Only Intrinsic Motivation Lasts | Hacker News Reader

Only Intrinsic Motivation Lasts

danielvassallo.com

60 pointsadrian_mrd32 comments

>Whenever I got promoted, it felt good for a week, and then it was as over. When I first hit $100K income, I would take a peek at my W2 for a few days admiring the six digits, but then it wore off. When I hit $200K, $300K, $400K, and $500K, it was the same thing. I would be delusional to think that earning $1M, or $10M would suddenly make it different. And I feel the same with every other extrinsic reward or material possession. Getting them feels good for a while, but this wears off quickly.

Let's not forget that at the 75K they started at, this person was already far beyond what most earners make.

Good on this person for making use of their skills and turning it into a lot of money. But this story just doesn't sit well given the year most people have had. My bubble includes people who are truly struggling this year and it pains me so much to see it.

do note that this was written in feb 2019 and only randomly submitted by someone else today

Excellent point, thank you.

You're correct and this is a good thing to point out. It's still somewhat worth keeping in mind how well most of us do here. $75k is considered fantastic pay to a huge percentage of the population. Almost "can't even figure out what to spend all them money on" levels, if you don't have expensive tastes (and obviously only in areas with reasonable COL)

Indeed. I think the key not that extrinsic motivation isn't long-lasting, but that excessively large incomes aren't even (or are only weakly) extrinsically motivating for most people. If the job was enabling them to make ends meet vs. not then no doubt they'd continue to be highly motivated.

>I’m going all in on independence, and I’m going to try to make a living with my own bare hands starting from nothing. I don’t expect to only do things that I like, but it will be on my terms. My target is to cover my family’s expenses before I run out of savings while doing something that intrinsically motivates me

This passage was unintentionally hilarious considering his salary range. From lurking on HN over the years, I am under the distinct impression that many tech workers completely lack perspective even as they go for long bouts of introspection.

He has $15k in 'expenses' every month according to a linked blog post in that article

Then it's a matter of investing that money wisely for a few years

Let me introduce you to my friend burnout.

Even doing what you love and assumed you were intrinsically motived to do you can have a change of heart.

Lots of passionate but overworked game-developers get burned out/disillusioned and go off to employers that don't demand both body and soul for the price of doing the work of their dreams.

edit: I realize the article focusses more on freedom, which might be seen as a separate issue to Games-Industry crunch, but some newly independent game developers will be surprised to learn that how their evil manager used to mistreat them can't hold a candle to what they'll do to themselves...

It's not all doom and gloom, but it's not always all roses either. And with this being a more-than-usually rough year for many people, the downsides are more at the front of my mind right now than the (many and tremendous) upsides.

Yeah, I think game dev is perhaps on one extreme of a scale. One can be highly intrinsically motivated but at the same time externally demotivated. I originally wanted to be in 8/16 bit game dev and it might have been alright at that time but glad not to be in it now, except as a recreational activity.

> I’m going all in on independence, and I’m going to try to make a living with my own bare hands starting from ~~nothing~~.

Good on you for doing your own thing, but I think it's accurate to say you are starting "from nothing". You are starting with lots of things - including 5 years of expenses and a house.

This is early 2019. Different world.

There is so little need for stories of overprivilege right now, even for this audience.

The nunber of narcissists that need this kind of attention - I made money and I gave it all up is reasonable, given the number of software devs in the world, but the visibility of their identically inane stories, amounts to noise. Give me the link to this blogspam along with the success story (of what they ended up doing 5 years later) and it might hold my interest.

Especially since, a year later, the answer seems to be "selling how to build a Twitter following" self help videos. [0]

This is just someone who desperately needs to justify why he retired early (which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you've got the cash and wish to live that sort of lifestyle, but there's no need to wrap it all up in some pseudo-psychology about motivation) .

[0] https://danielvassallo.com/#doing

Right now he is also working a part-time job as a head of product in Gumroad (working 10 hours per week).

https://twitter.com/shl/status/1300848723182776322?s=08

True enough, but this is about the meaninglessness of privilege. The author went to where the grass was provably greener. And it ended up being a valueless delusion. So now it is time for something different. This sounds more similar to current stories of desperation than different.

In fairness, it ended with being paid obscene amounts of money. Lost of people consider life a valueless delusion. For most people life is a frustrating grind, and there was never any light at the end of the tunnel. So there never was any delusion of living a meaningful life. Plus they have no money either.

The reality that much of the HN crowd has to come to terms with is that you'll probably never find your passion project. Most people don't, and if they do, it's a fleeting thing that only last a couple years. Otherwise we're here to make money and live as comfortably as possible. That means valuing the right mix of boundaries and compensation.

It's much better to focus on living meaningful lives, our relationships, and make best use of the free time we have.

I'm not getting the idea that privilege is meaningless from that story. On the contrary, for someone to honestly believe and state without any trace of irony that they are starting from nothing with their own bare hands with 15k monthly expenses and more than a million in savings means that privilege is hugely meaningful and significant as it allows people to live in completely different realities.

Different world in that the average person at HN now reads this similar to how the average person in general would have read it in 2019. This article was no less tone-deaf in 2019.

Let's just be clear that this article only starts to apply once you have money to live off for the next 5-10 years without working, if then.

This to me sounds insane. Reaching 500K after 5 only years work is out of this world. What kind of impact can a guy make after only 5 years of experience? Can somebody explain to me how things like that can happen? Also this: after 3 years an engineer cannot be consider "senior" at all, at most experienced.

Salary trends were set during 100 years of managerialism science of how to manage toil at scale. It’s likely a mistake to compare impact of manual labor against Archimedes’ Lever.

Today’s engineering wages are just beginning to recognize how value of one bit of code, run a billion times, could be insanely valuable by comparison.

Wages for software engineers (more than coders or devs) are thought of as “frothy” but in reality still haven’t caught up with the recognition for founders/entrepreneurs/startups who because of that lack of recognition can capture more of that market value (IPO, acquisition, etc.) for themselves.

Through time we’re likely to see increasingly selective identification and reward of individuals best suited to turn the job to be done into an automation across industries where digitalization can drive profits.

I've been performing well by running from my demons for at least a decade now, and here I thought that was normal.

I have ADHD. My motivation never lasts a day.

Good for that dude, but he's quick to generalize his personal experiences.

Ain’t bad when you can sell self-realization for a profit.

I feel like this whole article was an excuse to flex their performance and their bank account. Nothing wrong with recognizing your own achievements but making it such a big point of multiple blog posts of yours is a bit sociopathic.

I usually love a good post about quitting the corporate gig to chase greener pastures too, but this is definitely too much.

I don't understand why everyone is so fixated on his income. If he was an home builder that went from an apprentice to managing entire teams on large projects I think his argument would still apply - past a certain point financial incentives aren't enough.

In the builders case, maybe he'd be writing about getting back to custom, client facing work. I think his essay applies to lots of driven, Type A people that tend to optimize for status - regardless of their field. Personally I find this very relevant.

It's not as much about income itself, as it's about safety.

When you know you'll be able to pay your bills in the foreseeable future and you have an emergency fund, you can talk how money doesn't bring happiness or motivation.

When you're below a safety threshold, barely making ends meet, one car or dental problem from debt, or in debt already, it's a whole different story. Extrinsic motivation will do wonders for you.

Reiss, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University , argues that a diverse range of human motivations can't be forced into these categories of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. https://archive.is/57CX

Thanks for posting this! I had read an article by him a while ago and found it pretty persuasive (or rather that it supported prior intuitions), but couldn't find it again when I wanted to come back to it.

Quality presumption effect: 'The use-bounded and utilize-optimized consumer been pulled to that point where they get what they want for expenses they are willing to be priced at' - common sense? (-;

Totally relate.

I created web things from age 12 - 30, and I used to check Hacker News throughout the day. Then I saw... another JS framework.

Here's a story I wrote: https://www.appliedideals.com/daniel-poynter

But even that story is a few years old. In early 2019 I dove into climate full time, started a nonprofit last spring. Here's that story: https://www.carbonneutralindiana.org/blog-2020-quarter-3

Intrinsic motivation? Check.

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