what really motivates people?

     Its conventional wisdom that if you want to get a person to do something then you have to offer them a reason to do it. This reason most often comes in the form of a reward or a payment of their services. As far as the history of mankind goes, this has not always been the case because at various points in time we have even gone so far as to tell a person that they have to do something just because someone else says so. There are many dark times in history where people have been held against their will and forced to do things that they did not want to do but for the most part the general contract between two parties is such that if you do this then you will get that. But is that the way that the most impressive things have been accomplished in the past? Is that what got Einstein to create the Theory of Relativity, or what inspired Beethoven to write his famous 9th Symphony? Was it merely the promise of a reward, a payment for services rendered that produced such exponential leaps forward in our culture? 

     For the longest time I think that people truly believed even to this day that the best way to motivate a person is to offer them a reward. Writers like Daniel Pink have referred to this approach as the carrot and stick approach. The carrot being the promise of reward and the stick being the threat of punishment. If you do what you are supposed to do and you do it well then you are rewarded with this carrot that you want. But if you do not do what you are supposed to do or if you do not perform to the required standards; then you are poked or hit with the stick. If you look at the way businesses are set up then you can see that this is the exact philosophy that they have employed to run their businesses. They pay you do do your job and they punish you if you do not do it well enough. This has led to an economic environment where people just do jobs to survive and to pay their bills rather than doing the things that they truly enjoy doing. 

     If as a child you truly enjoyed building furniture but were led to believe that the only way that you could make a good living and provide for a family was to be a doctor; then a pragmatic mind would choose to be a doctor foregoing doing what they love. The greatest things that we have been able to do as a race have come out of the pure desire to do so; an intrinsic need for self fulfillment. Charles Darwin did not create the Theory of Evolution because someone was paying him to do so, and Plato did not write The Republic just for a paycheck. These great men and thinkers were able to accomplish what they have accomplish because of the inner drive to fulfill themselves and leave the world a better place than they found it. People have a need to do things, make things, fix things, and be useful. Inside every person is a drive to do something. There is a passion in some area and in some field that has not been nurtured and given the opportunity to flourish.