Today’s insight has to do with the complete different levels of motivations: internal and external. Tuomo Loukomies was coaching us about learning and I learned that the motivation is in fact prerequisite of learning.

I understood the vast difference between these two possibilities for motivating action.

People who are mainly moved by External rewards are also very much comfort seeking.

Where are internally driven people are willing to even suffer for their purpose. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls these people autotelic: “an autotelic person needs few material possessions and little entertainment, comfort, power, or fame because so much of what he or she does is already rewarding.”

Before I thought motivation is everyone’s own business, but gladly I understood today that the level of motivation can be of course influenced and changed. Even a person with zero influence can first to be motivated into some action with external rewards and eventually with patience even to the higher levels of motivation until the person becomes autotelic. With time and patience, this is possible.

Tagged: comfort, drive, external, fame, internal, levels of motivation, motivation, possibilities, power, suffering