Hi.

Do you know that the kind of the goals you are setting impacts your whole life in ways you could never imagined?

I read what I am about to share with you in the book “Why We Do What We Do” which was written from one of the world’s greatest researchers on human motivation. His name is Edward Deci.

In the book Deci separates the goals into intrinsic and extrinsic goals.

As intrinsic goals he refers to meaningful relationships, personal growth, and community contributions.

As extrinsic goals he refers to, he – simply – refers to money, fame, or beauty.

So, what does research reveal regarding the impact of these two different kind of goals in our lives?

It’s plain simple actually and kind of scaring to me.

As Deci says in the book
“the researchers found that if any of the three extrinsic aspirations—for money, fame, or beauty—was very high for an individual relative to the three intrinsic aspirations, the individual was also more likely to display poorer mental health.

For example, having an unusually strong aspiration for material success was associated with narcissism, anxiety, depression, and poorer social functioning as rated by a trained clinical psychologist.

Ouch!

In contrast, he continues, strong aspirations for any of the intrinsic goals – meaningful relationships, personal growth, and community contributions – were positively associated with well-being.

People who strongly desired to contribute to their community, for example, had more vitality and higher self-esteem.

When people organise their behaviour in terms of intrinsic strivings (relative to extrinsic strivings) they seem more content—they feel better about themselves, about who they are and display more evidence of psychological health.”

Interesting findings, don’t you think?

To me it’s kind of oxymoron sharing this idea on a social media platform where users are heavily extrinsic motivated…

The important question though is this:
Are you, you personally, more extrinsic or intrinsic motivated?

There’s nothing bad to any of the given choices.
But the effects you will get from each one will be completely, completely different. Which to me means that we have to be smart and prioritise wisely.

And this is the take away of this episode.

Take care!

All my best,
Konstantinos Karypidis