How to find motivation to do good work?

Question

When I was in school, I’d always deliver work with high quality when there was a grade on the line. Digging deep into this, I realize that the dopamine rush of getting an A in a class was really satisfying for me. However, this backfires against me when I don’t have grades to keep me accountable. If a class has a very easy grading scheme, or if I’m pursuing a side project, the quality of my work (measured against past projects I’ve done) is noticeably lower. I do a crappy job, mark it as done ASAP and move on to the next thing. I’ve come to realize that grades have been the only motivator for me since elementary school.

I’m a little worried that the workplace doesn’t have “grades”, and I’ll lose motivation to do good work. While performance reviews serve as a proxy, they happen every quarter/half/year and I don’t think the feedback cycle is quick enough to give me long term motivation. Furthermore, performance reviews evaluate your performance on multiple projects rather than a single one, which cuts my motivation even more.

There are two ways to solve this: make work feel like school or find something else to be motivated for.

How have people found motivation to do better without fighting for a grade? Have people found strategies or internal frameworks to do better?

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

It's easier said than done, but here's the best way to find motivation to do great work: Join a team full of people you respect and deeply enjoy working with.

Performance review is also a big motivator (especially now with increased stank rank and PIP everywhere), but it definitely is relatively infrequent (hard reviews are every 12 months at most places, 6 months at others). This means that it's easy to sort of forget about it and be unproductive in your day-to-day.

That's why awesome teammates are so important as you will work with them every day and not want to let them down. Humans are biologically wired to adapt to social pressure, so this is the most natural way to motivate yourself to do great work fast.

In terms of finding great teammates, that's a big task. We should make a course about that. In the meantime, I recommend this (there's other useful links here too): "How possible is it to spot red flags about toxic culture during the interview?"

How to find motivation to do good work?

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