How to build Intrinsic Motivation: a review of the science

I was surprised at how closely your experience (and a commenter's experience) mirror my own. During my life, I've had a few periods of a few months where I focus intensely and work nonstop, and the work does not feel like effort at all. For me, it also comes with a sense of complete confidence, a feeling like I am fulfilling my purpose in life and that everything is exactly as it should be. It is the best sustained feeling I've ever experienced.

Unfortunately I've only experienced this three times in my life; typically around major life events (once when starting a new job in a new industry, once when quitting that job to make my own stuff, and once in grade school: the summer between 10th and 11th grade, for some reason). I look forward to seeing more research, and hopefully one day can apply these learnings to manually trigger this intense focus and motivation.

Motivation to accomplish things is good, but it should not be a goal on itself. IMO the goal should be fulfillment and contentment.

Now and then, evaluation points in life emerge, where you question the 'why'. Those periods can be quite loaded with emotions of feeling lost or being insecure of where to go next. They might greatly shift perspective and hence your course of life.

To me, everything is feedback loops: you pour in energy and you get positive energy back. In that sense, the system is self sustained. However it is fragile as well, because over time, you tend to need more and more back to provide feelings of contentment.

Motivation is like love and relationships, you need to work, sometimes very hard, to sustain them.

When i was younger, i had intense bouts of what psychologists call intrinsic motivation.

As i get older, this happens less and less – which is a massive shame.

I wanted to understand whether there was any good evidence as to what intrinsic motivation is and how i might be able to cultivate it in my adult life. To do this, i did a massive deep dive of the scientific literature surrounding intrinsic motivation. This is the outcome of that research.

Ah fun! SDT is one of my favorite theories that I'm still actively using to this day to get myself intrinsically motivated on something. I've thrown a lot of theories away due to the reproducibility crisis and similar things concerning psychology. SDT isn't one of them :)

One of my other favorite theories is HEXACO. And personality does play into intrinsic motivation, to some extent.

Disclaimer: I skimmed the article.

Fun autonomy hacks:

1. Reframe the narrative. For example, when I studied CS at school, I didn't study CS. I studied how to learn as fast as possible. I happened to have studied CS.

2. Listen to Spotify to get into a solo task. I usually turn it down if I happen to get focused.

Also a note: intrinsic motivation is tough when you're sleep deprived. I've had moments where I was motivated and sleep deprived but they often don't coincide.

This is all to say that stuff like this go onto a fundamental layer of physical health. Something I dind't quite get when I was younger.

Took me a bit of skimming + reading to get to it, but section 3 about causes (and blocking) of intrinsic motivation reflect what you'll find in Daniel H. Pink's book, Drive.

https://www.danpink.com/books/drive/

Presumably built off the same research.

Half-way through this and already my takeaway is: spend more time with people who have related interests are are supportive of your competence.

Video gaming seem to be down this alley on the study of self-motiviation.

Some games are made to burn time, like Thumper.

Some games are made to burn you neurons like Baba is You.

Minecraft has 2 modes. Creative and Zombie. Both equally powerful incentives.

I try to keep the plasticity of my brain. Not to let it crust and crumble like Play Doh left outside the tub.

Great article! SDT has fascinating parallels in consciousness science that no one to my knowledge has actually explored. This is because in consciousness research, the experiencing self is a given, it just happens to be taken for granted that there's an "I" experiencing, and the wonder and magic is focused on the experience itself. What about the self that is experiencing? On the other hand, SDT operates at a level where a biological and even experiencing conscious self is taken for granted, and the focus is on how the cognitive self operates (in many ways). And this is also where the criticism comes from. This is all in the domain of the self and motivation and whatnot articulated in language. To go deeper, we need a bridge between these two that can explain how the self is constructed. And we do have a beautiful theory/framework for that

Consciousness is a consensus mechanism by which the self is constructed. It is a recursive loop where the self emerges, experiences, and folds in the next experience to create an evolving, expanding self. With language we have the ability to freeze many of these ideas and we are able to go much further. "I can think, feel, experience and reflect on this"

And why a consensus mechanism? Because "you" are actually a constellation of cells and experiences that needs to be sufficiently decentralized but also be able to act and plan in the very short and long term. How do you get 87 billion cells (in our case) to decide as one? That is actually a pretty difficult engineering problem where you have to think about both compute (all the different data streams coming from different sources need to be digested and acted on) and commute (one cell group in the prefrontal cortex needs to immediately broadcast a danger message to other corners of the brain, and we dont have direct wiring)

Now the natural question to ask is, what do synthetic beings need to develop both? If you are interested you might want to read our book Journey of the Mind

Here is a short read on the idea of consciousness as a consensus mechanism https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me...

Motivation is an emotional state. Emotions are ephemeral.

I need to know how to dampen it. I can get truly obsessed with building things, to the point where I feel guilty for not working on it or thinking about it.

Great read!