Philosophy on Facebook # 9 - What's in it for me?

Back again guys! This one i wanted to kind of piggy back on the last one about cynics and self interest and talk about the incentives and what gets people to do things. I think there are 2 major things that get people to carry out their daily lives and they are incentives and motivations. These 2 more often then not, overlap each other. While these two may seem pretty similar i feel like the main difference is that motivation can also come from within where incentives are carried out by external forces beyond a persons control. Motivation can also be caused by external forces. An example of it from the outside is a coach giving a motivational speech intended to pump up the players on a team. A person can set up their own incentives for themselves but i believe it requires an external force. An example is when youre trying to lose weight you get a treat after working out a lot. You set up a reward system for yourself to get you to lose weight.

Now that we have that out of the way I want to go in depth on the two. Incentives can be both good and bad things. A bad incentive is something that forces you to do something and you arent MOTIVATED to do it because someone else is making you. They could be threatening you to do something you might not want to. If someone was holding up the convience store you work in and wanted all the money in the cash register you were manning, you would give them the money against your will because of the incentive of keeping you life. This is how demagogues like hitler operated so effectively because they would use tactics of fear and force to control a tight regimen and build a ruthless empire.

A good incentive would be something that gets you MOTIVATED to do something without hurting you or causing you to do something against your will. This could be a prize based reward system. Its amazing how much prizes get people to do things. The staple of this is with the crane game and other arcade games that get people to spend their extra change in hopes of winning a prize. I have seen too many a times where people spend a dollar on a most likely rigged gamed in hopes of winning a new ipod when they could be using it for other more important things. Another example that doesnt require the consumption of your hard earned cash is the xprize foundation. It is a very amazing program that achieves great things by coaxing people to push the limits of their intellectual capabilities by offering lots of money to the winners of their competitions. One competition in particular was privitizing the space travel industry and having the first private company get an unmanned craft into space and onto the moon. They are funded by google (which of course seems to have unlimited resources even in this economic recession) and theyre offering 30 million dollars to the winners. They have gotten lots of teams to try and land a space craft onto the lunar surface. Its amazing how much money can actually make the world go round. It is why people go to work everyday; to provide for their families with the money they accumulate from working.

Money isnt the only incentive however, as many people have their own ways of getting through the day. Someones motivation to getting up every morning and going to work is to get their wallets stuffed from their paychecks. Others may get up looking forward to do something cool in their job. This is why I feel you should really do something that you enjoy because if you dont, you wont have a connection with your job like you would if you had a passion for it. If youre just doing it to make mullah then you will probably take the job less serious and do the job poorly compared to someone who loves doing it. You will most likely take everything you do to heart if you are interested in the field of your job while if you arent you are more likely to half ass things and do a crappy job. If that was how everyone dealt with their job then cars would break down even more than they do now and medicine wouldnt be as effective as it is and the list goes on. Everything you cherish would be flawed if the inventor or manufacturer didnt have a passion for quality and getting things done correctly. This is however a double edged sword because some greedy business people want to insure quality only for the fact that it will attract more potential customers to purchase their product or service.

What gets you up in the morning to do what you do is really up to you. You will more likely get something done and do it better if there is something at the end you are working for. Like previously stated it could be for money or the feeling of a job well done. There are countless reasons why people do what they do and it really depends, like i said in my very first note, the current environment you are in when a situation arises. If you make a new years resolution to lose weight you require the motivation to want to be skinnier, the incentive of fitting into the new pair of jeans you bought, and for this situation, the discipline of sticking to the plan and not going off course by eating mcdonalds for lunch.