Tagged: contribution

Revealed By Science: The 4 Elements Of Holy Grail That Jay-Z And Justin Timberlake Are Searching After

In radio right now: “And baby, it’s amazing I’m in this maze with you. I just can’t crack your code.” Don’t worry, Mr. Timberlake, I am here to crack the code for you. You just need to do what MC Hammer did: become a bit more geeky!

You curse my name
In spite to put me to shame
But I still don’t know why
Why I love it so much?

We’ve been told by Mr. Jay (Z) that in the lyrics of the song Holy Grail, Mr. Timber (lake) is talking about his love/hate affair with fame. In the same song, Mr. Jay himself complains how he is “caught up in all these lights and cameras” and ready to “f**k the fame.”

Both of them seem to be confused: How did they end up in this horrific maze of fame? And they still don’t know why they love it so much, even when it is sometimes so painful. Fortunately, the right answers are out there. They have just been hiding in the laboratories of mischievous – and less famous – scientists. So what can they tell to Mr. Jay and Mr. Timber about sustainable happiness?

Consider this: A few psychologists I know from University of Rochester (341 miles from Brooklyn) asked students graduating from college what they want to get in life. Some of the students had cozy dreams about satisfying close relationships, personal growth and serving the community. Other’s were all bling-bling, and wanted the infamous trio of money, fame, and image. And alas: one year later it turned out that both groups had taken some successful steps towards their goals: inner growth people had experienced inner growth, while fame people were a bit more famous. This seems to proof the theorem set forth by professor Eminem from 8 Mile Road University in his highly cited paper Be Careful What you Wish for:

So be careful what you wish for, cause you just might get it
And if you get it then you just might not know what to do with
Cause it might just come back on you ten-fold.

As professor Eminem argues, we should be very careful about our dreams. The truth is out there: All goals are not created equal. The research shows that achieving some goals produces well-being, while achievement of other goals produces – well – ill-being.

What are then the sources of sustainable happiness? What are the goals that produce true happiness?

There are four of them:
1) Having a sense of freedom and autonomy in one’s life
2) Feeling competent at what one is doing
3) Having satisfying close relationships
4) Being able to contribute to the society

The key problem with too much fame is that while 2 & 4 might be satisfied, too much fame can completely trump 1 and 3.

Let’s take Mr. Jay as an example:

1) Feeling Free: He can buy an island for his girlfriend as a birthday present, but at the same time: “can’t even take my daughter for a walk, see ‘em by the corner store.” He has certain freedoms others can just dream about, but at the same time he has been deprived of many freedoms that are self-evident for ordinary people: Being able to visit a corner-store, walk around freely on streets of Brooklyn – or any other neighborhood on this planet.

2) Feeling Competent: Hats off! Mr. Jay is ambitious, talented, and disciplined. He is the “post-millennial embodiment of the American Dream”, who won the game of making money out of hip hop. As regards competence, he is way up there!

3) Feeling Related: Having a sympathetic wife and a lovely daughter is great. But given that both he and his wife are quite dedicated to their careers, they might not have as much quality time together as your average Joneses. In addition, Mr. Jay complains how he is surrounded by pigeons. I am not an ornithologist, but Mr. Jay seems to have some knowledge about the behavior of pigeons: “But soon as all the money blows, all the pigeons take flight.” Finding friends when everybody around you is a pigeon? Not cool.

4) Contributing: A bit mixed really. Mr. Jay gives to charities, serves as a role model, and organizes cool things like Made in America festival. Harry Belafonte (the Banana Boat Song guy), however, criticizes him for turning his back on social responsibility. He thinks that Mr. Jay could do so much more with his high profile status and a net worth of 450 millions. In that sense, Mr. Belafonte feels that Bruce Springsteen is more black than Mr. Jay.

The point being: The fame itself doesn’t make anyone happy or unhappy. As regards happiness, fame helps only to the extent to which it helps to fulfill the four needs of sustainable happiness. And while having no money hurts, having too much money and fame can hurt too. It’s of course nice that if one “just want a Picasso in my casa, no, my castle”, one can buy it. But it is not nice when living a normal life becomes impossible:

“I feel like I’m cornered off enough is enough, I’m calling this off
Who the fuck I’m kidding though, I’m getting high, sitting low
Sliding by in that big body, curtains all in my window
This fame hurt but this chain works.”

Ok, now we know why Mr. Jay and Mr. Timber both love and hate fame at the same time. But where to go from here? What should they do to break loose and find that holy grail of sustainable happiness?

Mr. Jay asks us to look at “what that s**t did to Hammer”. So let’s look at what happened to MC Hammer!

For those born in the ’90s, MC Hammer was a guy who twenty years ago instructed us to not “Touch This”, leaving us wondering what exactly it is we can’t touch (and is it something we would like to touch in the first place?) He was huge in 1990! And surely, Mr. Hammer went through the usual cycle: huge fame, huge money, huge mansion in Fremont, California. And then the backlash: bankruptcy, loosing the mansion, out of fashion.

But what does Mr. Hammer do now?

It seems that he is living the good life with his wife and six kids while putting in some occasional missionary work for the local church. As for work, he is investing in and consulting tech companies, calling himself a “super-geek.” And he is right: he is definitely less cool when he talks about the user interfaces of search engines at Web 2.0 Summit than when he rapped about 2 Legit 2 Quit wearing Ray-Bans.

In a nutshell, Mr. Hammer in 2013 is less cool, less famous, but more happy.

Let’s break his life into the four building blocks of sustainable happiness to see how he has found his own holy grail of sustainable happiness:

1) Feeling free: Less fame means more freedom to walk on the streets and have the benefits of normal life that superstars are deprived off. Still, he is so well off that he can do most of the things he likes, like traveling or having a nice house.

2) Feeling competent: He can still do it if he wants, for example mashing it up with PSY at the American Music Awards. And he is getting more competent in the geeky stuff as well.

3) Feeling related: Having been together with his wife for over 25 years, and having six children certainly is a good start in having satisfying close relationships in one’s life. Also in his work life he seems to be surrounded with fellow geeks he loves to hang out with.

4) Contributing: His work at the church as well as the way he helps tech startups both seem to give him a strong sense of being able to contribute towards the society and other people.

That’s sustainable happiness, isn’t it! To get there, Mr. Hammer obviously needed to “Stop” before the new “Hammertime” started. He did that, found what is truly valuable in life, and is now living a more peaceful, less famous, but much happier life.

So don’t worry Mr. Jay and Mr. Timber, there is also hope for you. Just become a geek – less cool, more happy!

This story was originally posted on the site for my latest book

The four ultimate elements of motivation: How to get the best out of you and others? (And how robots will save the world)

What motivates you? Ultimately. We are motivated by many issues: by fame, friendship, food, and football. But what is the structure of human motivation in general? What are the basic elements of the things that make us move? Understanding what pulls your strings makes you more capable of manipulating them yourself, being in charge of your own life! As a leader, understanding them helps you get the most out of the people around you.

Motivation is about how to move oneself and others to act. There is basically two forms of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Extrinsic motivation means being motivated, not by the activity itself, but by the things it brings: getting rewards, escaping punishments, getting good grades. Often it is about the fear that otherwise others will not like me – that the group will abandon me. Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is about being motivated by the activity itself. The motivation flows from inwards, from one’s values, natural curiosity, or one’s passions. Here I will concentrate on the elements of intrinsic motivation. Why? Because if you want to get the most out of yourself and others, if you want to make yourself and others thrive and flourish, then what you want is intrinsic motivation.

The leading psychological theory about intrinsic motivation proposes that there are essentially three elements that give rise to it. In their self-determination theory, Professors Richard Ryan and Edward Deci propose that human motivation can be approached in the same way that the motivation of any self-determined being can be approached. And they see that certain elements motivate human beings in all contexts: (1) autonomy, (2) competence, and (3) relatedness. Sense of being the author of one’s own life is strengthened when the person feels that the activity he or she is engaged with is equipped with one or more of them. Let’s look at them one at a time.

Autonomy. The best way to ruin someone’s inner motivation is to start controlling it. Decades of research has shown that external rewards and punishments decreases the person’s intrinsic motivation. This is true in work environments where controlling managers produce subordinates who no longer feel that they have the ownership over their own work projects. It is true in schools where controlling teachers are able to suck the childrens’ natural curiosity and willingness to learn out of the learning experience. And it is true in one’s personal life where it has been shown that a wide range of life goals are better achieved as long as one feels one has autonomy in deciding how to achieve them.

Competence Another truth about human motivation is that we like to do things that we perform well. Sense of competence is a powerful motivator: when we feel that we are at the top of our game we rarely need any other motivators to continue. In fact, in these situations the activity flows so strongly and naturally that we become so absorbed in it that the question of motives doesn’t even arise. It is thus important to make sure one’s activities are designed so that they give enough challenge. Too little challenge and we get bored, too much challenge and we get anxious. But with the right amount of challenge, we feel that we are able to use the full range of our talent. And that is an energizing feeling.

Relatedness Ever since the times in the savannah, most of human accomplishments have been achieved in groups. Be it the hunting down of a mammoth, the farming of the family fields, or the building of a successful dot.com enterprise, we perform best as part of a team. Accordingly, the sense of relatedness is an important motivator. As human beings, we have a basic need to belong, to be a part of a bigger group in which we feel recognized and valued. That’s why being part of a group with a common goal is also a powerful motivator. Excitement is contagious and relatedness increases vitality.

But what if there is a fourth basic form of motivation that also makes us tick? What if a tendency to care about the well-being of others is also coded into our basic DNA? As social animals we are not only interested to make sure that others care about us. We also instinctively care about the others. Thus, we feel a sense of accomplishment and meaningfulness when we are able to engage in activities that contribute to the well-being of other people. During the last decade, more and more successful entrepreneurs have noticed that even though their work is fulfilling in all three dimensions above, they still lack something. And that something is the sense of making something valuable, contributing to the making of a better world for all of us. Therefore it can be suggested that there is a fourth basic human need: The willingness to make a meaningful contribution.

Take Zen Robotics as an example. The founders are all serial entrepreneurs with a number of success stories behind them. Their expertise and sense of excitement is about robots. They knew that with their experience, they could accomplish something with robots that others could only dream about. But this time they wanted to accomplish something that would not only be cool and sell well, but something that would make the world a better place. The only question was, where to find valuable enough target for their enthusiasm? Their answer was clean technology. As they themselves put it: ”The solution to the world’s waste problem is called ZenRobotics Recycler”.

These guys seem to know their intrinsic motivation. As entrepreneurs they have the freedom to do things their own way; in other words, they have found autonomy. At the same time they have found a highly challenging task that makes sure they are using their full competence. Their team spirit is great, thus they have a strong sense of relatedness within their company. And through their work they aim to contribute to solving an alarming global problem. Intrinsic motivation? These guys have it.

Do you as a leader want to get the most out of your employees? Do you as a teacher want to get the most out of your students? Do you as a parent want to make sure that your children will live a fulfilling life? If so, make sure that you aren’t suppressing them through control or depleting their energy through bad social relations. Instead, give them room for autonomy, support their growth in competence – and make sure that they feel that they are contributing towards something meaningful. Thus you wake up engagement and passion. That is the way to results that really matter!