#9: Can everyone afford intrinsic motivation? (Part 2)
Finding meaning at work
This is Part 2 of a mini (so far, two-part) series on intrinsic motivation and privilege. To read part 1, click here.
Growing up, I received competing pieces of career advice.
Some adults worried about job prospects (Oh la la! don’t study XYZ, there are no débouchés, as we call them in French), urging me to earn qualifications that they thought would guarantee me a stable income. Other messages insisted on the importance of doing what you love, safety be damned.
Both extremes are problematic. If you get a job you dislike purely for money, you may feel frustrated at some point. As for doing what you love, it isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be:
Here’s what author Miya Tokumitsu1 said about the pressure of doing what you love in a 2015 interview with The Atlantic:
“When I found that Craigslist posting [for cleaners who were passionate], I was super depressed. […] On top of having to scrub the floors and wash windows, they have to show that they’re passionate too? It’s absurd and it’s become so internalized that people don’t even think about it.”
So today, I wonder: Can everyone afford intrinsic motivation at work?
An element of luck
“My simple answer to your question is No,” says psychologist Blake Allan, who conducts research on meaningful work at the University of Houston, Texas. “Things like social class […] will determine who gets to choose their job.”
If you have the resources and education, you can choose a job that intrinsically motivates you, that matches your values and skillset, “but most folks take the job that’s going to meet their basic needs,” he adds.
That doesn’t mean that people who don’t choose their work cannot find meaning or enjoyment in it, Allan says. But there’s an element of luck involved if, say, you just happen to enjoy the kind of work available at your local factory or if you’re able to choose your college major and career because you have generational wealth2.
You don’t have to be Mandela
One well-studied source of meaningfulness is prosocial impact: doing work that benefits other people.
Organisational psychologist Adam Grant, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School3, showed this in 2007 in a neat randomised experiment with a small sample of callers working in a fundraising organisation. One month after a 10-minute meeting with an undergrad who’d earned a scholarship “funded in part by their efforts”, callers were more persistent and raised more money (twice as much!) than their coworkers in the control groups4.
Here’s another example Allan likes to use: Before the industrial revolution, a toy maker would design and make a toy, then be able to see the joy of the child playing with it. Now, work tends to be “so broken up in specialised tasks” that a toy maker is usually disconnected from the joyful children, he explains.
Meaningfulness often comes from small things, like interactions with a few people at work, says Frank Martela5, a philosopher and psychology researcher at Aalto University in Finland. “You don’t have to be Nelson Mandela to experience meaningful work,” he says.
Martela points out a distinction between intrinsic motivation and integrated motivation6. Both are autonomous forms of motivation: the former is about doing an activity you enjoy in and of itself; the latter about doing something because you feel that the goal is worthwhile, even part of your identity—although you don’t necessarily enjoy every bit of it.
Integrated motivation is often the more important type of autonomous motivation to reach long-term goals and feel good doing so, says Martela. “Whatever your job, there’s always some part of it that you just have to push through.”
This also applies to parenting quite well! There are cute, directly rewarding moments, and there are less fun tasks (I don’t know about you, but I’m wiping a lot of noses this November) that you’re still motivated to do because the overall goal of caring for these little people matters to you.
First, a caveat. “I’m critical of the dominant self-help approach that’s all very individual-focused, saying it’s on you as an individual to find that motivation. I see it as much more of a structural issue,” Allan warns. (Although as a trained therapist and career counsellor, he does work with individuals!)
It’s hard to give generalised advice, but we’ll try anyway, with his (*) and Martela’s (^) input:
To be meaningful and motivating, “work needs to be decent and meet standards established by the International Labour Organisation”: a living wage, time to rest, safe working conditions, access to social security, etc.*
Intrinsic motivation does not have to be an end goal in itself. Instead of seeking a job that you feel super passionate about, you could also think about the three basic needs (relatedness, competence, autonomy) that will be the fertile ground for your motivation to grow.
“If you work just for money and what you’re intrinsically motivated to do is play with your kids, that’s fine and a totally legitimate value system. But all other things being equal, would you want more connectedness, mastery, and autonomy at work?” * (Yes, you would.)
Take a few minutes to reflect about the value of your work for other people. Connect with people who benefit from your work, like the fundraising callers in Grant’s study. “What is the big picture? Why are we doing this work? Try to make that impact as visible as possible”—for instance, by sharing customers’ feedback within the company. ^
You can make changes to your job to feel more satisfied and “unlock more meaning” at work, in the words of job crafting researchers Jane Dutton and Amy Wrzesniewski7. For instance, some workers might change the scope or order of their tasks, the people they interact with, or reframe their work to focus on its positive aspects.
That’s it for today, and I don’t have a smart kicker to end this post.
Author of Do What You Love And Other Lies About Success & Happiness, published in 2015
And it’s not like some people want meaningful work more than others. One of Allan’s studies showed that people “across the social class spectrum desire meaningful work” to the same extent.
who had discussed a letter from a beneficiary without meeting her, or had no exposure at all.
Author of A Wonderful Life. Insights on Finding a Meaningful Existence, published in 2020
See this cool 2020 study by Ken Sheldon about the motivations of people hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, which I’m definitely going to write about again.
In this research, they mention a hospital cleaner reframing her work as a form of “healing”, which reminds me of the parable of the three bricklayers. I couldn’t find the original source, but it goes like this:
Someone asks three bricklayers at work what they’re doing.
The first says, “I’m laying bricks.”
The second says, “I’m building a wall.”
The third says, “I’m building a cathedral.”