Below is a lightly edited transcript of the btrmt. lectures podcast. For the article that inspired it, see On Motivation.

¶Why motivation is such a messy idea

The problem with motivation is that it’s a pretty messy construct. A messy idea, a messy concept to think about. Because although there’s a sub-discipline of psychology typically called the psychology of motivation, really, all of psychology is trivially about motivation.

To contextualise that, you can make some rough distinctions in the sciences of mind. You have psychology, which is interested in how and why people behave in certain ways. You have cognitive science, interested in how people think about stuff and the ways in which thinking happens. And you have neuroscience, interested in how the architecture of the brain and the nervous system works to produce those things.

Looking at those high-level distinctions, you see that psychology and cognitive science—and to a lesser extent neuroscience—are all about exploring what kinds of things make people think and act. How do people come to think certain ways and act certain ways? And that really is what motivation is, at the highest level of abstraction. So it’s not straightforward to tease the motivational aspects of psychology out into a sub-discipline, separate from everything else that makes people think and act. What is motivation except those things that make people think and act in certain ways?

¶Different kinds of wanting

What seems to matter is how you come at motivation. You could think, for example, that I’m motivated to drink. That motivation could be prompted by some biological mechanism—whatever it is that monitors the amount of water in your cells. That’s a motivation. But is it the motivation you care about? It’s certainly not the same kind of motivation that gets you listening to your Spotify daily mix to find new songs. They’re different motivations. One’s biological, one might be social or cognitive or aesthetic. But they’re both motivations.

And even at the biological level, there’s a mechanism that makes you thirsty because your cells are too dry. But there’s also the motivation to drink because you’re anticipating there being less water in the future—a fairly basic cognitive phenomenon which, if not biological, is certainly closer to being thirsty than it is to browsing Spotify.

So it’s messy. All of psychology captures things that motivate us to think and act. And if that’s true, how do we think about motivation? That’s fundamentally the question people have when they come to me asking how to motivate people.

¶Three frameworks

The bright side is that you can cluster motivation into useful chunks. There are some interesting frameworks that help us think about what makes people do things, and they gather a lot of this messy stuff into more tractable shapes.

Some of these are pretty standard. Some are my own, and a little less mainstream. But what’s best about them is that none of them require any particular psychological theory. If you think at the level of the frameworks, you can use whatever psychology you like to solve the problem in front of you.

¶Content theories: what motivates us

The first framework is content theories of motivation. Content theories talk about what motivates us. If you’ve heard about motivation before, you’ve probably heard about content theories, because they’re also known as needs-based theories—Maslow’s hierarchy of needs lives in this category. We call them content-based because it’s about the content of the motivations themselves; calling them needs-based concentrates more on the person. It depends what you want to do with it, but they’re essentially the same thing.

The most quintessential example, the one you get taught straight away in Psych 101, is the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. The idea is: does the motivation to do something come from the doing of the activity itself? Something intellectually stimulating, or that fills you with purpose, or that you just enjoy. You’re gardening because you love being outside, being active, seeing things grow and flourish. That’s intrinsic.

Extrinsic motivators come from something external to the activity. Getting paid for doing something, or being punished for not doing it. You’re not gardening because you like gardening; you’re gardening because you’re a gardener and people pay you to fix up their gardens.

¶Where the distinction breaks down

This one’s useful, and there’s a lot of literature around it, because intrinsic motivators obviously help motivate people. Well—I shouldn’t say obviously. Intrinsic motivators have an intuitive connection with better performance. If you enjoy doing something for its own sake, you’re probably more likely to do it than if it rests on rewards or punishments. A lot of the literature concentrates on that, and on how to make things more intrinsic.

I don’t encourage it, because you really don’t want to think too hard about the distinction. What makes you enjoy an activity for itself, and what’s external to it, doesn’t actually have a hard boundary.

I like the example of becoming a vegetarian for climate reasons. It’s a common reason to become vegetarian these days, and it isn’t clear to me what’s intrinsic or extrinsic about it. If I’m becoming a vegetarian for climate reasons, it’s probably because I don’t want the climate to become unliveable. I want the planet to maintain itself roughly as it is. That seems extrinsic, because I’m not doing it for the vegetarianism itself—I don’t enjoy vegetarianism, I’m doing it because I want to save the planet. But I probably also feel that’s an important thing to do, and it ties together under a banner of taking action on the climate, which feels intrinsic.

There’s a lot of debate in the psychological literature about altruism—doing things because they’re good for someone else, with no effect on you. Same problem. Is that intrinsic, because it feels good to be altruistic? Or is it extrinsic, done for the other person entirely?

You can port this into a lot of what people do and get yourself wrapped around the axles. You could do something at work that isn’t pleasant. Maybe that’s extrinsic—it sets you up for promotion, or makes you look good at the next meeting. But maybe you also just take pleasure in being good at your job, which seems more intrinsic.

Fortunately, you don’t need to get into the margins most of the time. Just knowing to what extent the thing someone is doing is done for its own sake, and to what extent it’s motivated by things outside it—those are aspects of motivation you can tease apart.

¶Maslow’s hierarchy

I mentioned Maslow, so let me use Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as another example of a content theory, because people are often more familiar with it.

It’s usually illustrated with a pyramid. At the bottom are the needs with the highest priority, the most urgent ones. At the top are the needs that are less of a priority—things we don’t seek as much if the ones at the bottom aren’t met to some extent. So at the bottom, physiological needs and safety needs: I need a roof over my head, I need water, I need food. Around the middle, more affiliative needs: I need to belong, I need to feel love, I need to feel esteem for myself. Up the top, cognitive needs—I need to be stimulated—and aesthetic needs, I need beauty around me. And at the very top, self-actualisation, fully realising yourself. Later, I think, Maslow bolted on something about transcendence: connecting with something greater than yourself.

The idea is that at the bottom you have what you could call deficiency needs, things you need to maintain at a certain level before you can seriously explore the higher growth needs. You’re not going to be especially interested in your aesthetic needs, your desire for beauty, if you don’t have enough food or water. It’s not that you don’t have those needs. It’s that they’re not a priority.

What’s nice about Maslow’s model is that it gives you a bunch of categories of things people need. If you’re trying to solve a motivation problem—why don’t I want to do this?—you can think about which needs are being prioritised right now. If I’m busy and stressed, I’m probably focused further down the hierarchy than further up. If I’m struggling with money, I’ll be spending much more time trying to fix that, or being preoccupied by it, than doing anything growth-oriented.

Again: a framework that helps you think about the content of people’s motivations. These are the kinds of things that motivate us.

¶McClelland, and the other needs models

Since it’s rather trendy to bash Maslow—because it’s so popular—I should say it isn’t the only cut on needs-based models. One common critique is that it doesn’t place much emphasis on interpersonal needs. I haven’t read a lot of Maslow, so I don’t know whether that’s true of his writing, but the hierarchy certainly implies they’re less important than you’d expect for a social animal. So there are other theories that emphasise exactly that.

Relatedly, there are theories that narrow Maslow’s list to a tighter set. One we teach here at Sandhurst is McClelland’s model, which focuses on three categories: the need for achievement, the need for affiliation with others, and the need for power or influence over them.

So there are a few ways to think about content theories. The deepest of them are probably the needs models, and there are heaps—I have an article where I go through a lot of them in great detail, which I don’t honestly recommend you read, but I’ll link it anyway. You don’t have to stick to needs theories either; intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is probably the best-known example of another kind.

The point is that you can zoom in or out as much as you like, or cluster them however seems appropriate. Use whatever theory you want. But one of the things you need to think about when you think about motivation is what kinds of things motivate people. Content theories. That’s one.

¶Process theories: how motivation works

The next framework is process theories of motivation. Unlike content theories, these aren’t interested in what kinds of things motivate us, but in the process by which we’re motivated—how those things move us.

I think process theories are pretty neglected. A little in the psychological literature, but very much in implementation: in schools, in institutions, in business. I think it’s because process theories are boring. But they’re probably the highest-value framework, because if you don’t think about how we’re motivated, thinking about what motivates us isn’t much use. You need a content theory, but then you need a process theory to get that motivational content actually working for you.

¶Normative and motivating reasons

Let me take a little dip into philosophy to explain why this is easy to get tripped up on. In philosophy there’s a distinction between normative reasons and motivating reasons. Like intrinsic and extrinsic, the boundaries are blurry, and I don’t want to get into that debate because people far smarter than me do it already. But essentially, normative reasons are all the motivations that might exist—anything you could point at and say that might be why they did what they did.

The Stanford Encyclopedia has a good example: Othello. For those who don’t know, Othello kills his wife because his jealous ensign, Iago, convinces him Desdemona has been unfaithful. The play is a tragedy because Desdemona is innocent.

So there’s no actual normative reason here. Desdemona wasn’t unfaithful, so there was no normative reason for Othello to kill her—normative in the sense that, back in the day, crimes of passion like this were seen as legitimate. But there is a motivating reason. Othello believed Desdemona was unfaithful, and so he was motivated to kill her. That’s the difference between motivating and normative.

The same is true in the other direction: there can be normative reasons without a motivating one. Take vegetarianism and climate change again. There are normative reasons—maybe I should be vegetarian for climate reasons, maybe I should be part of the effort to stabilise the climate. But perhaps I’m not actually motivated by it. I don’t have a motivating reason, even though a normative one exists.

So there’s an important distinction between the two. And if you only look at content theories, what you’re really doing is looking at the possible normative reasons and not necessarily the motivating ones. You need a way to connect them. You need a causal link between what might motivate us and what actually did.

¶Expectancy theory

The best theory I’ve found for this is expectancy theory. You’ll find it in any psychology textbook, so it’s easy enough to look up.

The idea is that there’s a chain of questions we ask ourselves. The first: what’s the likelihood that our effort leads to performance? Then: how likely is the performance that results to lead to some desired outcome? And then: how likely are those outcomes to satisfy our personal goals or needs? How attractive are the outcomes to us?

In real terms, imagine someone at work trying to think about how to spend the spare time they’ve got coming up. There are two options. They could go really hard on a big client pitch. But at the same time, they have a lot of maintenance work, and a lot of to-dos are stacking up. What are they going to work on? What are they going to be motivated to do?

So we ask the questions. First, is the effort going to lead to performance? If I’m putting the package together, rehearsing it, doing deep research on the market sector, then yes—the pitch gets delivered to a high standard. Is that performance going to lead to desired outcomes? The bonus I’d get for signing the client, or being seen by people who could promote me. And how do those map onto my personal needs and goals? Am I looking for a promotion? A bonus? What kinds of things motivate me—and we’re back to the content theories.

Whereas we could look at just managing the backlog of to-dos. The effort here is sustained attention to the things we need to maintain, staying on top of the queue. The performance is that the rest of our work is produced on time—not that the pitch is done, but that the rest of the job is kept stable. The outcomes might be a reputation for being good at our job, a reputation for reliability. And how do those map back to our needs, our wants, our desires?

You can triage each of these. If we’re bad at PowerPoint, like I am, is effort going to be linked to performance? Maybe not—maybe it relies on somebody else for the slides, or the market research. In that case the chain is broken. We’re not going to be motivated to do it, because effort doesn’t link to performance. Similarly, if the pitch isn’t that important, if we’ve been brought in last minute and I’m not going to get the credit, then it isn’t linked to the outcomes. And if I’m happy with the money I’m earning and happy with my position, the outcomes might not be linked to my personal goals.

You can do the same triage for the to-do list. Is effort—consistent attention to the tasks—connected to performance? I’m turning work around on time, so maybe. Probably. But maybe my to-do tracking is broken, or I don’t have a good sense of what’s required of me, and so effort isn’t connected to performance. And if nobody cares what I’m doing, maybe performance isn’t connected to outcomes, and I’m not getting that reputation for reliability.

So you can triage the motivation problem by walking through the steps. Is effort linked to performance? Is performance linked to some outcome you care about? And to what extent do you care about the outcome?

That’s expectancy theory. There are a handful of these, because management consultants in particular like them: equity theory, goal-setting theory, and self-determination theory, which is very complicated and covers a lot of ground—it seems to be trying to absorb all of psychology—but parts of it cover this as well. I like expectancy theory, but the theory doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have some kind of process framework linking the things people are motivated by to how they’re actually motivated.

¶Conditioning, which is also a process theory

Before I move on to my final category, let me point out one more, just to make clear how messy the idea of motivation is. It seems to me like a process theory of motivation, and it’s classical and operant conditioning.

Classical conditioning is about how the body learns relationships in the environment. We learn that something in the environment predicts something we want or don’t want. If I pull my hand back to punch you, that usually predicts getting hit, so you flinch out of the way automatically. Or you hear the ice cream van, which predicts delicious ice cream, so your mouth starts to water. You’ve been conditioned by the environment: something predicts something else, and your body responds automatically.

Operant conditioning, the related concept, is how we can be trained to behave through reward and punishment. You teach your dog tricks by giving it food every time it does something like the trick, until it learns to do it properly. Or the spanking of children, which people think punishes the child out of doing something. I think the literature disagrees with them, but that’s fundamentally the idea.

Both of these are process theories of motivation—how we come to be motivated by things. Classically, our body learns relationships in the environment; in the operant way, we’re taught to behave in certain ways in the face of rewards and punishments. Very closely related concepts, not normally considered motivation theories. But there you have it. All of psychology is motivation.

¶Maintenance theories: keeping it going

So we’ve had content theories—what kinds of things motivate us—and process theories—how those things motivate us. Now I want to talk about my own bespoke category, which I call maintenance theories. They aren’t classically considered motivation frameworks, but this is my podcast, so I get to do what I want.

I think it’s important to separate how things motivate us from how to keep motivation going, because the same things don’t motivate us all the time. You can’t just pick a content theory and a process theory and call the problem solved. You probably also want a model of how to change that over time, in response to events.

¶Thinky and less thinky motivations

Let me illustrate why with something I care about in the content I produce. There’s a distinction you can make between more thinky and less thinky motivations. You might know it as dual process theory, thinking fast and slow, or system one and system two thinking. We make this distinction a lot in the social sciences—biological versus cognitive motivations, rational versus irrational, conscious versus unconscious.

These distinctions all matter in their own right and their own context. But I want to pull out one aspect, because the intuition that we have more thinky and less thinky motivations can be summarised, for our purposes, as urgent and passionate motivations on one side, and more future-oriented and less pressing ones on the other.

You could imagine I might be motivated to hit somebody for insulting me. That’s an urgent motivation. But there’s a cooler, more future-oriented motivation—that if I hit somebody, I’m going to get done for assault, and that wouldn’t be sweet, so maybe I shouldn’t. These two live in contradiction with one another. And what most people want of me is to not hit people, so what we do is design systems around developing the thinky motivations and not encouraging the non-thinky ones. We develop future-oriented perspectives, and try not to encourage the more passionate motivations that bubble up in us.

That matters because, over time, different things motivate us differently. To maintain motivation on the things we want to maintain it on, it isn’t enough to think about the process—both thinky and non-thinky motivations have processes. We have to think about putting a structure around maintaining the thinky ones. The motivations that make us do good over the long term.

¶Herzberg’s hygiene factors

Another model useful here, though a little hard to describe, is Herzberg’s two-factor theory. A lot of people characterise this as a content theory, but I think it’s more about maintaining motivation than about what kinds of things motivate people.

Herzberg reckoned there was a difference between motivators and what he called hygiene factors. Motivators bring satisfaction in the doing of whatever it is we’re motivated to do. Hygiene factors prevent dissatisfaction. He called them hygiene factors because they maintain motivation to do the thing, just as hygiene maintains your health.

Say we want somebody to do something for us. A motivator might be that the thing itself is satisfying—intrinsically motivating, if you like. A hygiene factor would be that we’re paying them, and if we stop paying them they won’t do it at all. It doesn’t necessarily bring them satisfaction; it’s a prerequisite for the job at hand. And what you’ll notice is that it’s an extrinsic motivator.

If you’d only paid attention to content theories—intrinsic and extrinsic—you might think you should concentrate on the intrinsic value of what you’re doing. But that neglects what maintains you in doing it. Even if something is satisfying, there might be hygiene factors that allow you to do it at all. Even if the person we want something from finds the work satisfying, they can’t do it if we don’t pay them enough.

Maslow’s hierarchy groups into two clusters this way as well: deficiency needs and growth needs. If I don’t have a roof over my head, if I can’t get food and water, I’m not going to engage much in growth needs like self-actualisation. One is the thing that satisfies me—maybe I love engaging my aesthetic needs, my self-actualisation needs—but I won’t be interested in those if the hygiene factors, the deficiency needs, aren’t there at an appropriate level.

¶McKinsey’s influence model

Another model I’ve used a lot is McKinsey’s influence model. There’s a book on it, which I’ll link in the show notes, but essentially we’re more likely to keep doing things if four things are present: if we know why we’re doing the thing; if we can see others doing it, and how; if we have the skills to do it; and if we have mechanisms in place to support us doing it.

Say I’m telling a student to produce an essay for me. First, they’ve got to know why—this is going to help you in your exam. Then they’re going to want to see examples: how do other people do this, so they can get an idea of how to do it themselves? And everybody else in the class is doing it, so they’ll want to be part of that. But they won’t be able to if they don’t have the skills. And obviously they need the means—a laptop, or whatever it is. All of these need to be present, not just one, to maintain them in that motivation.

¶What you actually need

So it isn’t enough to concentrate on what motivates us—content theories—or how things motivate us—process theories. We also want some framework for how to maintain it over the long term. And I think that’s worth its own category.

That’s it. Three frameworks for thinking about motivation that don’t really care which theory you use. I just think you need all three present to be better at motivating yourself and other people.

Motivation is a really messy concept with a sprawling literature. To get to the point of explaining this to you—regardless of how well you think I did—I’ve been through three or four iterations of putting the content together. It isn’t an easy concept to pass on, and you can see, even in the explanations I gave you, how they leak into each other.

But I think these three groupings are the ingredients you need to be successful at motivating people, or at getting yourself motivated. You need a theory about what kinds of things motivate you: a content theory. You need a theory about how that content motivates you: what’s the process? And you need a theory about the maintenance of that motivation, once you’ve got the other two.

And if you have that, then the fact that all psychology is motivational psychology stops mattering so much. You can pick any of these theories to plug the gaps, as long as you have something in each of those three frameworks.

A little Dorian guide to life. I’ll leave it there.