So Olin College has this tradition of giving out books every summer for it’s students to read. This year happened to be a book on motivation called “Why we do what we do” by Edward L. Deci.
Edward argues that there are 3 reasons why we feel motivated to do things:
- Competency - “Are you good at what you do?”
- Autonomy - “Are we doing it out of our own free will”
- Relatedness - “Do you feel compelled and motivated by how you relate yourself to the world, your community, your family, etc”
If you want the details of why these things are important, I encourage you to read the book. I’m mainly going to unpack some of my own feelings about my own motivation.
For most of my life I’ve felt an incredible need to succeed. When I was younger I wanted to be a doctor for the longest time because that’s what my parents were and that’s what they encouraged me to do. And for the longest time I’ve kept that point of view, it was almost like if I didn’t know myself very well, what I would like to do, what I would enjoy. So it seemed just natural that I should go through the motions to get my MD.
I was good at science and math, so that means that I’ll be a good doctor right? Well I’m also crafty and pride myself on doing good work relatively quickly so that also means that I would be a good surgeon right? And rather than disagreeing with myself. I think that if I had decided to go into college as a biology major, I would be able to tough it out into med school and eventually be a skillful surgeon. Had I decided to move into a career of medicine I think I would have fulfilled the competency box but maybe not the autonomy box.
By the time I had entered high school I had convinced myself that I wanted to be a doctor. Now I’m not sure how much of that was my parent’s expectations, and how much of that was my own lack of pointed knowledge of what I could feasibly survive on as an adult. If you had looked at my report card you would maybe infer that I was a highly motivated young woman who worked hard to get good grades. I think the reality was closer to a girl who’s friends mainly existed on massively multiplayer online role playing games who cruised through high school relying on mainly talent. Even though I spent most of my time bitterly disliking high school I managed to graduate and get into Olin college, where I’m currently studying engineering design (you: “what does engineering design mean?” me: “I actually don’t know either...but lets not care too much about the labels, I’ll figure it out probably”).
But anyway I’m getting sidetracked, though I had no real personal drive for some awesome exciting future, my grades never slipped because of that need to succeed I talked about in the first sentence. That need was of course nurtured by my parents. I remember a bunch of times when I showed my parents a 97 and the response was something like “oh, why didn’t you get a 100?” And though towards the later years of K-12 it was more of a joke I was suppose to brush off, it made me mad that other kids who were getting Bs were getting presents from their parents while I was being told I wasn’t good enough.
So it wouldn’t be entirely fair unless I explained a bit of their side. In my case my parents came from China and if you think that test grades in America hold a lot of weight, in China you get into universities based on one test score that you take towards the end of your school. It’s one test that you take one time that determines what you’ll do with your life. And for most people that was the way they could dig out of poverty. So it’s not surprising that my parents had ridiculously high standards.
Honestly what irked me even more was that not only did they focus on grades but but they also tend to focus on the negatives. Even now when ever my little brother’s angry at me he’ll bring up that one B+ I had on my transcript from Algebra II (why does he even care???). But even though they were quite controlling I think it’s probably good that it managed to keep me afloat before I finally got my future stuff together.
But anyway since I’ve started college I’ve found that I’ve been less about getting the grades, partly because Olin professors are kinda bad at giving back grades, but that doesn’t mean that I care any less about what I’m learning. In fact I found that since I’ve been at Olin I’ve started to learn to enjoy learning more. Does it mean that I’m ecstatic whenever a new problem set comes out? Lols, no. But I do it willingly (for the most part) because I know that they’re the building blocks for me to be even awesomer (or I’ll just forget it in a year).
