💡 Passion series For the full picture of why passion disappears when you turn what you love into work — and where the exit lies — start with the cluster pillar. → Why Passion Disappears When You Turn What You Love Into Work
Introduction: The Motivation That Never Lasts
Your motivation will not rise. So you look for ways to raise it. Tips for drawing out drive, techniques for habit-building, the craft of goal-setting. And yet, whichever you try, the motivation you raised does not last. It eases for a while, and before long the same heaviness returns. And you conclude it is because my mindset has not changed enough, and pour still more time into correcting your mindset.
Plenty has been written on how to raise your motivation. What this article places is the question one step before it: why the prescription raise your motivation, change your mindset does not work on the loss of passion in someone who turned what they love into work, and what the real conditions for love that lasts are.
Let me give the conclusion first. Motivation is not something you raise from outside by force of will. It is decided from within, by whether three psychological needs are met. And the prescription change your mindset mistakes the cause of the problem for the individual’s interior, and so is no fundamental solution.
📖 Contents
Why “Change Your Mindset” Does Not Work
The prescription passion can be sustained depending on how you think; just enjoy it instead of treating it as an obligation is widely believed. There are scenes where this view helps: when turning around a temporary negative mood, a reinterpretation of cognition is of use.
But on the problem of lost passion, this prescription does not work. The thought I am doing what I love is a conscious cognition, while the fall of intrinsic motivation happens as an unconscious change of motivation. Your conscious mind may say I love this, but if the structure of motivation has changed, the energy toward action does not. Many people have the experience of trying let me enjoy it, let me be grateful, and finding nothing changed. It was not that their will was weak; it is that, since the problem does not lie in the quality of cognition, correcting cognition does not solve it.
This prescription has a further harm. The stronger the belief changing my mindset will solve it, the deeper the self-blame toward a self that does not change. It got hard again — because my mindset is still not enough — this interpretation pulls you into a cycle of spending yet more time and energy on correcting your mindset. Attributing the problem to the individual’s cognition is what delays the real solution.
Motivation Is Decided by Three Needs
By what, then, is motivation — intrinsic motivation — decided? Self-determination theory, systematised by the psychologists Deci and Ryan, showed that to sustain intrinsic motivation three basic psychological needs must be met [Deci & Ryan, 1985].
- Autonomy: the sense that I am choosing. A state in which the origin of the action is in your own interior.
- Competence: the sense that I can do this. The feel of growing by your own standard.
- Relatedness: the sense that I am connected to those I want to reach. A state of not being isolated.
What matters is that these three are a question of quality, not quantity. However busily you are earning, if the sense that I am choosing is lost, autonomy has fallen. However good the evaluation you receive, if that evaluation runs along an external standard, a gap opens with your own sense of competence. Being economically successful and having intrinsic motivation met are different concepts.
▸ How these three needs are obstructed by turning what you love into work is treated in why you lose your drive once what you love becomes work.
Not “Raising” It, but “Reducing the Obstruction”
From this understanding, the way you face motivation changes. Motivation is not something you inject from outside by will. Intrinsic motivation is already there; the problem is that something obstructing it has been added.
Turn what you love into work and autonomy, competence, and relatedness tend to be obstructed at once. The origin of action moves outward, the standard of evaluation moves outward, and the relationship moves from those you want to reach to those who send you requests. So rather than raising motivation, the right direction is reducing what obstructs intrinsic motivation. And that does not reduce with an attitude of mind. It reduces only by changing the structure the activity is loaded onto — above all the external control that robs you of autonomy.
Conclusion: Move the Question From “How to Raise” to “The Conditions”
Your motivation will not rise not because your mindset is immature but because the three needs that support intrinsic motivation are obstructed within the structure of turning what you love into work. So the more you search for how to raise motivation, the more self-blame toward the self that cannot piles up.
What is needed is not a more effective motivation technique. It is to change the question from how do I raise it to what are the conditions that support intrinsic motivation. Within a structure where autonomy is kept, motivation rises from within without your trying to raise it. Receive the overall blueprint as your next step. How this deception of the prescriptions works across turning what you love into work as a whole is gathered in why passion disappears when you turn what you love into work.
References
Academic papers and theory
- Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press
- Lepper, M. R., Greene, D., & Nisbett, R. E. “Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward” (1973) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28(1)
