You're rewarded for doing something with something extrinsic (nice food, money, new toy) or intrinsic (doing the thing makes it rewarding), or punished with something extrinsic (jail, fine) for doing bad things, or intrinsic (guilt, social exclusion).
Incentives and disincentives rule society, learning to harness habits and incentives has helped me improve my life remarkably
If you've figured out something else, I'm sure I'm not the only one curious!
For some people, presumably like OP, rewards and punishments are not motivation; I have anhedonia and a cluster of other problems (including ADHD); rewards do not work because I don't look forward to anything, and punishments do not work because I do not care. Motivation is hard to find.
I'd describe intrinsic rewards as "the thing, in and of itself, is enjoyable" and so if you're motivated primarily by intrinsic rewards, then doing anything that doesn't tickle that part of your brain tends to be somewhere between difficult and impossible and it's often the fear of punishment that finally forces you to do something. This is basically ADHD in a nutshell: can't do the thing because it's not fun, but oh crap the deadline is tomorrow so it must be done now because otherwise failure/get fired/etc.
So it's not so much about incentives or rewards, but that some people are motivated by things that aren't straightforward to control. Can you make unenjoyable tasks enjoyable? Maybe, if you understand that's the issue in the first place, and whatever it is that triggers that for you is something you can add to a task. e.g., a very common ADHD hack is doing something for other people - if you find it difficult to clean just for yourself, but you have guests coming over? Suddenly you're a cleaning machine; or perhaps you struggle to do boring, repetitive tasks in silence but add some music and off you go!
This is, incidentally, what makes being a manager actually challenging. People who are motivated by extrinsic rewards? Probably not super-difficult to motivate (raises, bonuses, public recognition, promotions, etc, are all tools for this). People who are motivated by intrinsic rewards? Well, that's a bit trickier, and I'm not sure what tools a manager would have available to them in this situation.
> People who are motivated by intrinsic rewards? Well, that's a bit trickier, and I'm not sure what tools a manager would have available to them in this situation.
They're not easy, and you don't want a lone wolf on your hands, but you do want to give these types a really long leash so they have the freedom to work on something they do enjoy. Then they'll give it 200%.
These are your rangers, your scouts, your trailblazers; they always seek excitement and there is no taming them for the banality of routine. So harness that by directing them toward experimental/greenfield projects that align with your/company's interests. They're the ones who'll find the new big thing, because they will quit before they allow themselves to get bogged down with yesterday's bullshit work (however critical it may actually be).
Nothing in terms of categories, but many people have "non-standard" coefficients in those mechanisms. Like:
> doing something with something extrinsic (nice food, money, new toy)
Those things are pleasurable and nice, but they don't work for me as a reward unless I can get them in under half an hour or so. My brain won't make the motivational connection between a task and a reward if the delay is larger.
The fundamental reward/motivation mechanism is the same, but it feels like (and I understand it actually is like) the "time discounting" has the exponential factor so large that it effectively becomes a step function - rewards become either "approximately now" or "approximately never".
Yes, this means that most of the things expected of adults are, for me, entirely unrewarding and thus nearly impossible to motivate to do. No, this is not a hyperbole. This is why several people in this thread are swearing to the motivational value of ticking a check box, and why I'm joining them in this - for a lot of mundane, daily tasks, ticking off a box is the only reward our brains can process.
(Sometimes the check box may work as a crutch, allowing enough successes in a row on an activity to let the brain pick up on a slightly more distant reward, and/or just habituate. This is, kid you not, how I had to re-habituate brushing my teeth a couple times in my life. Ain't ADHD great.)
Yeah, the only other motivation I get is something like excitement or curiosity, which is what motivates me to work on my art, but for me it does not tend to work for anything but making art.
