How to Increase Motivation | Jordan B. Peterson

i've been interested in how to increase people's motivation for a long time you know and um and there's a nice literature on that and and part of it was as was created by uh latham and locke carrie latham and edwin locke and they're looking at goal setting that's how they described it as a means to improve business productivity and so what they imagine that you have two teams and you get them to set goals and one team sets goals for their corporate productivity and another team sets goals for their life and then you match them head to head over some period of time and see which one comes ahead and what happens is the people who set goals for their life beat the people who set goals for the company and so that's really and then there's a variety of other literatures that support that kind of hypothesis but it's it's it's very very worthwhile thinking that through because what you want if your company is structured properly you want people in it who have a life right so they're aiming at things that they think are valuable because they're just not going to be motivated period unless they're aiming at things they think are valuable and then you want their loyalty to the company to be nested inside that so they have to see that working there no matter what it is that they're doing and now you know often jobs are repetitive and dull and difficult and and challenging and all of that or you wouldn't be paid to do them right they're not all fun and games but if you can see that the less intrinsically interesting things that you're required to do are related in some directly intelligible way to goals that you regard as valuable then that tags those activities with this dopaminergic kick that we were talking about earlier so you need this hierarchy of values right just like here's what i'm doing with my life here's why my job is important to that or maybe it isn't and then you have to quit and go find a new job but that's fine but you know because you might discover that too and so we started um trying to formalize this when at the same time that i also realized something that i've never recovered from realizing i think so i teach students usually for this class it was third and fourth year students and so this is at the university of toronto they're pretty smart kids it's a hard university to get into and they're pretty disciplined and they're actually quite conservative all things considered and i was teaching them about stories and about the fact that our life is a story with a goal and a purpose and a beginning point and and um i was encouraging them to develop their own stories so i had them write an autobiography and they really got into that that was quite amazing to identify you know to break their life into epochs and then to describe the important episodes in each epoch both positive and negative and what they might do to reduce the possibility of the negative in the future and to capitalize on the positive um which is the purpose of memory by the way and then also to write a plan for the future and so we we formalized that so the plan is okay first of all you have to get yourself in the right mindset and the mindset is you're trying to take care of yourself like you would care for someone that you cared for that's a hard mindset to get into because people like their pets better than they like themselves often and then you have to have a vision and so the vision would be well okay three to five years down the road if your friendship networks were configured properly what would that look like if you were pursuing the career that would be appropriate for you and sustaining for you what would that look like how are you going to educate yourself how are you going to take care of yourself mentally and physically what do you want for an intimate relationship and how are you going to handle temptations like alcohol and drug abuse because they take people down pretty frequently so all you have to do is think about okay what could that be like if you had what you needed not some wild fantasy but but realistic and what you needed so that's the first part and then okay now write for 20 minutes about what your life could be like three to five years down the road if all this came together and then now do the opposite so imagine all your weaknesses and all the ways that you can go down the wrong path and then imagine that gets the upper hand then imagine where you are in three to five years so then you get a polarity a it's like not this and that and yes this so you can run away from the things you don't want and you can run towards the things you do want that gets your anxiety behind you instead of in front of you right because maybe you're gonna go do something difficult and you're afraid of it and then you think well if i don't do this i'm gonna end up there it's like oh okay that's so terrible that this little terrible is nothing so and then in the next part of the exercise you turn that into an implementable plan you know and you write about why your life would be better and why your family's life would be better and why your community's life would be better so it's like fully articulated and we've tested about 10 000 university students with that now in three different locales and we've increased the probability that they'll stay in university by about 30 percent and raise their grade point average about the same and it's worked best for men who are most who are doing the least well so in holland those were non-western ethnic minority men and they improved their poor performance enough to actually slightly exceed the dutch national women who were at the top otherwise over two years yeah it was unbelievable it just blew us away a psychological intervention to cure what's in hypothetically a sociological problem and so and so that that's a good example of how and it what what blew me away when i was first considering this is i had all these students 21 years old and i realized that no one had ever sat them down not even once in their entire career in education and said okay who do you want to be like what sort of person is it that you want to be not not job it's like character what do you want your life to be like what should it be like and what shouldn't it be like and like write about that seriously like your life depends on it because it does and and then i thought well that's so weird why in the world isn't our education system set up to help people with that because it's like that's kind of obvious you know it's like what are you doing and why and then i did some reading partly from john gatto who's done some interesting work looking at the history of the education system and it was a derivation of the prussian education system back in the late 1800s and it was designed to produce obedient obedient well it was partly soldiers but it was partly workers oh i was going to say it definitely was soldiers because yeah that was the transition when they they had the transition take place at that time as well where they moved away from centralized command after they got beat by napoleon and they never they were constantly trying to fight towards that direction where the soldiers would not just be obedient because they realized that that is not what they actually wanted they they finally started to do at the end of world war one and and if they would have done it earlier it might have turned the tide of the war but that was what you know that's what world war ii the blitzkrieg and and total decentralized command and elements just going out and making things happen and finding gaps in the defenses and attacking them as opposed to you're just going to wait until you're told what to do right and that was the the german way and decentralized command so right yeah well well competence beats obedience right so you unite people under a goal and then you let them act autonomously you've got to get them you've got to not sell them the goal that's not right you know what you have to do is you have to go in and talk to them and discover what the goal is of the enterprise and what it is that fires people up and that really does work you know and the idea that capitalism is essentially crooked and it's the people who are who are pulling the wool over other people's eyes who win it's like well you know now and then there's a criminal action and the person gets away with it so to speak although people get away with a lot less than they think but most of the time within a functional company you better have your people on board or they will do exactly what you said they'll do they'll spend 80 percent of their time sabotaging the company yeah and i i uh again something i learned working with a corporate world and it was working with a corporate world where i reflected on what i did and and was talking to a elite a business leader at some point and i said well you know your people can understand why they're doing what they're doing and so then he's you know absorbs that and says okay that's makes sense and so then he gets up in front of his team and he says you know well the reason why we're doing this is we want to improve our profitability as a company and you know he sat down and we talked afterwards and he said did i do a good job because now they understand i said oh no actually you missed it and then i started explaining to them better because i learned that what you have to explain there has to be a thread of why that goes all the way through the corporate reason but that y has to come back down to the individual contributor so they realize that when when we do better as a company when we're more profitable as a company we can put more money in our in marketing and we can produce stuff cheaper because we'll do it on a more mass scale then we can lower prices and then we can actually hire more people that's going to make you move up in this command here and you're going to make more money we're going to sell more stuff and you're gonna get a bigger bonus so you doing this the reason why you're doing it is because then you can achieve those life goals because you want to buy that house and that car and send your kid to school so there's a big difference you need to make sure that the people understand why they're doing it not for the corporate reason not for the mission reason but for for why it's going to help them the exact same thing you just said yeah it's also really helpful too if you you know your corporation has i hate to use the word vision because that's you know turned into a buzzword but you know it's often that you're working in a company where worthwhile things are happening exciting and worthwhile things you know and you're you're you're trying to well make something better at a lower price let's say and so there's the the heroism let's say of producing a product that's going to have a positive impact on the world and you need to know how your small actions are tied with that greater goal and then there's this financial self-interest as well and and the thing is if you don't if you can't tell your workers that story then either your company is fundamentally corrupt because that isn't the true story it's like you're actually working so that i can rape and pillage the company over the next four years and take all the value out of it and run because you know ceos do that from time to time yes or you don't understand how the company works and you can't tell the story which means you're basically incompetent so but well you people are not wired up so that they will work without knowing why unless you beat them and then if you beat them you don't be thinking that that's victory

Channel: Jordan B Peterson Clips

Views: 550,471

Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology, how to, motivation, leadership, growth, improvement, podcast, interview, peterson

Id: D8NiOA78GwI

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 03 2020