Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation | Yu-Kai Chou

So once you have this tool— oh, then it's also graphed on the octagon shape for a reason. The left brain core drives, the left side, we call them left brain core drives, which the disclaimer is that it's not geographically on the left side, but it means our logical brain, you know. And the left brain core drives, they symbolically means extrinsic motivation, things to do for a reward, for a purpose, or for a goal, but we don't necessarily enjoy the activity itself. So once we get the reward, we hit the goal, or we get used to the reward, We stop doing it. The right-brain core drives are about intrinsic motivation. So things that you just enjoy doing. That you, you like doing it so much that you would even be willing to pay money to do. So you don't need a, you don't need a reward to enjoy using your creativity. You don't need a reward to hang with your friends. You also don't need a reward to be in that suspense of unpredictability. So here's my example. If, let's say you sit there and you press a button for 4 hours straight. And you're guaranteed a paycheck. That's kind of boring, right? That's like a job at a factory. Most people don't like that. But if you sit there and you press a button for 4 hours straight, and maybe you'll get a paycheck, maybe you won't, maybe you'll even lose money, suddenly that's casino gambling, and a lot of people like that, right? Even though the payout of that is way worse, right? Guaranteed payment versus potentially losing money. But our brains crave that unpredictability, that feeling of maybe I'll win, so much that we're willing to pay the casino to to experience that feeling. So people come out and say, oh, you know, I lost my $200 in the casino, but I had so much fun. Right? So that unpredictability is intrinsic drive that we crave. Now, most companies like to design for left-brain core drive, extrinsic motivation. And it's because it's just so much easier to put a reward, put a goal, to put a badge on something you want people to do, as opposed to making it fun. However, science has shown that The extrinsic motivation can often kill intrinsic motivation. So what does that mean? Let's say I love to draw, and I always draw for free. You know, it's my passion. Science has shown that one of the best ways for you to get me to stop drawing is to first pay me to do it. And at the beginning, I'm excited. Yeah, I get paid for my passion. Amazing. And then pay me less and less and less. You know, $50, $10, $1, $0.20, $0.01. At one point, I will refuse to draw. You know, I'm like, I'm not stupid. I'm not going to draw for $0.20. You know, that's insulting. Right. Even though before I met you, I drew for free. So you have transitioned my intrinsic joy of drawing into that extrinsic motivation of making money. So when the money's not enough, I lose interest altogether. I stop doing it. Now, you also may have noticed that the top core drives are a little more positive feeling. I call them white hat gamification core drives. And if you're always doing something because you feel like you're part of something bigger than yourself, you're leveling up, achieving mastery, you're using creativity, Feels very, very good. But if you're always doing something because you can't have something, because you want to avoid a loss, or because you, because you don't know what's going to happen next, it's still really, really powerful in motivating our behavior. But in the long run, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth because you don't feel like you're in control of your own behavior. So again, the white hat core drives make people feel powerful, in control. They feel good. The problem is that there's no sense of urgency. The black hat core drives make people feel urgent, obsessed, even addicted, but in the long run, again, leaves a bad taste in their mouth, and when the user can escape from the system, they will want to. So I believe that the problem with Zynga game is that they have figured out how to do all this black hat game design techniques. And they don't think about it that way because they don't have the framework. They think about it as data-driven design. But we know that because black hat creates urgency, whenever you are really black hat oriented or when you're data-driven, You always become more and more black hat because you put a torture break and suddenly everyone comes in, logs in 3 times a day, and they pay money. So the problem is that because of all this black hat, the short-term metrics look great. Their monetization, retention, their addiction, all that stuff look great. But because people don't feel good when they play Zynga games, when they can quit the game and escape the system, they will want to. And oftentimes that's the happiest day of their lives. It's like, yay, I quit the Zynga game. Right. And if you're a really good game, people shouldn't be so happy when they quit playing you. So that's a black hat thing. Now, just because it's called black hat doesn't mean it's necessarily bad. A lot of people voluntarily put themselves in black hat in order to go to the gym more often or eat healthily. So this is a funny example where this is an alarm clock where whenever you press the snooze button, the wake me up 10 minutes later, 10 minutes later button, it destroys your money. We are waking up because of loss and avoidance, Core Drive 8. You know, we don't want to lose money, so we're waking up. But we're okay with that because it's a goal we want to accomplish. We want to wake up. And so, so we don't mind it. What people don't like is when, you know, governments or companies or teachers or marketers use this black hat gamification to get us to, you know, work overtime without pay, to buy things we don't need, to get manipulated. And we're probably still going to do it because, again, this stuff is obsessive. But we don't like, we don't enjoy the process. It makes us feel bad, and afterwards we want to escape that system altogether. So once you have this framework, you can start analyzing different things. You can look at why Facebook is interesting. You know, Facebook has a lot of core drives, but doesn't have a lot of epic meaning and calling these days, and doesn't have a lot, especially no scarcity. There's nothing you really want on Facebook, but you can't get it. You can look at old games like FarmVille. No meaning either. No unpredictability. You go in, you know you're going to just harvest the crops you planted and plant new crops. You can look at Candy Crush, more right-brain oriented, a lot of creativity, social unpredictability. A fan of mine in Israel helped me build this little tool called the Octalysis tool. And I'll throw the link up in case it's useful. So you can toggle the little numbers and the shape changes. You have a templating little feedback that says, hey, your product is like 2 whiteheads, but no blackheads, so there's no urgency, or it's balanced. You know, stuff like that. So it's yukichao.com/octalysis. Actually, now I think if you just do go type in yukichao.com/octalysis, I think you can go there too. You can look at Twitter. You can also look at something like LinkedIn, which is kind of interesting, because LinkedIn is very left-brain focused, right? And it's because it's about your career. It's about your life. And so it's extrinsic motivation. So we all feel like we need to have a LinkedIn account, so we create one. But there's not a lot of stuff to do on LinkedIn, right? So a lot— for years, people kind of just sits there until we need to find a job or we need to recruit people. So again, very goal-oriented, function-oriented. It's extrinsic. Yes? This is my analysis of it. Yes. And so for years— and I know from everyone talking about people don't spend time on LinkedIn for fun. So LinkedIn has been spending a lot of time trying to push out the social influence front, Core Drive 5, right? So they have the endorsement, which is what I call a social prod. It's called the smallest amount of energy to create a social interaction. And so a social prod is like a poke on Facebook. You don't have to think or worry about what it means, if you're being witty, if you're saying embarrassing. You just poke someone. On LinkedIn, you don't have to— a poke is not appropriate, so they call it endorsement. But you can tell that by design, the LinkedIn endorsement is not meant to be meaningful. It's meant to be abundant. At the beginning, you're endorsing 5 people at once, 4 people at once, 4 people at once. You're endorsing 12 different skills of one person, even if you have no idea if this person is good at all 12 things. But if you just want to endorse that one skill, you can't just select that one skill. You have to click X, X, X, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel until that one skill is left and you click endorse. So again, you can tell that by design, the LinkedIn endorsements were not meant to be meaningful. They were meant to be abundant. But now suddenly, there's something to do on LinkedIn, right? People nowadays, people are just endorsing and every— I get a lot of emails, oh, so-and-so endorsed you. Okay, I'm going to endorse them back. And yay, again, there's something to do on LinkedIn. Basically, people just poking each other and feeling socially connected. So, but we can tell from the framework that LinkedIn can seriously benefit if they focus a little more on Core Drive 3, empowerment of creativity and feedback, giving people more meaningful choices, and unpredictable curiosity, Core Drive 7. Of course, they monetize through Core Drive 7, unpredictability. Sometimes they'll say, hey, you know, in the last week, 27 people have looked at your profile, but you gotta upgrade to premium to find out who they are, right? It's a little black hat type of design.