Doing more, giving more, who’s in charge?
Have you ever worked as hard as you did during that Organic Chemistry class? Or pulled more all nighters than you did when you were part of that project team?
And have you ever given more to charity than you did when someone pushed you to do so? Why do we need ice buckets and galas to incite us to donate to causes?
Along the way, we’ve come to believe that external motivation is the key to our success. That we need to be part of a degree program or a sales contest or have a boss looking over our shoulder to do our best work, to push us.
Of course, we were taught this by the marketers, industrialists and institutions that make a living by providing us external motivation…
If you accept the bargain of doing work on demand, though, you’ve just handed your future over to someone else. You've committed your best work to the highest bidder and to the person with proximity and leverage.
As marketing decentralizes and more of us work with less supervision (and more upside when we find our own path) reliance on the external fails us.