Nir Eyal

If I have a boss who I am dependent on for some kind of benefit, they're going to give me a promotion, a raise, but I don't believe in them.

I don't believe that they have my best interests at heart.

Well, am I going to stay motivated to do my best work?

No, I'll slack off and do the minimum I can because I've lost motivation because I don't believe I'm going to get the benefit.

Conversely, if I don't believe in my own ability to sustain that behavior, we call these limiting beliefs.

Well, then I'm not going to persist either.

So for sustained motivation, what we talked about is the most important thing to meet our long-term goals.

You have to have not only knowledge of what to do, the behavior, not only knowledge of the reward, the benefit that you're doing it for, but most importantly, you have to have the belief to tie it all together.

And so that's, I think, what's been missing in the dialogue.

I think there's a few ways to sustain motivation.

Fundamentally, what is motivation?

There's a bunch of different theories out there, but Desi actually tells us that motivation is defined as the energy for action, how much we want to do something.

But fundamentally in the brain, what is motivation?

What does motivation look like?

We think about motivation as just about pursuing the benefit, but really

At a base level, and we can actually see this happening in the brain, motivation is about the desire to escape discomfort.

That's really what motivation is, the desire to escape discomfort, even wanting to feel good.

People say, well, isn't there carrots and sticks?

Don't I also want to feel good?

No.