Ask HN: What motivates you to do what you do?
In the process I reflected a lot and one of the important topics I am trying to understand is about underlying motivations for my actions.
I can see what is going on in my head, that I tend to materialise some image of my future self, create value for the family and the environment I live in, position myself good for the future-needed skills, have joy in what I do, have more freedom to decide of my future direction ... there are many different triggers of motivation for my actions, but from time to time they seem random and misaligned.
As said, I can see what is going on in my head but I was curios about how others interpret and manage their motivations which trigger their actions.
Would be happy to have some insights into your heads if you may allow :)
67 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadFirst, let's talk about your assertion - we're basically all just in this for the money. If you want to make that claim, you have to be able to answer why. Why is money important? Why would we do anything just for money? Money itself is irrelevant, we only want it because of what we can get with it. So, let's go a step further and figure out what we'll buy with that money. Sure, you're going to buy things for yourself - most people likely will. But are they going to spend it all on themselves? Most likely not. Many people will spend that on gifts for their spouse, a vacation for their family, school for their children, a new house or car to improve the lifestyle of their loved ones. All of these things are honest reasons we justify spending our lives working - to improve not just our own life, but the lives of those we love (and for many great people in the world - the lives of people they've never met).
Second, let's go towards your statement that people just can't have a deep passion for things. You're saying that people can't do something because they're particularly interested in or dedicated to a particular issue? Ok, explain Doctors Without Borders, the Boys & Girls Club of America, St. Jude Children's Hospital, or literally any other charitable organization in the world. Are its founders, low-paid employees (relative to market potential), and unpaid volunteers just in this for the money also?
I'm keeping my cool here on this, because ultimately this is a comment and we're all free to express our minds - but I'm offended by the assertion that we can't care about anything other than money. And that's after you get past the fact that the statement on its face doesn't actually make sense, because none of us care about money - we only care about what we can get with it.
Edit: perhaps a bit of an overreaction to otherwise benign comments on behalf of the OP. I still feel strongly about my comments here, but may have misunderstood the intent of OP's statements.
I'm not sure how I'm misquoting you here - you very clearly and plainly said you assume 90%+ of people who say anything other than money is their motivation are lying to you and themselves.
As for your comment that you need money to live - of course you do. That's a far cry from your statement, which is that people are solely motivated by money. The typical HN reader likely makes above the average salary, so they're already past the point of working for enough of a salary to live, and they're in the disposable income territory.
Money is just a proxy for useful things you can request.
How can we all be working solely for money when none of us actually care about the money - we care about all the other things that the money gets us that the original comment explicitly stated we don't care about.
Edit: I think we're on the same page here, but perhaps I could have clarified what I meant in my comment. Money itself is meaningless, as you mentioned, it's a proxy for other things we can get. Which is why it makes no sense to say we're motivated by money. We're motivated by the things we want that money to buy for us.
"I can see what is going on in my head, that I tend to materialise some image of my future self, create value for the family and the environment I live in, position myself good for the future-needed skills, have joy in what I do, have more freedom to decide of my future direction ... there are many different triggers of motivation for my actions, but from time to time they seem random and misaligned."
In that context, he's clearly referring to (at least to me it seems) deeper motivations that simply financial. So, to have the top comment on this page say 90%+ of us are motivated financially and lying if we say otherwise, in the context of this topic, I think is just wrong.
That said, I've edited my original comment to clarify I may have misunderstood the one I replied to.
That said, I do know engineers that work at startups and actually are pumped by the vision - they're excited about what they're building and what it could mean for the future.
why do you think articles on salary and negotiation are so popular here?
Yeah, it's called a personal life. Work is basically that thing I do to make the stuff I do in my personal life possible or more comfortable. Or simply not starve. Would I rather have some sort of enjoyment in the work I do? Yeah, but the truth is I can be happy enough doing janitorial work or working retail so long as the work environment and pay is good enough. It is just a job, after all, even when the pay is good or it takes studying. While a few folks might hit the work/job lottery and get something they actually enjoy, I think work is just a job for most folks. It isn't cynical or jaded. It simply is.
Would I work if I won a lottery or if I didn't need money? Nope. Definitely not. I might have a few projects that look kinda like work if lottery-rich, but the truth is I'd just hire folks to do most of it for me. I'd mostly want to travel and make artwork and try out different sorts of hobbies. I'd work on getting weird and eccentric.
I enjoy programming, but I definitely wouldn't be doing it if I didn't need the work.
I think people ream me up about that because they find great anger in someone who is good at programming but didn't want to grow up to be a programmer. Because that conflicts everything they've ever thought in their lives.
I definitely notice a huge difference in desire to get up in the morning depending on the importance of what I'm working on. If it's menial or ultimately unimportant work, I can feel burned out working 30-40 hour weeks. If it's world changing stuff that's never been done before and will save thousands or millions of lives, I feel engaged working 60-80 hours a week.
When an employer is trying to recruit me, they don't need to offer more money than everyone else. They need to sell me on the importance of what I will be working on. For example, autonomous vehicles present continuous research and engineering challenges for which you often must provide the first solution anyone has ever devised. This addresses the problem of menial work. Accelerating the overall global development, production, and adoption of autonomous vehicles by a single day could save over a thousand lives. This addresses the problem of importance of work.
At the end of the day, money is secondary. I need enough that I don't need to worry about struggling financially; but, the primary reason I will accept an offer has nothing to do with money. We spend a large portion of our lives working. So, we better enjoy whatever it is that we do.
More money is always better. More money means more savings, which means sooner retirement.
An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied, “only a little while.”
The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?
The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.
The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, and stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”
The American scoffed. “I have an MBA from Harvard, and can help you,” he said. “You should spend more time fishing, and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, and eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middle-man, you could sell directly to the processor, eventually opening up your own cannery. You could control the product, processing, and distribution,” he said. “Of course, you would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles, and eventually to New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “Oh, 15 to 20 years or so.”
“But what then?” asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time was right, you would announce an IPO, and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
The American said, “Then you could retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you could sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play guitar with your amigos.”
To help with understanding your place in the grand scheme, I'd also check out this lecture by Michael Dearing from Reid Hoffman's Blitzscaling class at Stanford:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vCdfa_aeI8
Although nominally about Creative Destruction and the capitalist work ethic, it gets at the root of our entrepreneurial ambitions. There is a reason the mission statements of the Erie Railway Company from 1857 and Facebook's circa 2017 sound so eerily similar. Their duty isn't to build train tracks between cities or link nodes in the social graph. It's to spread knowledge, commerce and communication deep into places that have never known it before.
I try to visualize the end days and if I don't do 1 and 2, I will regret it. That is what drives me to do whatever that I do today.
2. I'm building a business and I have competitors who want to take my market share.
Either of these two thoughts are enough to galvanise me. #2 in particular can snap me wide awake with blood pumping and ideas firing.
Ultimately I am guided by the principle of least regret, although I find that more useful as a decision making construct than a motivation tool.
I have been one of those workaholic people that only cared about amassing money. No more.
Higher order goals are all well and good, but usually the best way to achieve those is to make as much money as possible and then direct the money towards the goals, rather than to change what you do and work on the higher order goals directly. While working directly towards higher order goals might feel more satisfying and meaningful, it's unlikely to be the most effective way of making a difference if you've got good skills as an engineer.
My personal higher order goals aren't much more than to live the good life, but being sure to live it - be in the moment, rather than living for some tomorrow.
You know the feeling, when you get something working for the first time. Something that has never been done before and will never be done the first time ever again. And you just did it. You received input, thought about it, build it, tested it, changed it, stewed about it, agonized over it, redid it, and finally, finally, got output. Often beyond your wildest expectations. And you lept out of your chair and yelled, "Yeaaa!" and danced a little bit.
Sure, I have gotten this feeling from other things, from my writing, from my comedy, from sex, from when the Penguins score a goal, and most often, from others. But in the grand scale, those things rarely happen.
Writing software is different. I can Happy Dance all the time if I only set myself up for it.
In the enterprise, I hardly ever Happy Danced. In my own business, I Happy Danced almost every day. What more does one need for motivation?
There's a reason that my explicit career goal is never to become a manager. I want to keep enjoying what I do.
Today I am just happy to have few low pressure customers that I am maintaining products for. I kind of feel like carpenter: sure I can make a table for you and I know it will be quite good. It is not going to be the next big table that is going to be displayed on front page of big Carpentry magazine. It is going to be table for some basement, but thats ok.
I sometimes need more money for bigger purchases, (I am farmer now and equipment is so expensive) which makes me return into high pressure of valley development. And I must say that working in this environment it is always hard to find motivation other then "it is soon going to be over".
Edit: At the same time, I am doing something I love to achieve this goal, so even if it takes me longer than I expected, in the meanwhile I'm enjoying myself and being compensated nicely for this.
Similar motivations here.
Freedom... I think it is possible to create a company around a common set of values?
But until that day, I have to find some way to keep on plugging away: planning, coding, testing, debugging, doing art, marketing, etc. It’s one of those things that maintains momentum through good developer experience and forcing myself to spend a little time on it every day.
And one day it will be done, and I’ll be able to step back and say “Wow. I made a thing.” Honestly, I don’t know if it will be that great of a feeling. But the anticipated satisfaction of a job well done, including the approval of my customers, is something that motivates me.
I’ll add that family can be super motivating too. Of course, I want to provide for them. But working on a side project and having your wife come by and say “That looks cool” is a pretty good feeling.
At home - I enjoy tinkering and that feeling of accomplishment with a job well done, whether that's washing my car, or making my home automation system do things that it wasn't intended to do.
If I think about it - these are both driven by a desire to be known as someone who can "do things," i.e. "I want the credit." [1]
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pm-5gWhJ3qY
I have two young children at home and nothing is going to come close to making me feel as fulfilled as being their father. Since we need money to live I have to go away for 8-9 hours a day, working on CRUD applications and their supporting systems. What keeps me in my seat is the money I can eventually bring home to to my wife and children.
To a non-parent this may seem a somewhat bleak and uninspiring vision of what we do as software developers, but the truth is that being able to provide for my family is one of the most intensely satisfying enterprises I have ever taken-on. It allows us to put good, healthy food on the table and live in a neighborhood with walking trails and a nearby lake. My children sleep in comfortable beds. The temperature in our home is always appropriate.
If I can't spend the bulk of my time with my family then next best thing is producing money that directly benefits them.
I did that in reverse. Once I "make enough" I intend on going back.
I spent a lot of my early 20s working then quitting to travel to other countries. I've been bitten a little in my later twenties, now early-30s having tried to "settle" down but ending up trying out a lot of different careers. Now about 3-4 years into an "IT" career but working to leveraging that into either contract and/or remote work in the future. Plus trying to keep creative outside of it.
fingers crossed
Unless someone has a kid, and feels that gravitational pull towards them; they probably won't understand. That's okay with me, it's my little secret I get to enjoy the rest of my life with.
I've learned over time that means activities which give you energy: physical fitness, creativity and relationship time (parenthood, spouse, friends, other family etc) and less activities which draw energy from you, inebriation, excessive video games, excess in any form (for example gluttony or work) etc.
I used to try to do projects 'for the money' in my spare time and inevitably I would give up on them. For me, money is not a main driver. I have enough, and toiling extra hours has no benefit for me.
I'm always finding myself interested in new things (and sometimes disinterested in old passions), so I optimize my career and actions around being able to freely engage with those "new things" without jeopardizing stuff like my financial stability. I also try to be as broadly educated and capable of learning so that those "new things" are never too difficult to immerse myself in.
-Doing and making something great via Human Computer Interaction
-Being hired as an intern at a technology company
-Generating money with a side project ie ramen profitable
Ofcourse, I yearn for a life where I am free and completely in control, doing something I like, but I really appreciate the fact that I have a job that keeps me going as well.