So What do you Fear and What do you Desire?

There is the story of a man with a very stubborn mule who needed to get the mule to move. The mule was content to be where he was and didn’t want to put n the effort to walk and pull the man’s cart. So, they sat there, neither got what they wanted. But then the man had an idea. He went a got a long stick string and a favorite treat of the mule. He tied the carrot to the stick and dangled it out just in front of the mule. The mule moved to get to the carrot. There are many carrots in my life, and if you look closely, you will find them in your life also. Maybe you get them from work where if you hit a certain number, you get a bonus, party, or meal. The number could be for many things number of days without injuries, the number of sales. In fact, getting a job is a carrot and stick. You met this person they offered you cash if you would come in and do certain things and be present between certain hours and on certain days. This is a viable way of changing behavior. It has been around forever because it works to a certain extent.

But there are a few requirements to get it to work, the carrot has to be something that means enough to the person for them to do it. If your boss said they wanted you to come in and work and you would be paid $1.00 that probably would not motivate you to come in. If you told your child, you wanted them to spend an hour in the sun weeding for that popsicle, they might not do it. Everyone who has a job and gets paid for it likes this type of motivation. Money is used as a carrot so often that it can be overdone right. Money is an easy thing to come up with and it motivates so many people. In fact, it is usually about what number of bills motivates them, not a question of will they be motivated by it.

So, I hope we now agree, you are motivated by money. You show up at a business listen to what others want, produce what they asked, and then you receive nothing more than a few sheets of high-quality paper with some ink on it, for doing so. If you do a good job then they dangle the possibility in front of you that they will give you more sheets of paper. Maybe they will give you more responsibility and work and then you get more sheets of paper.

Why do we allow money to be a motivating factor? The first one we already mentioned is it is easy to do. Most of us have fear of the stick (homeless) and a desire for the carrot (things money will buy). Another reason is that we don’t know what other likes and dislikes we have. According to the numbers, there is no correlation between personal engagement and salary. People making $500,000s per year dislike their jobs as much as those making $24,000. Money does motivate, but the problem is it only moves us so far. It gets you to show up. It gets you through what is required. But it doesn’t get you to enjoy it. It doesn’t get you to learn, or to become. Once you have the needs for you and your family met the psychological benefits of money drop. Arnold Schwarzenegger said it best “Money doesn’t make you happy. I now have $50 million but I was just as happy when I had $48 million.” Money is nothing more than a concept or symbol to facilitate trade. We as people project our own attitudes and tendencies towards it. We project definitions to it.

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