Austin Scholar #172: Everyone is wrong about motivation
(& why extrinsic motivation beats intrinsic motivation)
Hey, y'all!
This week from Austin Scholar...
Everyone is wrong about motivation (& why extrinsic motivation beats intrinsic motivation)
Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…
As David Perell revealed in his X post, the project I’ve been working on is a documentary starring The Cultural Tutor on why we don’t make beautiful things anymore. Working on the film set and experiencing London through this lens was a truly magical experience, and I can’t wait to tell you more about it next week, so stay tuned for that!
For this week’s newsletter, I’m going to be talking about one of the core parts of Alpha and 2 Hour Learning: motivation. Online, adaptive, AI-powered apps might be life-changing, but if you can’t get a kid to put in the work, they’re useless. Motivation is what makes our system work.
Everyone is wrong about motivation (& why extrinsic motivation beats intrinsic motivation)
If you've spent any time in education circles, you've heard the gospel of intrinsic motivation. The basic belief system goes like this:
Intrinsic motivation (doing something because you inherently enjoy it) is pure, noble, and sustainable. Extrinsic motivation (doing something for external rewards like money, grades, or recognition) is corrupting, shallow, and ultimately counterproductive.
This belief is supposedly backed by decades of research, most famously Edward Deci's 1971 studies where college students lost interest in puzzle-solving after being paid to do it, and Mark Lepper's research showing that children who were promised rewards for drawing became less interested in drawing during free time.
The overjustification effect – where external rewards supposedly undermine intrinsic motivation – has become education dogma. School programs that provide money or prizes for reading books have been criticized for their potential to reduce intrinsic motivation. Teachers are told to avoid external rewards whenever possible.
But here's the thing: I think this research has led us to the wrong conclusions about how motivation actually works in practice.
My Spiky POV: Extrinsic motivation dominates (and that's okay)
After four years at Alpha School and now at Stanford, I've come to believe that extrinsic motivation is not only more powerful than we give it credit for – it's actually the dominant force behind most high achievement. And rather than corrupting intrinsic motivation, thoughtful extrinsic rewards can enhance and channel it.
Here's why I think the conventional wisdom is wrong:
At Alpha, where students complete their academics in just two hours a day using AI-powered adaptive educational apps, we've seen something fascinating happen. Because academic learning becomes so efficient, our guides don't spend time on lesson-planning. Instead, they spend their time getting to know each individual student and figuring out what motivates them.
For some kids, it's money – they'll work incredibly hard if they can earn spending money for achieving goals. For others, it's pursuing specific achievements related to their passions. Some are motivated by extra social time with friends. Others by small treats or privileges.
The key insight: the guides spend enormous time personalizing these extrinsic motivators for each kid. They don't assume one size fits all. They observe, experiment, and adjust.
Now, I would consider myself highly intrinsically motivated. I genuinely love learning, writing this newsletter, and pursuing intellectual challenges. But here's what I've noticed about myself and my similarly driven friends:
Our intrinsic motivation has never disappeared despite receiving tons of external rewards.
I got paid to write this newsletter. I received recognition for my SAT scores. My friends who are also high achievers have been awarded throughout their lives for academic and personal accomplishments.
According to the overjustification effect, we should have lost our intrinsic drive. But we haven't. If anything, the external validation and rewards have reinforced our internal motivation by showing us that what we're doing has value.
My sister is a perfect example of why the "intrinsic only" approach fails. She's not naturally drawn to academic learning the way I am. Without external motivators, she would likely do the minimum required.
But with the right extrinsic rewards – personalized to what actually matters to her – she accomplishes incredible things. I always go back to the story of when she really didn’t want to learn fractions and explained how useless the work she was doing was. However, the head of school knew that she wanted to be a fashion designer and he explained that, if she truly wanted to be a fashion designer, she needed to know how to use fractions. He knew my sister so well to say the exact thing that she needed to go on.
Even as time went on, though, she held the belief that she just wasn’t good at math. But she was motivated by money. The solution? Tell her that she could have $1,000 if she reached the 99th percentile nationwide in math in her grade level. She accomplished it the next year. These external motivators allowed her to work through mental blocks and achieve things that she didn’t believe to be possible. The external motivation doesn't corrupt some pure internal drive; it creates a drive that wouldn't otherwise exist.
I think the classic motivation studies got something fundamentally wrong: they used rewards that were too small and impersonal.