How givers can be wildly successful, the incentives that influenced ABBA costumes and understanding the science of motivation
4 minute read
Friday Thoughts & Learnings
This week Adam Grant teaches me how givers can be wildly successful, Irish economist David McWilliams told me a fabulous yarn about what drove ABBA to choose the costumes they wore and insights from the science of motivation has boosted my productivity. Enjoy!
How givers can be wildly successful
Adam Grant's book Give and Take has been on my reading list for a while. According to conventional wisdom, highly successful people have three things in common: motivation, ability and opportunity. Grant argues there’s an overlooked fourth ingredient: how we approach our interactions with other people.
The book’s central theme is that people who have a social interaction style that gives willingly to others, are more likely to achieve both personal and professional success than relying one of the other two styles: takers, and matchers.
Givers are people who seek to help others without expecting immediate returns, while takers aim to gain advantages for themselves, often at the expense of others. Matchers strive for a balanced give-and-take approach.
By sharing their time, knowledge, and resources generously, givers foster more meaningful relationships, build trust, and contribute to a greater collaborative and successful environment. This investment pays off over the long term both in terms of quality of relationships and in career success because it helps everyone win.
The book has plenty of real world examples and data to back up his claims that givers, when they set boundaries and discern whom to assist, can be highly successful in both their personal and professional lives.
If you’re someone that wants to achieve success in your career AND have a giving mindset in your interactions with people you work with, this book is worth reading.
The incentives that influenced ABBA costumes
Podcast: 2023 in Review by economist David McWilliams
David is my favourite podcasting economist. He’s an Irishman with a unique gift of making the traditionally dry subject of economics compelling listening through his fabulous storytelling and sense of humour.
This podcast is a wrap of the key events and stories that shaped the global economy in 2023.
One of the key take aways I got from this episode was from an anecdotal story David told about how tax incentives helped shape costume design choices made by 1970s Swedish pop band ABBA.
ABBA was famous for their music and their glam costumes. Their decision on what to wear when performing was apparently not primarily based on the image they wanted to project, but more so on how they could secure tax deductions against their music income.
In Sweden, expenses on performing arts costumes were tax deductible at the time, but wearing regular clothes to perform was not. Dressing flamboyantly, therefore, was an innovative image / wardrobe solution inspired by tax incentives.
Maybe that’s where the inspiration to their song “Money, Money, Money" came from?
Understanding the science of motivation
We all struggle at times to find the motivation to complete tasks. Particularly ones that we find tedious and unchallenging. a.k.a boring. For me that’s updating my website.
What I’m currently researching and learning about is how our brains use chemical incentives to motivate us to get tasks done that interest us and avoid what doesn’t. And what we can do to keep tasks interesting, so we get them done.
Our supply of energy and motivation each day is not unlimited. Motivation, research shows, flows strongest where our interest goes. Our brains are primarily interested in two things:
Gaining knowledge, skills and conditions that benefit us, and
Conserving energy.
Our brains direct attention and supply energy to complete tasks we believe will expand our knowledge, develop skills or provide things that we want. Our brains also actively look to avoid tasks that don’t interest us, so we conserve energy.
We become interested in tasks because our brains promise to supply dopamine (feel good hormone) when we are doing them or once they are done. We can get this supply from ourselves through enjoyment of completing the task (intrinsic motivation) or when we receive things external to us that we value, such as praise or money (extrinsic motivation).
When we are at work, we find things most interesting when they are new and challenging and provide experience to help our career progression.
On the other hand, where we believe the work will be boring and add no or limited value to us, our brains incentivise us to look for ways to avoid it and conserve energy.
It’s why, when we are in roles with repetitive tasks that don’t change, we can become bored and disengaged if we don’t find something else to create interest and give us a dopamine hit when we complete them.
In these situations, we often convince ourselves we must do the work to get the pay cheque we need to survive.
But this alone isn’t enough over time to keep our interest alive because our brains will stop supplying the dopamine hit that sparks interest when there is no challenge to overcome.
How to boost interest and get things done
There are three tricks to keeping your work interesting, according to psychologists:
link tasks to what matters – how does the task help you achieve your goals or brings you closer to your desired identity?
find ways make the task seem new again – what can you do to use new technology, different steps, other people to achieve the result?
search for ways to do it with less energy – how can you look at the task differently to see how you can do it in less time and with less energy?
Using just one of these three tricks may be enough to boost interest and motivation. Or you may need to employ a combination of them to keep interest alive and motivation high to get the tasks you need to do done.
Having a mindset that you are in control of what interests you and learning how best to manage your motivation will help you achieve more of what you want out of life.
And make you feel amazing too!
If you enjoyed this article, share it with a friend or colleague.
For less than a minutes investment you could help change the course of someones life for the better.