Day-in and day-out, the strongest, most powerful, motivation is intrinsic.  People work for money, for gold stars, for personal prestige and to feel better about themselves, but nothing brings about the tenacity and persistence that intrinsic motivation does.  And nothing brings about the satisfaction either.

So what is the magic of intrinsic motivation and why and how does it matter? 

It’s motivation that stems from a magnetic attraction to a strongly held personal belief that what you are doing is worth doing in its own right, not for what it brings in terms of rewards or what other people think.

Some examples?  If you feel a cause is just, you don’t mind working hard.  If you feel what you are doing meets an obvious human need for someone who matters to you, you don’t really think twice.  Even if you simply feel that something is personally rewarding to know, you will work to gain that knowledge and take pleasure in the process, not just the result.

Think you don’t have intrinsic motivation?  You probably do but the things that intrinsically motivate you don’t even occur to you as requiring motivation.  You just do them.  But I’ll bet you know for sure when you have to do something for extrinsic reasons only.  Those things feel empty by comparison.

So take a minute and do a little survey.  Are there things you do that give you a great deal of satisfaction, simply for doing them?  Is there an activity—it could even be routine, in which the satisfaction for you is out of proportion to what someone else might expect?

Are there activities you feel are noble and worthy of your best?  Is there something for which you don’t simply go through the motions—something you don’t just phone in?

Now please be clear that intrinsic motivation is not a matter of purity in some abstract sense.  Spare me.  Of course there are things that people do that are both financially rewarding and intrinsically rewarding.  And good for you, if you have them.

I have heard some of these people say, however, that they would do the work they do for free because it is so satisfying or fun.

If you come up empty when trying to think of what you do that is intrinsically motivating, you may also be coming up emptier than you want to be in terms of deeper satisfaction.  If you want to achieve more and experience more satisfaction, increase your mix of intrinsically motivating activities.  You will tap into a powerful reservoir of what might best be called natural motivation.