Payoff Book

Payoff unravels the complex construct that is human motivation and shows you how it consists of many more parts than money and recognition, such as meaning, effort and ownership, so you can motivate yourself not just today, but every day.

Do you like your job? I mean really like it? If your pay was cut in half, would you still do it?

Even if not, chances are you’re not doing it just for the monthly paycheck. There are other factors at play, right? Dan says reducing motivation to money and status is a huge mistake. It’s a complex construct, with variables such as happiness, achievement, pride, fulfillment and countless other intangibles factoring into the equation.

The number one factor though, is meaning.

If you find your work to be highly meaningful, it can be miserable, yet you’ll happily tolerate it. That’s because meaning and happiness aren’t the same thing.

Just think about careers, which include extremely excruciating work, whether that’s physical (ultra marathoners, sculptors, kitchen chefs) or mental (writers, therapists, poker players). These people don’t enjoy the task itself more than others, they just derive more meaning from it.

For most people, the best way to get a big sense of meaning from their work is to contribute to a bigger mission.

Sure, sipping pina coladas all day on a beach would be nice for a while, but the happiness from such pleasure activities is always short-lived. It can’t possibly compete with the prospect of proper meaning.

Dan’s next assumption lends further credibility to his last one: effort engenders meaning. The more work you put into something, the more meaningful it will seem to you. This principle piggybacks off one of the strongest biases in humans: the sunk cost fallacy.

Naturally, we hold on to something ever tighter, the more time and effort we invest into it. This often works against us, because it makes it hard to let go of things that aren’t working, but when it comes to motivation, this can be advantageous.

Here’s how Dan verified the idea: he took two groups of people and gave them the task of folding origamis. One group received well-written instructions and pictures with directional arrows, leading them step-by-step. The others were given minimal and even slightly confusing guidance.

As you would expect, the guided group’s origamis looked a lot better. But when asked how much they were willing to pay for what they’d made, the do-it-yourselfers outbid the first group by far. Clearly, putting in all this work had made their results more meaningful to them.