negative and positive motivation

• negative motivation is when your drive comes from the space between you and the destination (it’s not being told you suck)

  • can be characterized as “hating to lose”

• positive motivation is when your drive comes from wanting to see what’s next in the journey (it’s not being told you’re great)

  • can be characterized as “love to win”

i talk about

• how extreme i am in one direction, and the type of roles that i relate to as a result

• how that contrasts with my cofounder - and the type of roles that society needs which rhyme with positive motivation

• how i’ve struggled to communicate w/ people who are intrinsically positively motivated

me and my motivations

i am entirely negatively motivated - there’s a target i’m trying to hit and there are milestones between where i am and the target - and series of milestones that i need to hit to get there.

get to a trillion dollar company

can’t do it myself, need the best of the best in the world marching with us

need to convince others, how are the best people motivated?

they seem to be motivated entirely by exposure, reputational and monetary

so structure the company like that

i have a very fast clock speed - every hour i’m evaluating if we’re on track, if we have enough gas, if we have enough time, if we have enough moral, if we’re traveling on the right vector and how much tolerance we have for the things that could go wrong along the way.

that negative distance, the blurriness of the target between here and then - is everything for me.

and i can’t conceive of not having a target

affirmations do nothing for me

being told i can do it does nothing for me

i’m often told our product looks fantastic. my response is usually one of horror - because i only notice the things that are fucked up about it

i rarely look back at how far i’ve come - bc it’s already happened and i take it for granted

its just me and the target

this type of motivation seems very common among sales people, pro athletes, traders, and goal-oriented people. driving urgency, putting in the extra hours, being in war time and fighting the clock. anything with a quota - or a clear quantifiable measuring stick for skill and success

a relentless desire to speedrun the optimization function of gradient descent w/o thinking too much about alternatives - the embodiment of exploit and not explore.

any problem can be solved by harder work

any failure is the result of not putting in enough work - and entirely my fault

rory sutherland describes how there are bees that do a flower dance to collect pollen from a discovered location, and there are some portion of bees that run off randomly to look for new flowers in random locations.

i am not one of those explore bees. i am the bee that’s making more trips - flying faster, and carrying more pollen from the fields we’ve already discovered. i probably sometimes get angry at the explorer bees going off on their own w/o a clear target to hit…

this is a problem

because while the bee that carries the most pollen back might mean when things get super tough - the difference between life and death.

the bees that ensure long term thriving and growth aren’t the ones who produce the most output…

positive motivation in Mark

mark has a slower clock speed (number of times he re-evaluates his trajectory). close to once a week than every couple hours. he spends less time stressing uncovered distance

after all - he’s smart, and he’s at max speed. if we can traverse the distance - he will do it. if he can’t, well he gave it his best try. why stress about it if maxed out?

• ethan’s note: you stress about it if you aren’t going to make it so you can recalirate direction, and try to do something else. this is in cases where “not making it” is unacceptable, and you need to reorient the target

mark is positively motivated. he is focused on the next thing, the next step in the journey, and how to do it really well. finding out the destination later is fine

we would be dead w/o mark. this problem would not be solved w/o mark.

there have been 3-4 instances in TextQL’s lifetime where we were stuck. no hard work could move us further. we’re in a plateau. no more idea. we need some magic rethink of the architecture

we finished the flower field - it wasn’t enough, and we need a new field of flowers

and w/o telling anyone - one day mark announces to the team something like “i did something extremely brash…. i wrote an entire semantic layer in an afternoon”

and each time - this leap in improvement catepults us forward past a local minimum like the explorer bees finding a new unexplored field of flowers

this type of motivation - assured of yourself, wander forward w/o a clear goal, to see where you end up… is typical of humanities step function improvements. it’s the type of person who works on problems that are interseting - and not missions.

imagine in the story of the three bricklayers - the second one says “i’m buliding the most long lasting wall that has ever existed”. they aren’t interested in the mission - the house of god. they’re interested in the problem - the craft of building the best wall on the history of the planet. in other words, their house of god - the passion they’re obsessed about, IS the wall.

that bricklayer will discover new ways of laying brick the mission oriented one will never see - becuase the mission oriented one is more inerested in the church and only sees the wall as a piece of work required to reach the church

positive motivation is typical of scientists, creatives, artists, and musicians. the work cannot be measured w/ time - but you can observe the quality get better through procrastination - just by spending more time it.

from their tone - you get the sense that einstein or feynman never really gave a shit about the fame they got - only that they were interested in the work.

negative and positive motivation is the difference between someone obsessed w/ winning a nobel prize - and someone who accidentally discovers something that wins a nobel prize.

hard to bridge the gap

i’ve gotten better, so this’ll be a short section

i’ve found asking someone who is positively motivated what their targets are and how they’re going to hit them is a futile exercsie.

actually - it’s actively harmful. it’s just the wrong way to measure it.

my wiring - my entire being itches to measure the next milestone and make sure i’m keeping pace. anxiously making sure i’m on track.

and hearing “do you want me to just move my fingers across the keyboard faster” from mark jerks me back to reality.

that’s all.