What motivates us?
If you have ever been annoyed by a programming problem, bug, or error you can’t make sense of StackOverflow is the first place you go to try and find answers. It gives professional and enthusiast programmers a platform to ask and answer questions.
Quora works on the same idea. Someone asks a question and other people come ahead and answer it. But why? What do these people have to gain that they are putting their time and energy to answer a stranger’s question on the internet?
And these are not the only two examples. Apache was originally written and is still maintained primarily by network admins and programmers who need reliable, low-cost Web server software and believe it’s better to pool their efforts than go it alone. Wikipedia is made available for free to users around the globe. There are countless other open-source, community projects that can be found.
So, it begs the question why are these highly skilled people, who already have jobs, are taking up equally, if not more, challenging work and are giving it away for free? What motivates people to participate in the open-source community? Who would want to do something where there’s a lot of work involved, and the remuneration is minimal?
Dan Pink explores this in his fourth book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. He argues that human motivation is largely intrinsic and the aspects of this motivation can be divided into autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Autonomy: Our desire to be self-directed.
Mastery: Our urge to get better at things.
Purpose: Our desire to do something that has meaning and is important.
If we look at the examples, we talked about earlier it mostly fits these aspects of motivation. There could be other interpretations and explanations to it but I feel autonomy, mastery, and purpose have a significant role to play.
I would highly recommend the book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us if you haven't read it already. There’s also an amazing animation of the book by RSA you can check out.
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When the reward is the activity itself - deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one's best - there are no shortcuts. ― Daniel H. Pink, Drive
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