic motivation is a real thing and that it is really important. Self-directed exploration and play are primary factors in human learning and development. Our curiosity, more than anything else, is what promotes deep and lasting learning, not the grades or the praise we receive.

My next post on Wednesday will sum up what I’ve learnt in the past year of writing this newsletter with the support of the Attuned writer fellowship. See you then, and subscribe if you don’t already:

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In case you missed it: last week I published a letter to my pregnant friend listing five (of many) things I wish I’d understood before giving birth—from an intrinsic motivation perspective, of course. It might be useful to other people around you who are preparing to meet their babies.

Also, I’m excited to announce an interview with Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, the expert on psychological safety at work (and beyond), next week.

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Now, onto the Three Things that made me think about motivation in the past week:

1. Personal growth ‘freaks’

2. Deconstructing big projects

3. Intrinsic motivation in gaming

1. Let your freak fly

You may have seen me occasionally quote “personal growth” authors around here, while also claiming to be wary of gurus and prescriptions. I nodded my head in recognition when I read this post by Jeff Gill of the FFOREST newsletter, who put his finger on why consuming “growth stuff” leaves him (and me) “feeling vaguely angry”:

[These ‘growth people’] are not normal. They are at the ends of all the spectrums. They leap out of bed before five AM and drink a gallon something green and powerful while immersed in ice and doing journalling with key members of their power team. […] They studiously avoid all social media while simultaneously creating 75 pieces of social media content daily— I’m actually getting annoyed now.

They live their freakish lives then turn to you and say, If you want to be successful, you must… and they list the freaky things they do. […]

You and I are closer to the middle of these various spectrums. We find it easier to shut down our weirdness and go with the general flow of culture. I think the big lesson here is: Let’s not.

It’s easy to dismiss that kind of content as prescriptive and removed from our reality (as I do), and just close the tab. I liked Gill’s invitation to view the growth people’s “success” as non-literal inspiration—to find our own ways and metrics and “do our own weird.”

Read Gill’s (short) post here:

FFOREST

🔋 TREE 467: I consume personal growth media so you don’t have to

This is a longish one – 450 words instead of 250. I read and listen to quite a bit of personal and business growth stuff. I learn useful things from the people who create it. I can’t do it all the time though because most growth people leave me feeling vaguely angry…

Read more

4 years ago · 5 likes · 9 comments · Jeff Gill

2. A single action

Oliver Burkeman, the author of Four Thousand Weeks (I’ve mentioned his work before here, here and here), notes in the latest issue of his sign-up-worthy newsletter that “a lot of advice on how to get things done is borderline useless” to him. He’s either in a good place, making steady progress with his projects with no need for elaborate systems, or in a bad place, where the mere idea of a productivity system is “preposterously over-ambitious.” Yes!

Instead, he suggests doing one thing.

It's noteworthy, I think, that framing the challenge of action in this way – that is, by focusing on one thing you could and would do – differs subtly from the cliched old time management tip that you should "break a big project down into small chunks." Thinking in those terms still places the "big project" – that intimidating or repellent thing – front and centre. It's still ultimately a matter of trying to force or trick yourself into working on something you'd rather not be doing. Whereas zeroing in on a single action has a way of bringing into your awareness at least one little task that, in fact, you wouldn't mind doing at all. And one is all you ever need.

In the end, it isn't really a question of "breaking big projects down into small chunks." It's more a matter of seeing that "big projects" are nothing but psychological constructs, quasi-illusory entities summoned into existence by taking a particular view of what our lives really consist of – which is moments, and the actions that unfold in them.

3. Nihilist gamers

Finally, I found this Twitter thread by game designer Rosa Carbó-Mascarell intriguing. It certainly matches my very limited experience of gaming (see also this post about my frustration with a gamified language learning app):

Big news: I’m launching a new project this Thursday! It will be a (separate) weekly newsletter about untangling the joyous mess of living in a multicultural family. That newsletter is for you if you’re raising multicultural kids, thinking about having them, or grew up in a mixed family. It’s for you if you want to explore the questions big and small that come up in mixed relationships and parenting.

If you’d like to receive it, reply to this email 🙋🏽and I’ll add you to the list 💌. SQUEE!

And now, onto the Three Things that got me thinking about the reasons why we do the things we do:

1. Grandpa David

2. Positive vs. negative framing

3. Leaving Amazon

1. ‘Challenging Mother Nature’

Last month, writer Rachel Handler published a Q&A with David, her late ‘grandpa-in-law’, about his decision to have a “voluntary assisted death” facility in Switzerland.

Who the hell wants to die? I don’t. I’ve had so much fun in my life! The places I’ve gone to, the things I’ve done. I love it. But I can’t enjoy it.

David speaks about his declining quality of life as the main reason for his decision; about the disapproval of medical doctors and the support of his family; his emotions—sadness, hurt, love, gratitude, no anger. I started picking more excerpts to share with you, but would rather encourage you to read the whole interview over at The Cut. It is moving, respectfully done, and has left me with more questions than answers.

2. Scary messages

During the COVID-19 pandemic (as in other situations), health messages urging people to adopt certain behaviours could be framed negatively (e.g. wear a mask to avoid losing your health and avoid endangering others) or positively (e.g. stay home to stay healthy and protect others). A big study, published in the journal Affective Science last month and spanning 84 countries, 16,000 participants and 48 languages1, found that "message framing had little-to-no measurable benefit for behavioral intentions, policy attitudes, or information seeking, but did have a significant emotional cost in terms of increased [self-reported] anxiety."

Jennifer Lerner, one of the co-authors of the study and a professor of public policy, decision science, and management at Harvard Kennedy School, said in a press release last week:

These data imply that scaring citizens is not the answer. Public health advisories shouldn’t emphasize only the bad things that could happen from inaction; doing so in this case increased citizens’ anxiety without producing any benefit in behavior.

The anxiety part sounds a little self-evident; the no-benefit part, less so. The paper says previous health psychology research comparing actions associated with gains (e.g., wearing sunscreen to clear skin) vs. inaction associated with losses (e.g., not wearing sunscreen to skin cancer) has “yielded mixed results” so far.

There is at least one study, however, that used a reasonably comparable paradigm but which found divergent results: Abhyankar et al. (2008) found a loss-frame advantage on intentions to obtain the MMR vaccine for one’s child. It could be the case that the effects of loss- vs. gain-message framing differ when assessing health intentions for oneself vs. another person, especially when the other person is a child under one’s care. Additional possibilities include that there may be something specific about an unfolding (and highly uncertain) pandemic that blunted such effects or that the gain/loss manipulations were weaker in the present study.

3. Going indie

In February 2019, Daniel Vassallo left a high-paying software developer job to go indie. Apparently, things are going well for him (he sells online courses, an online membership for self-employed folks, and other products):

In this Medium post titled “Only intrinsic motivation lasts”, he wrote about his initial reasons for leaving his “cushy job at Amazon after 8 years”: he wanted to do something that he could “consider satisfactory” if he kept doing it until 80 years old:

Despite getting rewarded repeatedly with promotions, compensation, recognition, and praise, I wasn’t motivated enough to do another year. […]

It would have been foolish of me to expect my motivation to start increasing if I got yet another promotion, or another compensation bump, or another big project. But there was something else that was trending down with my motivation. It was my freedom. […]

The things that don’t wear off are those that I’ve been doing since I was a kid, when nothing was forcing me to do them. Things such as writing code, selling my creations, charting my own path, calling it like I saw it. I know my strengths, and I know what motivates me, so why not do this all the time?

(With thanks to Anita at Worldwise for the tip!)

Last week, I published a 20-minute podcast interview with INSEAD professor Jennifer Petriglieri, author of Couples that work (a book I recommend to all working couples), and I hope you’ll give it a listen. She gave us useful ideas on not getting sucked into other people’s life plans, the illusion of the 50/50 couple, as well as midlife crises and how to navigate them thoughtfully as a pair. You can read the whole transcript or listen here:

Why Would Anyone

#93: How to thrive as a dual-career couple

Listen now (21 min) | Welcome to our third podcast interview! Jennifer Petriglieri is an associate professor of organisational behaviour at INSEAD in France, and the author of Couples That Work: How dual-career couples can thrive in love and work. She spent years studying the lives of dual career couples, interviewing hundreds of them to identify typical patterns and traps t…

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4 years ago · 5 likes · Tania Rabesandratana

And now, onto Three Things that got me thinking about why we do the things we do:

1. The concerns of a Formula-1 champion

2. Rewards-based recovery programmes

3. Bad bosses

1. #THEREISSTILLARACETOWIN

In July, German race driver Sebastian Vettel said he’d retire from Formula 1 by the end of the 2022 season. He inaugurated his Instagram account (he had so far eschewed social media) with a stark black-and-white video announcement, explaining that racing is taking his time and energy away from his family and that there’s much more to his life than Formula 1.

I love this sport. It has been central to my life for since I can remember. […] Being a racing driver has never been my sole identity. I very much believe in identity by who we are and how we treat others rather than what we do.

[…] My goals have shifted from winning races and fighting for championships to seeing my children grow […].

While his statement doesn’t use the words “climate”, “environment”, or “petrol”, Vettel also hints at his environmental concerns (which he’s mentioned in clearer terms before and after his career announcement) as another reason behind his decision:

My passion comes with certain aspects that I have learned to dislike. […] Talk is not enough and we can not afford to wait. There is no alternative. The race is underway.

“People say I am greenwashing,” the UK Mirror quoted Vettel as saying last month. “I am and we are, but I try to do what I can.” I have no idea how much of a difference his stance can make in practice, in car racing or elsewhere. But I’ll take Vettel’s posture—admitting contradictions and trying to do something anyway, however small and imperfect—over this kind of superior, tone-deaf reaction.

2. Candy crush

Last month, the AP wrote about the rise of US programmes that give prizes (“candy, gum, gift cards, sunglasses and headphones”) to reward people for staying in treatment for opioid addiction. Writer Carla K. Johnson says such programmes are “widely recognized as the most effective treatment for people addicted to stimulants,” especially when “the dollar value increases with consistent performance.” She cites—among other experts—psychologist Stephen Higgins of the University of Vermont, who pioneered the method in 1991: “It’s very much using that same dopamine reward system that’s the basis for addictions to promote healthy behavior change.”

Motivation researcher Ayelet Fishbach, author of Get It Done, told me in June about the over justification effect:

[Past] research on over justification made the point that when you give kids rewards for drawing, they will not want to draw once the incentive is removed. You want to have justification, just not over justification. The difference is often subtle. [Does the incentive fit the activity,] or is it an over justification that takes away from my enjoyment? 

I wonder if and how this plays out here, and I’m curious to know what happens after these recovery programmes end. Does it matter that the incentives aren’t directly linked to the rewarded behaviour? Will the direct benefits of recovery itself become the reward?

Harold Lewis, a former cook in recovery, says in the AP report:

At first, I was like: ‘I don’t need a prize!’ But after I won, like, $80 in gift cards, it became a little sweeter. Recovery should be fun because you’re getting your life back.

3. Blame it on me

Yes, I know. Quiet quitting seems to be merely a fancy alliteration to describe behaviours as old as salaried work. I have read about three pieces about it: one article to understand what the name meant; one from my Substack friend Jessica Wilen because I knew she’d have a thoughtful take that’d make sense for my life as a working parent; and this one over at Harvard Business Review last week (because it was picked up by my “intrinsic motivation” news alert).

The story’s all in the headline: “Quiet Quitting Is About Bad Bosses, Not Bad Employees”:

It’s easy to place the blame for quiet quitting on lazy or unmotivated workers, but instead, this research is telling us to look within and recognize that individuals want to give their energy, creativity, time, and enthusiasm to the organizations and leaders that deserve it.

Surprise! You’re exceptionally getting a second batch of Three Things this week. On Wednesday you’ll receive a Q&A / podcast episode (!) with Jennifer Petriglieri (!!), and a Why Would Anyone post on Friday. Then we'll resume our usual programming.

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Now, onto the three items that made me think about motivation:

1. Gift-goals > should-goals

2. How to read more books (if you want to!)

3. Free content moderation

1. Let running be easy

This quote on setting “gift-goals” rather than “should-goals”, from Tara Mohr’s excellent Playing Big:

… whenever I’ve had the opportunity to get a closer look at the people I thought of as having remarkable self-discipline, I found they were each driven by something different. For one of my friends who is a marathon runner, authentic passion for running plus a running group she loves are the drivers that keep her doing it every day, even when it’s hard. But another friend of mine runs daily because she feels terrified of gaining weight and uncomfortable with her body. They both look self-disciplined from the outside, but in fact one is taking action out of compulsion and shame, and the other is taking action because she’s well supported and loves what she’s doing.

2. Let reading be easy

A dear friend (who sees me quoting a lot of books in this newsletter) asked me how I find the time to read. I’ve identified three elements that I believe make it easier for me to weave reading into my daily life, although none of these feel like an effortful, conscious strategy.

(Before I go into these: this newsletter is my job at the moment; I am paid to write it. It’s part of my work to read as widely as I can and mine books for ideas related to motivation. This is a privilege that I don’t take for granted.)

1. I don’t feel I should read certain books in a certain way. I give myself permission to read whatever I fancy, no matter how (un)fashionable, and usually have several books going on at the same time. I stop reading whenever I want, come back to books I’d abandoned, re-read books I loved. (If you need permission to do any of this, go here or here.) I have periods of profuse reading, and other periods where I’d rather binge-watch Breeders. It’s all okay.

2. I make it convenient to read. The game-changer for me has been owning a backlit e-reader. It allows me to download books in a flash; I otherwise wouldn’t have easy/quick/cheap access to books in English where I live. More importantly, it allows me to read in the dark (I read most evenings while my children are falling asleep) and one-handed (I used to spend hours reading while feeding my babies).
   What would be convenient for you? Could you leave great novels in the toilet? Install a reading app on your phone so you can read while queuing at the post office?

3. I associate reading with the pleasure of going to sleep. When I’m immersed in a really good book, I’m impatient to go to bed to read that next chapter. Maybe you could associate reading with another habit, like eating a fine sandwich on your lunch break, or listening to an audiobook while you drive or fold laundry.

Psyche published this guide in 2020, titled How to read more books. It echoes the suggestions above and adds other ideas:

• Reflect on why you want to read more books. What would the benefits be?

• Set modest goals—maybe a few pages / minutes a day, and “track your progress by recognising every day that you managed to read, rather than by ticking off completed books.”

• Does your social environment support reading? (You could consider joining a book club.)

Last but not least, my friend Sarah wrote eloquently last month about prioritising our own reading in Can we read?, her newsletter about children's literature:

in our culture, we reward immediate, tangible results — a vacuumed house, a homecooked meal on the table, tasks that “prove” we are “doing our jobs” as, let’s be honest, mothers — rather than the outcome of a more nebulous life of the mind: reading, and the vast knowledge that come from it.

3. Crowd wisdom

Twitter has launched a pilot programme called Birdwatch to flag and slow down the spread of misinformation on the platform. Gizmodo reported last week on potential problems with it: some misinformation specialists worry that the “criteria to become a [Birdwatch] contributor are lax”. It works like Wikipedia:

Birdwatch relies on its thousands of anonymous unpaid contributors — there are currently 15,000, although Twitter plans to onboard up to 1,000 more each week going forward — to add contextual notes to tweets to stop the spread of misinformation.

Here’s Twitter vice-president of product Keith Coleman explaining why the Birdwatch volunteers aren’t getting external rewards for their work (also, free labour is cheaper?):

We think that generally the more intrinsic that motivation is for people doing that, the better the outcome will be and the more trustworthy it will seem. So, we’re open to exploring other kinds of recognition for contributors. […] These people are doing great work and some of them are doing a lot of it, and we want them to feel the power of that. […] We wanted the contributors to feel that like, “Hey, I wrote this note and 100,000 people saw it,” or “I helped rate this note and a 100,000 people saw it.” […] We do hear again and again that the reason these people are here is because they want to get information out in the world that helps people stay informed, and so we think that’s an avenue to at least satisfy that core motivation that they have.

Here are Three items that got me thinking about why we do the things we do:

1. Failure irrelevant

2. Hanging out on set

3. Figuring out what we want

Let’s go:

1. Trickster grin

I’ve been thinking again about this quote from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear:

There is a famous question that shows up, it seems, in every single self-help book ever written: What would you do if you knew that you could not fail? 
But I've always seen it differently. I think the fiercest question of all is this one: What would you do even if you knew that you might very well fail? 
What do you love doing so much that the world's failure and success essentially become irrelevant? 
What do you love even more than you love your own ego? 
How fierce is your trust in that love?
You might challenge this idea of fierce trust. You might buck against it. You might want to punch and kick at it. You might demand of it, “Why should I go through all the trouble to make something if the outcome might be nothing?” The answer will usually come with a wicked trickster grin: “Because it's fun, isn't it?”

2. The Hang

It took me a while to acknowledge how important social relationships are for me to be happy at work. I can tolerate hard or boring tasks if the team is fun and welcoming, but interesting tasks are rarely enough to make up for a dull or unfriendly workplace.

It turns out that the same is true in Hollywood; actor Tom Hanks calls this the hang. In the 5 September episode of the Armchair Expert podcast, he describes the importance of that time spent hanging out with cast and crew between scenes: building memories, swapping stories and jokes and sharing food from the catering service. (I bet folks who feel respected and included on set often make better movies, too.)

Around 27.00:

Tom Hanks — You can talk about the work and the director and all that kind of stuff till the cows come home. And at the end of the day, that’s not what fills up your life. What fills up your life is What time did you get off work? How hot were the lights? And stuff like that.

Around 43:00:

Interviewer Monica Padman — I just want to underscore the ‘hang’ part, because not everybody listening is in [show] business, and that can be applied across the board.

Hanks — Any job has a hang.

Padman — Exactly, and that’s where the aliveness is, that’s what you take away when you go home and you talk to your friends at dinner.

3. No person is an island

Here is another set of prompts, this time from a recent Vox article titled How to figure out what you want out of life—a few questions that can help those of us who tend to pay more attention to external expectations than to our own intrinsic motivation :

[Psychologist Jeremy] Nicholson recommends paying attention to your feelings when confronted with significant milestones. Are you running away from something or running toward it?

It’s not about asking the question, ‘What do you want out of life?’ which sets you up for external measurements again, and some kind of ‘measured entity’ or ‘output,’” [therapist Natasha] Sharma says. “Instead, ask yourself: ‘What do I enjoy about life?’”

[Therapist Mercedes] Coffman says to consider what naturally excites you and to feed those desires. “If you lived on an island and there was nobody around to people-please or to impress, what is it that you would want in your life?”

Here are three things that made me think about intrinsic motivation in the past days:

1. Dorian Gray

2. A Guardian column

3. The real reasons behind medical complaints

Before I go into them, a kind reminder that I published an enlightening Q&A with health psychologist Rory O’Connor for World Suicide Prevention Day, on 10 September. I hope it reaches as many people as possible.

Onto this week’s Things:

1. Bad influence

I’m re-reading The Picture of Dorian Gray (though I think I didn’t finish it the first time around). Here’s what Lord Henry tells Gray shortly after meeting him in Chapter 2:

“There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral – immoral from the scientific point of view.” 

“Why?”

“Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self.”

2. Spot-on

I enjoyed this snarky Guardian column by Emma Beddington, ridiculing silly / toxic lists of things you must have done by X years old:

The sense you aren’t where you should be, and that others are, is a surefire thief of joy, and we shouldn’t let blokes who overuse fire emojis steal our joy.

and

People, you discover, do awe-inspiring things at every age: there’s an 86-year-old water polo player in this week’s New York Times. But more importantly, they do the things they, not anyone else, wants: what fulfils them and what they enjoy.

3. Why patients complain

I’ve been finding Twitter even more tiresome and toxic than usual these days, but did come across an interesting thread by Marie Bismark, a professor of public health law at the University of Melbourne, Australia, who’s been studying patient complaints for 20 years.

In a 2006 paper, using case studies from New Zealand compensation claims and complaint files, Bismarck and her co-author listed the reasons why patients (or their families) take legal action after a medical injury: “money is only one of them”.

These motives, which all can be considered to represent a demand for some form of “accountability,” generally fit into four themes:

• restoration, including financial compensation or some other intervention to “make the patient whole again”;

• correction, such as a system change or competence review to protect future patients;

• communication, which may include an explanation, expression of responsibility, or apology; and

• sanction, including professional discipline or some other form of punitive action.

In New Zealand, the paper explains, injured patients are entitled to government-funded, no-fault compensation through the Accident Compensation Corporation— without claiming negligence or error. Whereas in a tort-based system (like in the United States), “where money is effectively the only remedy available to injured patients,” plaintiffs end up using the courts to demand damages that may mask their other motives.

(The link in the tweet below is broken, but you can download the paper as a PDF here.)

This reminded me of the “McDonald’s hot coffee case” episode of the (funny, smart) podcast You’re Wrong About. Remember that drive-through coffee burn story? It was reported in the 1990s as the epitome of frivolous lawsuits in the US. In the episode, Michael Hobbes explains in detail how this case is not a story of "jackpot justice", but a story of government outsourcing regulatory functions1 to the courts (and insurance claims).

What we want as a society is we want victims to be made whole again. And we want corporations to behave differently. I want McDonald's to not serve its coffee that hot again and I want Stella2 to be fine. […] We've linked these two things, but you can also imagine a situation where just like the government steps in and does both of those things separately. We don’t need Stella and McDonald's to have a fight with each other. 

In contrast, Bismarck writes:

By separating financial compensation from other forms of accountability, the New Zealand system is able to distinguish effectively between injured patients’ tangible and intangible needs, and respond effectively to patients’ desire for sanction, restoration, correction, and communication.

Here are today’s Three Things that got me thinking about why we do the things we do:

1. Serena Williams

2. Parenting for an audience

3. A 9-year-old’s sculpture

Shall we?

1. A grown-up decision

You’ve heard the news: Serena Williams has declared the end of her career as a professional tennis player, chiefly because she wants to focus on growing her family (her daughter Olympia has just turned 5). Williams had a sparkly last hurrah at the US Open last week, after announcing her decision in Vogue magazine in August.

In that first-person essay, she describes what she loves about tennis:

This sport has given me so much. I love to win. I love the battle. I love to entertain. I’m not sure every player sees it that way, but I love the performance aspect of it—to be able to entertain people week after week.

Williams loves the sport but she did not choose it1: her father, coach Richard Williams, famously decided to raise tennis champions. On the first episode of Archetypes2, the new podcast hosted by her pal Meghan Markle, which aired on 23 August, Williams describes that paradox, and the novelty of making her own momentous decision (around 44:40):

— Markle: How does it feel to be choosing a path for yourself?

— Williams: Oh my gosh. […] Tennis was chosen for me and I loved that choice and I couldn’t have made a better choice, right? So I was really happy that that happened. But now, for the first time in my entire life, I’m choosing to do something, and it’s hard! […] It’s something I’ve actually never done.

I find that quote fascinating. I naïvely expected such a high-caliber champion to be used to making hard decisions for herself. But of course expectations, obligations weighing on her shoulders must make it hard to pause and ask Wait, what do I want?

Now, she writes in Vogue that she wants her child to follow her own interests:

I got pushed hard by my parents. Nowadays so many parents say, “Let your kids do what they want!” Well, that’s not what got me where I am. I didn’t rebel as a kid. I worked hard, and I followed the rules. I do want to push Olympia—not in tennis, but in whatever captures her interest. But I don’t want to push too hard. I’m still trying to figure out that balance.

2. Performative parenting

I’ve been thinking about Claire Zulkey’s spot-on essay about trying to look like a good parent in public, in her excellent newsletter Evil Witches:

Trying is an aspect of public parenting. For me, that involves a lot of telegraphing that I’m working really hard to raise polite and conscientious young men who will be a benign-to-positive presence in the world. This little show started early when we were instructing near-infants at the playground to “share” and “take turns” even though they couldn’t even poop in a toilet or watch a whole TV show.

Trying is often performative, to show that despite what your child is currently doing, there is a certain standard of behavior you wish for that you hope reflects your values.

How relatable is this?! Do you also find it hard to parent your kid(s) in a way that works for you and your family at that moment, instead of performing (what you think is) a socially acceptable version of an adult-child interaction?

This reminded me of a woman (let’s call her #1) describing3 how another mother (#2) deeply focussed on her child who was having a hard time at nursery drop-off. #1 was impressed because #2 was (apparently) not caring about the other adults around her, whereas she (#1) would probably have been flustered, giving anxious glances to the other parents/nursery staff, not wanting to look like a sh*t mother. But worrying about the opinion of other folks at the scene doesn’t make for serene, competent parenting, right?4

The humiliating part about trying is that your kids know that in public, you likely won’t respond with some sort of meltdown or a doomsday option like leaving the pool early or declaring no screens at 10 AM. They know you have to choose your battles and that sometimes means looking like an idiot going “Guys. Guys. Guys. Guys. Guys,” over again over again so you don’t look like you gave up.

3. Ganesh

Okay, LinkedIn is full of dubious business “lessons” and pompous #mindset prescriptions and 🤦🏽‍♀️. But this one was cute.

I’m back with three fresh things that got me thinking about intrinsic motivation.

1. A Stoic’s quote

2. A funny take on a less funny situation

3. Desacralising nudges

In case you missed it, I published an enlightening Q&A with psychology researcher Johnmarshall Reeve about how school can harm intrinsic motivation, and what we can do about it: here are part 1 & part 2.

Onto this week’s things. If these made you go 🙂💡🤔, do subscribe to receive more. It’s free:

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1. Marcus Aurelius

This quote from the second book of Roman emperor / Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, translated1 by Gregory Hays in 2002:

“Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. But make sure you guard against the other kind of confusion. People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time—even when hard at work.”

Also, who knew there were so many Instagram accounts dedicated to sharing Marcus Aurelius quotes?!

2. ‘It is impossible to write a second novel’

I had a good chuckle at Sharon Lam’s take on the second-book slump, over at Aotearoa news website The Spinoff (‘the mid-shelf red wine of New Zealand journalism’). Are there other non-novelists here who can identify with Lam’s description of semi-coasting? (Expensive degrees need not be involved.)

You feel that your single published novel was a fluke and are worried that if you try to write a second you’ll prove yourself right. After all, you arrived at your first novel by rolling down the path of least resistance at the time – you didn’t want to get a job, so you applied to writing school. It worked, you were accepted and bought yourself another year, another Master’s degree, two in a row, which unfortunately you did not get for the price of one. You have no tertiary sanctuary now, there is literally no external reason to write another book. 

Between the funny lines, Lam points to the things we need to complete the projects we care about: community support and inspiration; deadlines; trials and errors (“false starts, traversing other mediums, a change in tools”); sitting down to work day after day until “the rhythm and habit” kick in.

I’m off to order Lam’s first novel, Lonely Asian Woman.

3. Nudges don’t work?

I’ve written about nudges before (here) and hadn’t read the growing body of research questioning their value. “After correcting for [a severe publication] bias, no evidence remains that nudges are effective as tools for behaviour change,” write folks at University College London and the University of Amsterdam in an analysis published last month by PNAS (a scientific journal of the US National Academy of Sciences).

Magda Osman, a Cambridge researcher who studies decision-making, sums it up in an article for The Conversation, explaining why we shouldn’t put such a burden on nudges to change people’s behaviour:

Right now, the best science we have is seriously questioning the effectiveness of nudging. […] That said, efforts to use behavioural interventions need not be abandoned. A better way forward would be to focus on building an evidence base showing which combinations of nudges and other approaches work together. For example, as I have shown, combinations of nudging methods together with changes in taxation and subsidies have a stronger effect on sustainable consumption than either being implemented alone.

[…] Given how complex human behaviour is, how could one single approach ever hope to change it? There’s not a single example of this being successfully done in history, at least not without impinging on human rights.

This is the third and last of my August re-runs, where we revisit or discover old favourites. Here are Three Things that made me think about parenting and intrinsic motivation, and that I had already shared in previous posts, with insights from:

1. Parenting guru Janet Lansbury

2. Slate advice columnist Rebecca Onion

3. This Is Us matriarch Rebecca Pearson

You may also be interested in post #3 (one of my earliest pieces!) where I interview twin studies specialists about the origins of intrinsic motivation in children—that old nature/nurture question.

And last week, I published a juicy Q&A with motivation Johnmarshall Reeve about what teachers can do to help children’s intrinsic motivation flourish at school. Subscribe to receive part 2 straight into your inbox:

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1. Parenting outcomes (from post #29)

If you frequent online parent groups (like I do), you’ve probably seen links to Janet Lansbury’s “respectful parenting” podcast episodes being passed on between worried mothers (yes, usually women) as precious remedial nuggets. I, too, have found solace in Lansbury’s words on wobbly days, and her suggestions have helped me to reframe hard situations.

So I was intrigued to know more about her own story, upbringing, and motivations in this recent profile by Ariel Levy for the New Yorker, where Lansbury says:

It’s not like I think I’m perfect, but I’m proud of how I am as a parent, and it’s a good feeling to have. [….] My whole goal is, I want people to believe in themselves that much.

In Lansbury’s world, respectful parenting roughly means giving children, from day one, the same level of respect you would give adults, meeting their needs, and stepping way back. It’s hard to tell if it works; a ‘good’ outcome will look different for different people anyway. But as Levy writes:

Lansbury, though, does not promise that her approach will lead to the best possible kid; what she’s selling is the best possible relationship.

We can find anecdotal clues in Lansbury’s own children. In one episode, her adult daughters Charlotte and Madeline reflect about growing up with (what Lansbury herself calls) “weird” parents. Their agreeing to talk publicly about their upbringing already seems like an endorsement; for what it’s worth, they also sound like well-adjusted, intrinsically motivated adults (full transcript here).

Here are two examples:

We were never made to do anything. […] I have friends now who say pretty confidently that looking back, they wish that their parents would have forced them to do the violin or some sport because now they would be really good at it. I strongly feel totally the opposite. It’s much more important to me that my parents raised me in a way that fostered the sense of: ‘we trust you to choose your activities and pursue […] your passion of the day’.

(around 20:49): Do we feel intrinsic motivation instead of doing things to seek approval? 100%. […] [My parents] kind of let school be my own territory, and whether or not I wanted to do an assignment was completely up to me. They realised that there were enough forces in effect at school [so that] you’ll be punished for a bad grade and you’ll be rewarded for a good one within that context.

2. Misnaming (from post #62)

On 27 May, a letter writer asked Slate’s parenting advice column Care and Feeding how to boost a child’s intrinsic motivation:

My first grader lacks intrinsic motivation for… basically everything. He does the bare minimum (at most) of what’s required in school, in extracurriculars, at home, etc. He is a generally happy, playful, smart and athletic kid, so any natural consequences of this “bare minimum effort” haven’t caught up with him yet. Do you have any tips or tricks to inspire him to care more? I want to avoid nagging and creating only external motivators/demotivators (like rewards and consequences). How do I build his intrinsic motivation to try harder?

Who decides if and what he should “care more” about, or “try harder” at? What about leaving that “happy, playful, smart and athletic kid” be? Rebecca Onion says it with more panache when she urges the letter writer to “parent the child who is in front of you”:

Maybe he just hasn’t found the thing, yet, that presses him to put forth his maximum effort. Or maybe he never will! If he’s happy and healthy, and responsible and kind, does it matter?

More broadly: it isn’t totally oxymoronic (what a delightful word!) to try and foster another person’s intrinsic motivation from, well, the outside, in particular if that person is your child (or employee, or student). There are conditions that can help intrinsic motivation to flourish, which involve a good deal of stepping back.

But when I read another parent say about her daughter, who is struggling with her second-grade homework:

I hate feeling like I’m forcing her to do this extra work when I don’t believe there’s a real benefit to most of it, but I’m a rule follower and so, if the teacher assigns it, we make sure she does it. We’ve tried to build some intrinsic motivation in the form of being proud at being able to do hard things and persevering even when some tasks aren’t fun, etc., but I’m honestly not sure how much that’s helping.

… I get a little worried that “intrinsic motivation” is becoming a misnomer for “the will to do what we adults want them to do”.

3. Yes Ma’am (from post #69)

I’ve just finished watching This Is Us, and I was not ready for the series to end. 😥

*SPOILER ALERT*

That heartbreaking quote from matriarch Rebecca Pearson, in episode 7 (and the rest of season 6), as she summons her adult children and lays out the law for the upcoming years of her life with Alzheimer’s:

My last request is less of a request and more of a demand, actually. […]

I need you all to hear my voice right now, your mother’s voice, with all of her faculties.

You will not make your lives smaller because of me.

This thing that’s happening to me will not be the thing that holds you back. So, take the risks. Make the big moves, even if they’re small moves. Forge ahead with your lives in any and every direction that moves you. I’m your mother and I’m sick, and I’m asking you to be fearless. And if that seems like that is a tall order, well, guess what, it is. But the only acceptable response is a resounding, “Yes, ma’am.”

This is the second of my (Northern-hemisphere) summer re-runs, where we revisit or discover old favourites. Here are three things that made me think about intrinsic motivation, and that I had shared in previous posts:

1. what masters do

2. a funny/wise tweet

3. planning for burnout

Could this also be an opportune time to listen to my podcast interviews with Nir Eyal (How to stay focussed) and Daniel Pink (How to harness the right kind of motivation)? They’re under 20 minutes each, and to the point.

1. Your precious gems (from post #23)

From this soothing 8-minute video by French film-maker Mai Hua:

[Teachers or masters are not] giving anything to you. They’re pulling out of you, from the mine of your soul, your diamonds and your rubies and your sapphires, your precious gems.

2. This Tweet from post #55

It is now offline, so I’m glad I’ve captured this screenshot:

3. Burning out (from post #35)

Climate journalist Emily Atkin, who writes the Substack newsletter Heated, says she had an ambitious List of career goals from a young age. It included external markers of excellence—and possible proxies for social impact—like a Pulitzer prize or cable news invitations, and also this curious target: “By 50, I’ll have to take a few years off because of burnout.”

HEATED

Climate reporter burns out

When I was 20, I made a list of things I wanted to achieve in my career, and a timeline by which I wanted to achieve them. For the last 11 years, every big decis…

Read more

5 years ago · 200 likes · 93 comments · Emily Atkin

She writes about her planning, nay striving for collapse:

From popular culture to academia to the economy, I learned that a noteworthy life required an extreme and unsustainable use of energy. If I wanted to both improve the world and be able to take care of my parents, I would have to extract from myself more than I thought I could bear. Eventually, inevitably, I would run out of steam. But it wouldn’t be that bad, and I would recover. The benefits would be worth it. There was no other way.

You see the parallel to climate change, right? The rationale I’ve used to burn myself out is the same rationale the fossil fuel industry uses to burn up the planet.

Oof.

While I’ve never expected burnout as a necessary part of a worthwhile career, I have certainly bought into the narrative of the broken worker resurrecting into a better version of herself—finally finding the clarity and courage to be and do what she’d always wanted to, deep down. I also bought into the common confusion between our identity and our work, like we’re Gracie-Lou Freebush.

I recall the trainers of The Self-Investigation, an online course helping journalists to deal with stress and digital overload, telling us: You are as important as your work. Aha! It is OK and good to ask ourselves (and each other): How do you feel? Do you enjoy this work? Does it matter to you?

As Atkin writes:

I’m going to stop fixating on the amount of work I do, and focus more on how it feels to do it. Hopefully, that change in focus will allow me to create something sustainable—something that will last far beyond the year I turn 50.

This is the first of my (Northern-hemisphere) summer re-runs, where we revisit or discover old favourites. Here are three things that made me think about intrinsic motivation, and that I had already shared in previous posts:

1. experience becoming

2. creative process

3. connecting people

Shall we?

1. Finding out (from post #38)

This Vonnegut quote, shared in Shaun Usher’s wonderful Letters of Note newsletter:

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Kurt Vonnegut Letter to Xavier High School 5th November 2006

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2. Process vs. result (from post #43)

In post #40, I shared a wonderful quote by Tove Jansson, from Pénélope Bagieu’s graphic book Brazen. I then enjoyed (re-)listening to a few interviews with Bagieu, who is consistently smart and funny. This quote on (perceived) failure, from a 2021 interview on French public radio France Inter, resonates with our theme:

[Failure] pushed me to ask myself what was really important. Was it the result, and its being validated? Or was it the creative process, which makes me happy? Doing things makes me very happy, and the end result, less so.

So even if someone says in the end: “It’s not so great, what you’ve done,” I say: “Yes, but I spent four amazing hours drawing it.” That is the right calculation. Because then it doesn’t matter so much if we’re not successful later on.

3. Connecting (from post #49)

In April, the Washington Post published a fascinating profile of hyperpolyglot Vaughn Smith, a man who speaks 24 languages and has some basic knowledge of another 21. (It’s a moving and informative read, enriched with sound clips and videos.)

He’s not interested in impressing anyone. He only counted his languages because I asked him to. He understands that he seems to remember names, numbers, dates and sounds far better than most people. Even to him, that has always been a mystery. But his reason for dedicating his life to learning so many languages has not.

Smith’s main motivation, writer Jessica Contrera explains, is to connect with other people. In a world where learning certain languages—the “worthy” or “useful” ones—is often seen as a necessity or a mark of status, Smith’s pleasure and curiosity warm my heart.

As a child:

… he overheard a Russian woman in a grocery store. “Здравствуйте, как поживаете?”. Vaughn asked. Hello, how are you? He explained that he was trying to learn Russian.

He liked the look he put on that woman’s face. “Like she was hit with a splash of happiness,” Vaughn remembers.

As a teenager:

There was a clique of Brazilian students, so he started to learn Portuguese. He befriended a brother and sister who would write him lists of phrases in Romanian, and watch as Vaughn memorized them all. When he noticed a shy Ethiopian girl, he asked her to teach him Amharic. […]

In an environment where he never felt like he fit, he was connecting in a way that no one else could.

As an adult:

… every language is really a story about the people it connected him to.

He learned American Sign Language from Gallaudet University students at a club called Tracks, which had a dance floor known for its vibrations.

He picked up some Japanese from the staff at a restaurant where he volunteered to clean the fish tank once a week.

When his niece liked the way the word chicken sounded in Salish, they started studying it together, befriended leaders of the language school on the Flathead Indian Reservation and road-tripped to Arlee, Mont., twice.

On the way back from Boston, where MIT researchers scanned his brain with an fMRI machine:

He’s bouncing as he talks about all the connections he made in a single day with the researchers and the strangers he’d introduced himself to in a coffee shop. All the people who were, as he would say, “hit with a splash of happiness.” This is what I’d discovered getting to know Vaughn: By putting in the effort to learn someone’s language, you’re showing them that you value who they truly are.

I’m wondering if Vaughn will ever see that same value in himself.

(Right after reading this piece—and now that I have a functional phone!—I finally downloaded a language learning app and am having fun with it. I thank Smith and Contrera for the prod 🌱.)

—August 2022 update: One month after I started playing Greek on DuoLingo, I wrote about my frustrating experience using the gamified app in post #56. After a 106-day streak on the app, I am glad to be taking a break from all the scorekeeping.—

I'm going on a summer break! In my absence, you’ll receive a few re-runs of Three Things, so you can (re)discover some old favourites while I spend time away from my keyboard. Also, if you missed last week’s posts, you can:

• share / find book ideas on this discussion thread

• read / listen to my interview with Daniel Pink

Now, here are the Three Things that got me thinking about intrinsic motivation in the past week:

1. a scientist’s memoir

2. incentives for musicians

3. a rallying cry

Happy August.

1. True scientist

I want to dedicate this quote from geobiologist Hope Jahren1’s beautiful memoir Lab Girl to anyone who’s plodding through a Ph.D. at the minute, and anyone on their support team (yay us!):

A true scientist doesn’t perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. This transition between doing what you’re told and telling yourself what to do generally occurs midway through a dissertation. In many ways, it is the most difficult and terrifying thing that a student can do, and being unable or unwilling to do it is much of what weeds people out of Ph.D. programs2.

Also this:

People are like plants: they grow toward the light. I chose science because science gave me what I needed—a home as defined im the most literal sense: a safe place to be.

2. True music

Did you notice that recent pop songs tend to last around 2:30? It’s not only because we have a short attention span, or because lots of musicians suddenly decided that they loved the short form, but possibly because artists get paid more money that way. (As a daily user of music streaming platforms, I am feeding that system.)

Here’s Arcade Fire’s Win Butler telling BBC interviewer Faisal Islam how the band’s playing the streaming platforms’ game all wrong:

Islam: As musicians, does [the algorithm] create strange incentives?

Butler: Not [for] us. We’re doing it so wrong. The modern trick is you put a thousand tracks on your record because that’s more streams [and more streaming revenue]. We don’t do this crap for the money, let’s put it that way. If we weren’t playing music, I don’t think we’d be functioning humans.

PS: If you’re after human music suggestions, you can:

• watch out for my August list of motivation-adjacent songs

  (subscribe to get it in your inbox, and find my playlist archive here)

  Subscribe now

• check out Leo Mascaro’s rich and lovely Shuffle Sundays

• subscribe to composer Fog Chaser’s atmospheric monthly newsletter

3. True wild

I finally read Glennon Doyle’s mega-best-seller Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living, a memoir in the shape of short inspirational chapters. Throughout, Doyle urges readers to challenge their social conditioning, in particular prescriptions about motherhood as martyrdom. In short, she suggests women do whatever the heck they really want: she doesn’t write about self-improvement, but about finding what and who was always there.

This New Yorker profile aptly describes her style:

Doyle, who sometimes refers to herself as a “clinically depressed motivational speaker,” has a knack for distilling wisdom from seemingly incompatible sources—radical feminism, evangelical Christianity, twelve-step programs, Pema Chödrön—into an easy-drinking blend. Everything will be better, she suggests, if you just tell the truth about yourself.

Here are two bits from the book that stood out on first reading:

We can make our own normal. We can throw out all the rules and write our own. We can build our lives from the inside out. We can stop asking what the world wants from us and instead ask ourselves what we want from our world. We can stop looking at what's in front of us long enough to discover what's inside us.

We all want purpose and connection. Tell me what breaks your heart, and I’ll point you toward both.

Below are the Three Things that got me thinking about intrinsic motivation recently. They’re all about integrity:

1. historic wordings

2. looking inward

3. honest scientific research

Last week, I wrote about lowering our own standards to help maintain friendships. This was a response to WWA reader (and fellow Substacker) Vikki, and also definitely a piece I needed to write for myself:

Why Would Anyone

#75: Why Would Anyone stay in touch?

Bonjour, Here is my answer to the second question that I received in response to my call for motivation conundrums, a few posts ago. I was delighted to receive questions that I could have asked myself, and wrote the answers that I need to read, too. (If you missed #1, click…

Read more

4 years ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Tania Rabesandratana

Shall we?

1. Off-the-cuff

You obviously know Neil Armstrong’s 1969 Moon landing declaration (“That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.”) I’d simply assumed that was a spontaneous, inspired choice of words—indeed Armstrong said he “thought about if after landing”1. But I’ve learnt from Shaun Usher’s consistently wonderful Letters of Note that, in the months before lift-off, some NASA folks wanted to pre-approve an apt, memorable sentence for the occasion.

Julian Scheer, NASA’s Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs at the time, rubbished the idea; the unscripted approach eventually prevailed. He wrote in March 1969:

the truest emotion at the historic moment is what the explorer feels within himself not for the astronauts to be coached before they leave or to carry a prepared text in their hip pocket.

Quoting the records of Columbus, James Cook, and others, Scheer added:

The words of these great explorers tell us something of the men who explore and it is my hope that Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin will tell us what they see and think and nothing that we feel they should say.

2. Simple, not easy

Martha Beck trained in sociology at Harvard before building a life coaching business, endorsed by the likes of Oprah Winfrey. Her books and teachings mix down-to-earth common sense and spirituality—some of it will annoy woo-shunners for sure, but Beck strikes me as sensible and compassionate.

In May, she discussed her latest book The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self (which I haven’t read) on the podcast Quitted.

Here’s the bit that stood out for me:

We are raised to look outward outward outward outward. We look at: “How am I doing as opposed to other people on Instagram? How am I doing as opposed to my friends? As opposed to what my advisers or my bosses [want]…”

In contrast, she says, recalling the time she spent in China at 20 years old:

Instead of looking around for objective measures, Asian philosophy looks inward and says: What is my subjective experience? […] I’m gonna start with that awareness and then track what feels truest to me from the inside. You don’t have to go to Asia or learn Chinese to do that. All you have to do is be in a room full of people who are pressuring you to be something you don’t want to be. […] Look inside yourself to see what works for you and then go there, do that. It’s really really simple. And yet, people pay me so much money over the years to tell them: “so if it feels really good, maybe do more of that and you’ll get confidence in yourself. If it feels horrible, maybe do less of that and you’ll get confidence in yourself.”

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3. Taking an oath

Before starting this newsletter, I spent most of my working time writing science and policy articles for outlets including Science magazine. I recently wrote a piece for them, about a new law in France that requires researchers (in any discipline) to take a formal integrity oath on the day that they successfully defend their PhD.

Most of the scientists I spoke with said the oath alone would not prevent scientific fraud or misconduct, but that a solemn pledge to do honest science was a good idea anyway. (One told me the oath would be downright useless, though.)

What pushes a scientist to massage data, plagiarise a colleague’s work, or elbow their way on the list of authors for a piece of research on which they haven’t really worked? In the vast majority of cases, this isn’t about an innate villainous streak, but about external incentives that push for quantity over quality. Those who churn out copious amounts of research papers in the most prestigious journals usually have better chances of getting recruited, promoted, invited at conferences in cool locales, and of securing funding to explore their research ideas. And some academics might, gradually, learn that a slightly dodgy practice is okay because “everybody’s doing it”.

Taking an oath won’t change those metrics, but might be a small part of a slow cultural change for the whole profession.

Plus, aren’t rites of passage important? Taking 1 minute 24 for a solemn declaration, just before pouring champagne for the colleagues and friends who have seen you toiling on your manuscript, could give PhD defences a welcome dignified tone.

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Here are Three Things that got me thinking about intrinsic motivation lately.

As I put these together, I realise they capture my mood in the past weeks: pondering directions and possibilities, in between caring for sick babies. Vamos por partes:

1. making the choice

2. going for aliveness

3. byproduct of values

1. Deciding to look

I can’t believe author and proto-gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson was TWENTY YEARS OLD when he wrote the following life advice, as quoted by the consistently wonderful Letters of Note newsletter:

[B]eware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life. But you say, “I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.”

And there’s the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don't know—is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by DECIDING TO LOOK, you go a long way toward making the choice.

Hunter S. Thompson
Letter to Hume Logan
22nd April 1958

2. Feeling alive

Helpful questions to ask ourselves when we face a big decision, according to Oliver Burkeman (author of the very very good Four Thousand Weeks. Time Management for Mortals) in the 14 July issue of his newsletter The Imperfectionist:

• “Does this feel alive to me?” (or “does this make me feel alive?”)

• “Does this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” (courtesy of James Hollis, author of What Matters Most)

3. Side-effect

I’ve just finished Una mansión propia. Feminismo terapéutico para crear abundancia (A mansion of one’s own. Therapeutic feminism to create abundance) by Spanish psychologist María Fornet. It’s a satisfying read if, like me, you’re frustrated by personal development discourses seeped in magical thinking (no ‘manifesting’ here!), that tend to emphasise individual responsibility and choices and ignore wider systemic constraints.

Fornet’s book invites us to view happiness as progress, rather than as reaching a particular goal, or as feeling good. She writes (the translation is mine):

I’m tremendously fond of the idea of conceiving of happiness as a side-effect, not something we pursue directly, as a consequence of cultivating in our lives certain values, as a product of living an existence aligned with what makes us feel good, what matters to us, what is valuable for us.

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None of the components of happiness is hidden under the hyper-productivity and obsessive multitasking that falls onto women as a gendered mandate. Far from it. When I speak of progress, I talk about sustaining yourself in a constant state of growth, about staying connected to your Lighthouse, about walking in a systematic way towards the person you want to be and moving away from the world you want to leave behind; with your incongruities and inconsistencies, of course, but also with intention.

She urges us to plan. And to folks (like me) who claim that planning isn’t for them, she says:

If your thing is going with the flow… Great. Just answer yourself with complete sincerity: Is it working for you? […] if what makes you anxious about making plans is seeing that you don’t fulfil them… then there’s work to do.

Touché.

Last week I published my first advice column! Here’s my response to two thoughtful readers who asked me about sustaining motivation over long projects:

Why Would Anyone

#72: Why Would Anyone muddle around the middle?

I’m writing to you on a Sunday for the first time; it seems fitting for this new format. A few posts ago, I invited you to share motivation conundrums, and was delighted to receive thoughtful questions that I could have asked myself. So I wrote the answers that I need to read, too. Below is the first one…

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4 years ago · 6 likes · 7 comments · Tania Rabesandratana

And now, onto the Three Things that got me thinking about intrinsic motivation in the past week:

1. Redefining happiness

2. De-conditioning

3. Emotional agility

1. First of all

This comic by The Oatmeal:

Oh, I don’t know.
I just like SlargNakking.

Sometimes my arms hurt from lifting these, and sometimes I get frustrated.

But I find it meaningful.

2. Doing the things

I’ve been bingeing on Elisabeth Feytit’s podcast (in French1) Méta de Choc—a prolific exploration of metacognition (= thinking about our own thinking).

In 2019, she published a fascinating six-part conversation with philosophy teacher Grégoire Perra about his 30-year experience living in, then leaving anthroposophy, a sprawling spiritualist movement founded in the early 20th century by Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophy has ramifications not only in education (through Steiner-Waldorf schools), but also in agriculture, banking and cosmetics.

In episode 5.5 of the “Shocking” series, Perra explains his own de-conditioning process, and his search for “truth” and his “real self” (starting around 35:50):

Who I really am, I don’t know if I know it. I’m searching, I have a few leads […]. I’m discovering it through doing the things that I’m passionate about, that I love.
[…] I am someone who loves my cats that run around the apartment. […] I am someone who loves to travel, I am someone who loves to dance, who loves to learn, who is curious about the world.

People around me at the time don’t understand why [my dance classes] are so important to me. […] I reclaim my own body, I reclaim the contemporary world. […] I don’t need intellectual constructs, I avoid them. I want to travel and do things that I don’t know how to do.

3. Wagging finger

Finally, these two quotes from Chapter 7 of Emotional Agility, by Harvard psychologist Susan David.

On have-to vs. want-to motivation:

In trying to bring our actions more in line with what really matters to us, we can double down on discipline and willpower, but, as most of us have learned the hard way, this rarely leads to the best results. You may drag yourself to the gym, but how often does that lead to a great workout and sustained attendance? Or you may call up your relatives out of a sense of obligation, but how often do you have a meaningful conversation? When we enter into something this way—compelled by a wagging finger instead of a willing heart—we end up in an internal tug of war between good intentions and less-than-stellar execution, even when the end goals—improved health, better relationships with family—are supposedly in line with our values.

On the importance of language:

We all fall into these subtle traps of language and thinking: ‘I have to be on “dad duty” today’ or ‘I “have to” attend another boring meeting.’ When we do this, we forget that our current circumstances are often the result of earlier choices we made in service of our values: ‘I want to be a father’ or ‘I love the work that I do and want to excel at my job’. 

To be clear, I'm not suggesting we should all simply ‘think positive’ and ignore real underlying concerns. If you can't find a ‘want to’ in some particular facet of your life, then that could be a sign that a change is in order. 

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Here are Three Things that got me thinking about intrinsic motivation this week:

1. Living our lowest potential well

2. Parenting the child we have

3. Potty control

Before I go into them, I want to remind you that I published a Q&A with motivation researcher Ayelet Fishbach last week, and it’s rich with practical advice to help you set and reach goals that matter to you. Read it here:

Why Would Anyone

#70: Why Would Anyone disclose their goals?

How to get stuff done and feel right doing it? In this Q&A, I’ll share insights from Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioural science and marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and her book Get It Done. Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation…

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4 years ago · 2 likes · Tania Rabesandratana

1. Back to basics

Warning: This idea is a fourth-hand summary (from mystic author Caroline Myss1> through comedian/podcaster Jacqueline Novak2 > through newsletter writer Hayley Nahman > through me > to you).

Here’s the gist: How about trying to live our lowest potential well instead of aiming for the stars?

Many people attending Myss’s workshops tell her “they want ‘great big huge’, but they can’t even function at their lowest potential,” Novak says. As Nahman writes:

“They like, can’t get out of bed, they can’t command their spirit to forgive their friend,” yet they’re fixated on reaching their highest potential. Jacqueline explains that, in her own life, she typically aims for the “the biggest, most-upstream essential thing” and works backwards from there, but wonders if instead she ought to try living her lowest potential well. “Like, literally get my shit together around, you know, my laundry3,” she says. “I’m always dismissing the small, and then I find myself absolutely crushed by mess.”

This is what this looks like in Nahman’s life:

For me aiming low means getting into a rhythm with my apartment, maintaining relationships with my friends, my family, my neighbors, going outside, trying new things, hitting my deadlines. Even my more spiritual aims are fairly mundane […]. None of them are overtly ambitious or particularly “shareable.” But they change everything.

This reminded me of the late Richard N. Bolles's take on our capital-M Mission(s) in life in his classic job-hunting manual What Color Is Your Parachute?

In the epilogue (which I only skimmed when I first got the book in 2005, because I thought it only relevant for religious readers), Bolles writes about a step-by-step, universal Mission as a necessary path towards the other Mission that is uniquely ours.

… so many times you will see people wringing their hands and saying, “I want to know what my Mission in life is,” all the while they are cutting people off on the highway, refusing to give time to people, punishing their mate for having hurt their feelings, lying about what they did. […] For these people wringing their hands, their Mission was right there, on the freeway, in the interruption, in the hurt, and at the confrontation.

2. Children teach us who they are

This essay on parenting the child we have—not the one we were, or the one we’d like to have—aptly describes something both obvious and hard to grasp: that each child is a “whole and new person”. A person who may not give a flying hoot about the things we value, or even the things (we think) they are great at.

How relatable is this litany of things that the author, parenting coach Robin Einzig, wanted for her daughter over the years—like wishing she were more sociable (“For her, mind you. Not for us. For her. Or so we tell ourselves”); or urging her to share her singing talent with the rest of the world:

You should join a chorus. Or an a capella group. How about the talent show? 

You know, college admissions officers really want to see you doing some powerful volunteer work. Being on a sports team is an important way to learn to work with others. 

I’ve sure heard similar comments from adults while growing up, or uttered them myself. Maybe they weren’t addressed to a child, but to a student or mentee. Or even to ourselves: “I’m doing this [thing that bores me] because it’s great for my CV.”

There are things we can expect of [our children]. And we can work on those things. And there are things they cannot do and will not do and ways they simply “are not.” Our attempts to change them into the children we imagine or create the family “scene” that we imagine is a perfect recipe for maximum frustration and exhaustion.

3. Potty torments

We don’t have a word in French (or Spanish) for “potty training”4 (or “sleep training” for that matter). We call it, I guess, learning to use the toilet? That might be one of the reasons why much “potty training” advice feels fraught to me: it’s not bootcamp; it’s a learning process.

Here’s what psychologist Becky Kennedy—a.k.a. Instagram parenting rising star Dr Becky—wrote in her 23 June newsletter, titled “We Are Raising Humans, Not Training Animals”5:

The potty process is one of the first times kids learn whether they are in charge of their own bodies. […]

If our approach is based on control and coercion, we may have short-term potty success if our kids are approval-seeking… or short-term disaster if our kids are strong-minded. But either way, we’ve kind of missed the point of this important developmental achievement. 

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Last week I published my first discussion thread, inviting you to share your questions about motivation. Some of you have already commented with your own challenges—thank you, this has given me a boost of motivation! Feel free to add your own questions or ideas to the discussion here.

Also, don’t miss my second post this week: a Q&A with Ayelet Fishbach, motivation researcher and author of Get It Done. I’ll send it on Wednesday and it will be full of practical suggestions. (The cool kids say ‘actionable advice’.)

Now, onto the Three Things that made me think about intrinsic motivation in recent days:

1. Public goal-setting

2. That This Is Us scene

3. Gentle goal-setting exercises

1. Sticking to it

I’ve seen the idea of “commitment contrats” to reach a personal goal mentioned in three books: in Fishbach’s Get It Done; in Nir Eyal’s Indistractable; and in Daniel Pink’s Drive (more on Pink’s work next month!).

Two of the authors mention an online service called stickK, where users define a target and put down money; if they don’t reach their goal, the money will go to a friend or a charity they despise. (The website has bright colours and upbeat testimonies. They lost me with the no-pain-no-gain weight-lifting imagery.)

In Indistractable, Eyal describes his own “price pact”: He committed to paying his friend Mark $10,000 (!) if he didn’t finish the first draft of his book by a set date, which he says “worked like a charm” for him.

I get how stating intentions out loud, being accountable to an accountability buddy or internet strangers, and putting money on the line can help to clarify and solidify goals. Okay for a finite project like writing a book, but what if your goal is to stop smoking? What happens after the first deadline elapses? And how do you recover if you don’t reach your goal and end up paying a fourth of your July wages to the NRA?

Pink advises considering a quick experiment with stickK “if you’re really struggling”. Eyal warns that these scary contracts only work in specific circumstances—short tasks, and circumstances where you actually are able to tune out distracting triggers if you so decide—and aren’t for people who tend to beat themselves up. 🙋🏽‍♀️

Would you try it?

2. Yes Ma’am

I’m watching season 6 of This Is Us, and I’m not ready for the series to end. 😥

*SPOILER ALERT*

That heartbreaking quote from matriarch Rebecca Pearson, in episode 7 (and the rest of season 6), as she summons her adult children and lays out the law for the upcoming years of her life with Alzheimer’s:

My last request is less of a request and more of a demand, actually. […]

I need you all to hear my voice right now, your mother’s voice, with all of her faculties.

You will not make your lives smaller because of me.

This thing that’s happening to me will not be the thing that holds you back. So, take the risks. Make the big moves, even if they’re small moves. Forge ahead with your lives in any and every direction that moves you. I’m your mother and I’m sick, and I’m asking you to be fearless. And if that seems like that is a tall order, well, guess what, it is. But the only acceptable response is a resounding, “Yes, ma’am.”

3. Bottom of the barrel, but good

In January, I spent a day out with a group of local woman freelancers, mapping out and discussing our goals for 2022. Two exercises stood out for me:

1. The opening exercise was a brief visualisation. Nothing too woo-woo: we sat down, closed our eyes, and one person voiced instructions to gradually imagine ourselves in January 2023, and then to sum up what we saw/felt in a drawing.

2. Later in the day, we filled out a workbook that included, among other things, two A4 sheets where we could list 10 goals for the year.

Half a year later, I have not met half of those goals, and that’s Okay. If you read #22, you’ll know that I approach goal-setting exercises with healthy skepticism. But workbooks I can fill like nobody’s business! This one included common-sense, encouraging prompts and blank spaces and what can I say? Forms and questionnaires get my inner straight-A student raring.

Here is what I learnt that January day:

1. The image I conjured in the first exercise—in just a few minutes—was more honest and memorable (and realistic) than the workbook pages I filled up painstakingly.

2. The juicy goals started to appear at the bottom of the 10-goal list.

I don’t need to think much about the should goals, like growing this newsletter or saving money, because they’re on the top of my dutiful mind. There are also some obvious want goals: things that may be hard to organise in practice, but that—bar a tragedy—I know I’ll make happen eventually, like travelling with my family.

At the bottom of the second page, when I felt I was running out of ideas, that’s where the less expected, more ‘selfish’, intrinsically motivated goals popped up—like dancing or playing music—the things that I love and neglect. (Maybe if I make space and time for them, the other goals will get easier to reach, because I’ll feel more energised?)

Try it! List more goals than you think you need to write out. See what comes up.

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Here are Three Things that made me think about intrinsic motivation in the past week:

1. Eating mindfully

2. Emma Thompson’s new movie

3. What nudges can do

Let’s go.

1. Every mouthful

Years ago, a slim, deceptively simple book called On Eating, by Susie Orbach opened my food-loving eyes to five basic ‘keys’:

1. Eat when you are hungry

2. Eat what your body is hungry for

3. Find out why you eat when you aren’t hungry

4. Taste every mouthful

5. Stop eating when you're full

Eating according to our hunger is not as straightforward as it seems. Sometimes, we eat just because it’s time; we eat some tired arugula because everybody else is having a salad lunch; we gobble up the cold macaroni our child left over; we loosen our belt and finish our plate to show appreciation to the person who cooked or paid for a meal.

As this Reddit user explains:

Intuitive eating is the first time I’ve ever sat and thought about what drives me from inside out, not from outside in. I feel like this is why a lot of people hear about [intuitive eating] for the first time they assume they will never crave vegetables. They think without the extrinsic motivators they won’t do anything they’re supposed to.

2. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

I’m curious about this movie starring Emma Thompson as a widowed, retired teacher who hires a sex worker to explore pleasure after decades of repressed sexuality.

How often do we pause to wonder what we want sexually, how, why? For our own pleasure? Because we feel sad, happy, stressed, inebriated? To make babies? To connect? Because everybody else is doing it? Because someone else wants it a certain way?

I mean, I’ll take any excuse to watch Emma Thompson interviews anyway. (Interviewer Olivia Marks asked some funnier-than-usual questions here!)

Women are traditionally not invited to think about what they might want. And they’re certainly not invited to think about what gives them pleasure.

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3. Nudge nudge

Back in March, I enjoyed this article by Bryony Lau for the online science magazine Undark, laying out some limitations of nudges used by policy-makers in the COVID age.

As research ramped up during Covid-19, the gap between what experts thought they knew about nudges and how they function in practice widened. As Varun Gauri, a senior nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and former head of the World Bank’s behavioral science unit, said, the pandemic “left behavioral scientists and others kind of scratching our heads saying, what do we do?”

The effects of nudges are often modest, or frankly small; they usually work if people are already inclined to do the thing we want them to do; and they’re hard to extrapolate to varied, changing contexts outside of controlled lab environments—especially during a crisis.

That’s why governments need to test nudges and incentives before investing their limited resources, said [Dena Gromet, executive director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania]: “Different approaches are going to work for different people and at different times.”

In a 20-page overview published by Attuned—the company that funds my time to write this newsletter—behavioural scientist Brandon Routman sums up where nudges come from and what they can do, with some examples of ‘good’ nudging by governments and businesses. (To find out more about how to use nudges in your organisation, you can register here for a free 45-minute webinar with Routman on 30 June.)

He explains:

The approach [of authors Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their seminal 2008 book Nudge] is based on a philosophy the authors call libertarian paternalism. The libertarian aspect holds that: people should be free to make their own decisions (even if the decisions are mistakes); they should not be forced to take a certain action if they do not want to; and their set of options given a particular decision should not be restricted.

The paternalistic aspect of the philosophy holds that people should be influenced to make positive decisions. They should be encouraged to reduce their environmental footprint, to lead healthier lives, etc.

The oxymoron makes me shudder—I don’t want some father-like entity defining what he thinks my best interests are and influencing my choices! But I’m not (completely) naïve; I know that outside entities steer my decisions all the freaking time. (And maybe life would be exhausting otherwise?)

As Lau writes, some critics say nudges are too much; others think they’re too little:

Some commentators decry nudges as government overreach or as an infringement on individual autonomy. But there are also people who say the opposite: that nudges result in governments’ not doing enough. […] In theory, behavioral science doesn’t skew left or right, but in the hands of politicians dubious of “big government” nudges can become a way to sidestep more muscular interventions.

Call me a boring moderate, but surely it’s not either/or and there’s a time and place for both gentle nudges and hard-hitting, legally binding regulations? And surely there’s a spectrum, from evil tricks that don’t serve us to thoughtful, transparent nudges that make life better and easier?

As Routman writes, the field is young and nudges are here to stay, so I’d rather we explore and refine nudges so that they truly serve us—people, organisations, societies.