What motivates more: positive or negative feedback?
And when to give positive feedback & when negative
It keeps you up for 24hrs straight completing a passion project without checking the clock.
Come Monday morning (when you need to nail down that boring PowerPoint), it’s floated into the stratosphere…
Motivation. It’s a powerful beast.
Often, a sustained blast of it is all we need to kickstart a new career or complete a personal goal. And if we could harness it every day — well, we’d be unstoppable.
Unfortunately, it’s rarely that simple. Motivation is hard to summon and harder to keep alive. As a resource, it’s as finite as they come (see also: its ever-flakey brother, inspiration).
That’s why few people can sustain a constant high charge of self-motivation: things tend to fizzle out somewhere in between the steep rush of excitement and the formidable endpoint.
I believe that to manage motivation as effectively as possible — to tame this elusive, fleeting energy — it needs to be part of a built-in loop that regenerates itself.
Like a timeshare, it becomes bigger, stronger and more powerful when others feed into it.
