Understanding the Power of Intrinsic Motivation

At some point, we all are assigned to work that we find tedious and unchallenging. If we don’t figure out how to turn these tasks into interesting and challenging problems to solve, we’ll struggle to complete tasks in a timely and reliable manner, sabotaging our own success and growth at work. One skill that can help you do this is intrinsic motivation, or the incentive you feel to complete a task simply because you find it interesting or enjoyable. Learning how to harness this skill early in your career will help you build the resilience you need to reach your goals in any field. Here’s how to get started.

• Look to understand how your job fits into the bigger picture. If you don’t feel like you’re contributing value, you’re more likely to become demotivated. The next time you’re assigned a vague task ask: What problem are we trying to solve by doing this work? How am I helping contribute to the solution? When you know that your contributions have a purpose, your tasks will immediately feel more interesting.
• Perform easy tasks right away. When we check items off our to-do lists, feel-good hormones are released in our brains. This makes us feel accomplished, which makes the task more interesting and rewarding, which in turn, makes us more motivated to do it.
• Avoid too much “mindless” repetition. When a task starts to feel boring, it’s often because the outcome of completing the task is no longer interesting to you. What can you do to change that, and make the outcome feel exciting? For example, can you challenge yourself to execute the task in less time while still achieving the same result or better?
• Look for opportunities to help others. One of the easiest ways to tap into intrinsic motivation is to participate in activities you find inherently rewarding. Helping others is an easy way to do this.

At our jobs, we will inevitably face activities that don’t naturally interest us or that we perceive as boring, irrelevant, uncomfortable, or too difficult. This is rooted in how our brains are designed: Though the brain rewards us for spending mental energy on expanding ourselves, it rewards us even more for conserving our energy — which is why we struggle with activities that don’t immediately spark our curiosity, or why we tend to get bored with things over time.