Motivate: How to Defeat Distraction, Ignite Interest, and Secure Success

By Adam Braus

Whether it is at school, at work, or in our personal lives, being motivated helps us to achieve more and be more successful. But what does it take to be motivated? Does it require perfect parenting, a ton of privilege, and a lot of luck? New educational and psychological research suggests that we actually have significantly more control over our

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peripatetic Press
• Release date: Jul 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986640532

Book preview

Adam Braus

Motivate

How to Defeat Distraction, Ignite Interest, and Secure Success

First published by Peripatetic Press 2021

Copyright © 2021 by Adam Braus

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

First edition

ISBN: 979-8-9866405-3-2

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

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For Maggie, Nora, Leo, Evan, Ethan, Kahn, Frankie, and Rooney — the next generation

Contents

Epigraph

Introduction

I. THE LADDER OF MOTIVATION

1. Carrots and Sticks

2. You Just Might Find, You Get What You Need

3. Autonomy, Mastery, and Self-Determination

4. The Top of the Ladder of Motivation: Social Significance

II. GRIT & GROUT

5. The Rise of Grit

6. Should I Be Understanding or Demanding?

7. Putting Care into Charisma

8. Benjamin Bloom and Personalized Learning

9. Building Interest I: Interest and Ownership

10. Building Interest II: Where Interest is King

11. Building Interest III: How to Spark Interest in Anyone

12. What We Can Learn From Video Games

13. Trophies for Everyone: Self-Esteem and the Motivation to Learn

14. Screen Time is OK: How to Use Carrots and Sticks

III. THE HARD CASES: DISTRACTION, PREJUDICE, AND DEFIANCE

15. Bending the Bell Curve

16. Defiance and Discipline: Restoring Motivation

17. Defeating Distraction: ADD/ADHD and Motivation

18. It Is Important to Have Teachers Like You

19. Learned Helplessness and Growth Mindset Language

20. What Motivates Us More — Helping Ourselves or Helping Others?

IV. THE MOTIVATED SCHOOL

21. Benjamin Bloom Builds Better Schools

22. How to Grade to Build Motivation

23. Competition, Designed Properly, Increases the Motivation to Learn

24. Betty’s Brain: Motivation and the Protégé Effect

25. Let’s be PALS: Motivation and Peer-Assisted Learning

26. Motivated Students Need Motivated Teachers

Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Adam Braus

Epigraph

The best thing for being sad, replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.

—T. H. White, The Once and Future King

Introduction

Nataly was on fire.

Just as she completed her high school’s advanced computer science and programming class, Nataly learned about the phenomenon of anti-vaxxers. At first, she was fascinated by them. Who could be against vaccination? How did people become convinced of conspiratorial ideas? Then she learned about kids getting sick (and sometimes dying) of measles. This made Nataly mad. Nataly told her teacher, Marcus, about how she felt. Marcus suggested that Nataly could use what she had learned that year about websites and the internet to make a difference.

Nataly took her teacher’s suggestion and went into high gear. She collected educational information and data on the importance of vaccination. She publicized this information and visualized the data on a website. Finally, she shared her website with her community to raise awareness of the importance of vaccination. Nataly applied all the major principles of her computer training, became a minor expert in immunological public health, and created an impressive addition to her college application. In some places in the country, the skills Nataly put to use could have landed her a well-paid job.

Nataly was deeply and personally motivated to start and complete her project. When most of her peers were suffering from stage-five senioritis, Nataly committed to spending hundreds of hours on a project that was entirely optional.

Any parent or teacher would take one look at Nataly and say she was special. Her learning was persistent, passionate, and self-regulated.

Nataly was motivated.

This book is about how to get people to be as motivated as Nataly.

Building a highly motivational environment

Five years ago, I was hired to do an impossible job.

I was given the reigns of a new, fledgling college in San Francisco, Make School, that was accepting and admitting students from all levels of preparation, privilege, and backgrounds. With their credentials, few other colleges would have accepted them, but I was told to turn all of them into top performers with jobs at companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook. On paper, it was impossible, and any other educator would have called us foolhardy.

I felt towards my students the way a parent does towards their children. I believed in them, and I wanted to give them every advantage. Many people in and outside the school doubted we could succeed, but I believed that we could do it. For my confidence, I earned the title of Resident Optimist around the office. Five years later, Make School is an accredited college with over two hundred enrolled students and hundreds of successful graduates.

So, how did my team and I do it? The short answer is we built a highly motivational environment.

When I took the job, I felt like an ancient alchemist facing the question of transmuting lead into gold. I began with one thing in mind — a simple yet potentially disruptive hunch: The greater someone’s motivation is, the greater their success will be. I believed that being motivated was at the heart of success for my students, no matter their background or level of preparation. The most motivated students were going to be the most successful. So, studying motivation became my obsession. I started with several burning questions: What motivates learners? Why do people become demotivated to the point of apathy and then to defiance? Where does a deep motivation to learn come from? How can we build up motivation?

Over the next five years, I read piles of books and research papers. I conducted dozens of my own experiments. I interviewed hundreds of educators, parents, coaches, and young people both in my school and worldwide. I broadened my research scope to encompass the fascinating, often dizzying worlds of economics, psychology, and behavioral science. And I found what I believe to be groundbreaking research that could radically change people’s lives all around the world for the better.

I discovered that it was possible to change someone’s motivation and increase it. Instead of changing someone’s attitudes, beliefs, or habits, the most reliable way to improve someone’s motivation to learn is to change their environment. As someone in charge of an environment, whether a parent, teacher, or manager, to create significant improvements in motivation, we had to focus on designing the environment in which people live, work, and learn. The rest of this book is about how to do just that.

What is motivation?

So what is motivation?

Motivation is everything that goes into making a human being an energetic, working organism. It’s the mental machinery humans have for setting and working towards goals. Motivation is a complex, interconnected web of natural, personal, societal, and situational processes. If someone’s motivation is low, they become apathetic, lethargic, and repetitive. If their motivation is high, like Nataly’s from the beginning of this introduction, they become purposive, energetic, and prolific. Whatever their age or situation, increasing someone’s motivation means increasing the pace and richness of their goal-seeking behavior.

When I began researching and writing this book, I believed that being as motivated as Nataly required affluence, immaculate parenting, brilliant teaching, and a good deal of luck. Improving education would take enormous amounts of money, major technological breakthroughs, and parenting and educational policy revolutions. Instead, I found that when it came to motivation, elite boarding schools were about as good (or bad) as overcrowded public ones and that a single parent or teacher working in isolation could easily make a significant impact in their home or classroom.

Motivation is not just a conscious process. The unconscious elements of our being matter too. We all have instincts, reflexes, and hard-wired cognitive biases; we have tastes, preferences, and values; all that, together with our conscious feelings, thoughts, and values, add up to make our level of motivation. And we cannot stop just by analyzing one person by themselves. The most important parts of any environment are the relationships between people and between people and big ideas. To motivate someone, we have to understand the possibilities someone has for participating in and creating social meaning. With so many variables that add up to motivation, the task of understanding and predictably increasing motivation may seem impossible, but, thankfully, generations of psychologists and researchers have already done a great deal of the work for us.

The evidence-based factors that cause motivation are shaped roughly like a ladder. I call this ladder the Ladder of Motivation. It has four steps.

The ladder of motivation

Generally speaking, the lower rungs of the ladder must be met before unlocking those higher up. It is hard to motivate someone with a strong sense of purpose and belonging if they don’t have adequate food or a place to live. If someone has their physical and emotional needs met but they have no control over their lives, frustration and apathy set in.

Each chapter of this book tells the story of a new, powerful tactic anyone can use to build motivation. In Part 1, we’ll gain a common language to understand motivation by learning the rich history of the study of motivation. Part 2 draws on contemporary research from around the world, from Alaska to Australia, to explain how and why people can only develop grit — motivation, and perseverance — when they have adequate grout — support, autonomy, and social meaning — in their environment. You’ll be able to bring the best out of people by being understanding and warm while still maintaining high expectations. You’ll learn that most parents and schools get personalized learning wrong and the three factors of personalizing learning that really work. You’ll learn how interest supports the motivation to learn and how to use a breakthrough four-phase model for sparking and growing people’s interest. You’ll learn how to use extrinsic rewards, such as screen time and cold hard cash to help (and not hurt) someone’s motivation. In Part 3, we’ll challenge ourselves to look at stories of major motivational challenges. We’ll ask how to motivate people who break the rules, have ADD or ADHD, or who face prejudice, are underserved, and are underprivileged. We’ll learn critical, new perspectives on popular but misunderstood ideas, such as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and having a growth mindset. We’ll learn that a new evidence-based method of discipline is sweeping the world. In the final section, Part 4, we’ll take a critical look at stories of how we can take what we’ve learned to reform schools. We’ll learn how teachers and principals can make schools more motivating by changing the way they grade, manage classrooms, and train and reimburse teachers.

How this book can work for you

This book is built to help parents and teachers who are looking for concrete ways to help young people become more motivated and succeed. What can we do to nurture a young person’s interest in math or art? How can we effectively encourage our children or teens to clean their rooms? What can we do to help them more than we already do? Are we doing anything that might hurt their success down the line? Parents and teachers have significant influence over the children in their care and often can feel anxious, powerless, and even hopeless about their motivation, resilience, and success. This book is here to provide compelling and innovative evidence-based answers to these questions.

This is a book about motivation. And while I’m an educator and I focus on motivating young people in homes and schools, anyone can use the tactics in this book to make any environment more motivating. Whether we need the motivation to run a marathon, improve our careers, motivate our teammates or employees, or help our children and students succeed, research suggests that we will succeed if we stop blaming our characters and instead spend our energies and brainpower improving our environments.

I

The Ladder of Motivation

The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

— Confucius

1

Carrots and Sticks

In 2016, the coding boot camp General Assembly (GA) hired me to be one of three instructors who taught their flagship Web Development Immersive course known by its acronym WDI. The course ran for twelve weeks, cost roughly sixteen thousand dollars, and promised to turn its students into professional web developers.

I arrived early on my first day for the morning meeting with my instructional team. My two fellow instructors were Michael, a warmhearted recent computer science grad from the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), and Brett, a developer in his late thirties known for being accompanied everywhere by Walter, his frail, grey chihuahua.

During my first twelve-week session, I learned that although WDI was an incredible slog, more students completed the grueling gauntlet than I had expected, though by week six or seven, many of them were completely burned out. They looked and acted like coding zombies, with their eyes glazed over and their mouths agape, just slightly wider than normal. Despite the endless punishment, almost everyone returned day after day for more. I asked around to see if burnout at week six was normal.

Of course they get burned out, Michael answered with some pride. We have one of the most rigorous programs.

UCB is a place that boasts about its culture of work-till-you-drop rigor. I didn’t press Michael on his answer, but I filed away the obvious follow-up question: should student burnout be a sign of a good learning environment or a bad one? So I decided to take an inventory of the motivational environment at GA. This is something any parent, teacher, student, or principal can do for their home or school.

First, observe how motivated people are, and then write down the characteristics in their environment. Next, consider which things are contributing to people’s motivation and energy and which ones are detracting. Finally, see if you can grow the contributions and shrink the detractions.

When I arrived at GA, instructors gave lectures for 70-80 percent of class time, and then assigned hours of homework, much of which went right over learners’ heads. Students were at their desks at 9:15 each morning and often stayed there coding until 7 or 8 pm. Every third week, learners had the chance to envision, design, and build their own original portfolio projects. These project weeks were accompanied by pressure, frustration, and not a few tearful breakdowns.

In a traditional school environment, these gulag conditions would have led to sulking, disengagement, defiance, surliness, failure, and the inevitable dropouts. But somehow not at WDI. Every day the learners were in their seats, ready to try their best. If I had been a student, I don’t think I would have made it. I shared my surprise with my colleagues about the ability of WDI students to keep going in the face of daunting subject material and honestly boring and frustrating teaching. The answer was that our adult learners were expected to motivate themselves and had invested a lot of money in the course and the better job prospects it offered.

At the time, I accepted this two-part explanation. Maybe motivating adults is different from motivating adolescents and children. Maybe adults are just better at motivating themselves. They’ve worked for a living, and they bring that experience into the WDI classroom, whereas high schoolers usually have not personally paid anything for their education. On the other hand, college students pay a lot (roughly four-to-twenty times more than at GA), and they definitely want their studies to lead to jobs.

Michael and Brett’s justifications of our students’ burnout and zombie-like perseverance were not adding up. Their common notions of motivation did not sit right with me. Were we really doing the best we could for our students? Could we make changes to our school to motivate them more? I decided to dive into the science of motivation and see if I could improve our students’ motivation.

Skinner’s pigeons and Pavlov’s dogs

Michael and Brett explained the motivation of WDI students with the simplest and oldest theory of motivation: carrots and sticks. Reward and praise behaviors you want, and threaten and punish behaviors you don’t. In the field of psychology, this theory is called behaviorism or classic conditioning. For GA’s learners, the big juicy carrot was a good job in tech. If you quit the boot camp, you got whacked with the stick of losing your tuition, which was around $16,000.

The carrot and stick method of motivation is also called positive and negative reinforcement and was invented by the behaviorists B.F. Skinner, John B. Watson, and Ivan Pavlov (famous for the dogs he trained to salivate at the sound of a bell). These theorists observed that in the animal kingdom, and in many instances of human behavior, that punishment, or the threat of it, will inhibit a specific behavior, while a reward will cause it.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of behaviorism, B.F. Skinner developed experiments using primarily birds and mice. He developed a recognizable experimental situation known to this day as a Skinner Box.

In a Skinner Box, the subject is in a controlled environment where there are only two possible outcomes: either positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement of their behavior. Positive reinforcement might be a pellet of food, while negative reinforcement could be a mild electric shock to the floor of the box. Skinner found that animals changed their behavior very rapidly in response to both negative and positive reinforcements.

Behaviorism might seem somewhat medieval by today’s standards of science and ethics, but, at the time, the theory was a major breakthrough in providing a scientific basis for how we behave. Both behaviorism and classical conditioning had (and still have) strong explanatory power and strong staying power. To this day, most people, when trying to change or influence behavior, turn to positive and negative reinforcement, even if this approach draws criticism. We put people in prison who break the law (sticks). We give rewards to people who return stolen property (carrots). We fire and demote agitators and sluggards (sticks). We give raises to people who are obedient and excellent at their jobs (carrots).

When we consider only rewards and punishments, our homes and schools start to resemble large Skinner Boxes. Young people get carrots in the form of praise, screen time, free time, gold stars, good grades, and the odd piece of candy. The most common sticks are time-outs, getting grounded, bad grades, a sharp rebuke, probation, detention, suspension, and expulsion.

Skinner might have approved of GA’s motivation scheme. Like a giant twelve-week Skinner Box, students could either get the big juicy carrot of a well-paying software job or face the stick of losing or making little use of the money they paid in tuition. Despite being easy to understand, behaviorism is extremely limited in its application. The behaviorists couldn’t offer any more suggestions for improving motivation and reducing burnout at GA beyond what we already had in place. We were already praising good performance and warning people who were falling behind or repeating errors, and we weren’t about to start giving out food pellets or electrifying the floors.

I knew there had to be more we could do to improve motivation and achievement than just create more or bigger carrots and sticks. Just as in any home or school, there was so much more going on at WDI, with so many opportunities to improve each person’s motivation, just simmering under the surface. B.F. Skinner’s pigeons weren’t burning out, they were just pressing buttons and eating food pellets. To make meaningful improvements, I needed a deeper, more human understanding of motivation. I found it in the theory of needs-based motivation, the next chapter of the psychology of motivation.

2

You Just Might Find, You Get What You Need

Each day, Ms. Nancy, a third-grade teacher in Washington, D.C., gave her class of twenty-seven eight-year-olds, twenty minutes of quiet recess when they could choose anything to do in the classroom, provided they did it quietly.

One student named Henry routinely walked over to the classroom library, picked up a book, plopped down criss-cross applesauce, pulled an oversized pillow into his lap, set a book on it, and read. Ms. Nancy sometimes had to separate Henry’s friends who got rambunctious during quiet recess, but not Henry. He was perfectly content just reading for the full twenty minutes. When Ms. Nancy asked the class to draw a picture of when they were most happy, Henry drew a picture of a stick figure boy sitting in a library of brightly-colored books, reading.

Henry was motivated to read, but why? B.F. Skinner or Anton Pavlov could not explain his behavior. Henry wasn’t receiving a reward and didn’t have to worry about punishment. He could use his quiet recess however he liked. But, if we look closer at Henry’s life, we find an answer to what motivates him that goes beyond carrots and sticks and takes us into the world of the fulfillment of physical and emotional needs.

Ms. Nancy shared with me that Henry came from a difficult home life where his father was in and out of their lives, and his mother did not maintain a predictable life for her son. The closest thing to a parent he had was his uncle, who had died suddenly a few months ago. Henry’s needs for safety, predictability, emotional support and even nutrition were not being adequately met outside school. But sitting and reading helped him meet one of those needs — the need for time that was quiet, predictable, and safe.

Fulfilling our needs is deeply motivating. We all have the same basic needs, such as shelter and food, but we also all have the same higher-order needs that define us — needs like love, a sense of belonging, or self-esteem. When our basic needs are not met, we have to use our