Most important to our quest is where this process leads. Knowing the history of a subject and the technical language that surrounds that subject helps you converse with others about these ideas. Those conversations are critical for the next step.
GO PUBLIC
Cultivating real passion isn’t an overnight process. It’s not enough to play around in the spots where multiple curiosities intersect. Certainly, there’s some emotional energy at those intersections. Sure, the neurochemistry beneath this energy helps transform curiosity into passion. But to really light that fire and ensure you’re on the right track, you’re going to need to amplify that passion with a series of “public successes.”
A public success is nothing more than positive feedback from others. Any kind of social reinforcement increases feel-good neurochemistry, which increases motivation.12 Positive attention from others causes the brain to release more dopamine than we get from passion alone. It also adds oxytocin to the equation. The combination of dopamine and oxytocin rewards “social interaction,” creating the feelings of trust and love that are so critical for our survival.13 And the feel-good nature of this reward feeds back on itself, increasing our curiosity even more, which is the neurobiological feedback loop that forms the foundation of true passion.
Thus, at this point in the process, it’s time to make friends. But walk before you run. Taking things public doesn’t require giving a TED Talk. Simple conversations with strangers will get things going. Walk into your neighborhood bar, start chatting with whoever sits next to you, and teach them about the stuff you’ve been teaching yourself.
Then do it again. Talk to a different stranger, tell a few friends about your ideas, or join a meetup devoted to the subject. An online community. A book club. And if one doesn’t exist, start your own.
Finally, it’s important to do these steps in order. You want to spend a bit of time playing around at the intersections of curiosities before taking this public. There’s a lot of excitement that builds up as you start to investigate these intersections, but it’s important to keep it to yourself for a bit. You want to enter any conversation with ideas of your own and something to say. There’s nothing very fulfilling or passion-cultivating about being an absolute beginner. Knowing little often feels crappy. But being able to add something to the dialogue—having a few ideas of your own and a few public successes built off those ideas—now you’re approaching escape velocity.
TRANSFORMING PASSION INTO PURPOSE
Passion is a potent driver. Yet, for all of its upside, passion can be a fairly selfish experience. Being all consumed means you’re all consumed. There’s not much room for other people. But if you’re going to tackle the impossible, sooner or later, you’re going to need some outside assistance. Thus, at this point in the process, it’s time to transform the fire of passion into the rocket fuel of purpose.
It was University of Rochester psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan who first discovered this fuel.14 In the next chapter, we’ll get to know these scientists and their work even better. For now, just be aware that, in the mid-1980s, this duo introduced “self-determination theory” and, with it, their concept of “relatedness.” Self-determination theory has since gone on to become the dominant theory in the science of motivation, with relatedness remaining a core component.
Their original idea was simple: As social creatures, humans have an innate desire for connection and caring. We want to be connected to other people and we want to care for other people. At a basic biological level, we need to relate to others to survive and thrive; and, as a result, are neurochemically motivated to fulfill this need.
More recently, researchers have extended this notion, expanding the idea of “relatedness,” the need for caring and connection, into the concept of “purpose,” or the desire for what we do to matter to other people. Purpose takes all the motivational energy found in passion and gives it an extra kick.
Neurobiologically, purpose alters the brain.15 It decreases the reactivity of the amygdala, decreases the volume of the medial temporal cortex, and increases the volume of the right insular cortex. A less reactive amygdala translates to less stress and greater resilience. The medial temporal cortex is involved in many aspects of perception, suggesting that having a purpose alters the way the brain filters incoming information, while a larger right insular cortex has been shown to protect against depression and correlate with a significant number of well-being measures.
All these changes seem to have a profound impact on our long-term health, as having a “purpose-in-life” (the technical term) has been shown to lower incidences of stroke, dementia, and cardiovascular disease.16 Additionally, from a performance standpoint, purpose boosts motivation, productivity, resilience, and focus.17
And it’s a specific type of focus.
Purpose shifts our attention off ourselves (internal focus) and puts it onto other people and the task at hand (external focus). In doing this, purpose guards against obsessive self-rumination, which is one of the root causes of anxiety and depression.18 By forcing you to look outside yourself, purpose acts as a force field. It protects you from yourself and the very real possibility of being swallowed whole by your new passion. To put this more technically, purpose seems to decrease the activity of the default-mode network, which is the brain network in charge of rumination, and increase the activity of the executive attention network, which is the network that governs external focus.
Finally, there’s an even greater benefit to purpose: outside assistance. Purpose acts as a rallying cry, inspiring others and attracting them to your cause.19 This has an obvious impact on drive. Social support provides even more neurochemistry, which produces an even greater boost in intrinsic motivation. More crucially, other people provide actual help. Financial, physical, intellectual, creative, emotional—they all matter. Simply put, on the road to impossible, we’re going to need all the help we can get.
PUTTING PURPOSE INTO PRACTICE
Now for the practical concerns: When it comes to crafting your purpose, dream big. This is going to become the overarching mission statement for your life. Your capital I: Impossible.
In our book Bold, Peter Diamandis and I introduced the concept of a “massively transformative purpose,” or MTP for short.20 Massively means large and audacious. Transformative means able to bring significant change to an industry, community, or the planet. And purpose? A clear why behind the work being done. An MTP is exactly the kind of big dream you’re hunting.
To hunt your MTP, take out another piece of paper. Pick up your pen again. Write down a list of fifteen massive problems that you would love to see solved. Stuff that keeps you up at night. Hunger, poverty, or, my personal favorite: protecting biodiversity. Again, try to be as specific as possible. Instead of just “protecting biodiversity,” take it a step further and add in the details: “Establish mega-linkages to protect biodiversity.”
Next, look for spots where your core passion intersects with one or more of these grand, global challenges—a place where your personal obsession might be a solution to some collective problem. The overlap between passion and purpose, that’s what you’re hunting. If you can zero in on that target, you’ve found a way to use your newfound passion to do some real good in the world. That’s a legitimate massively transformative purpose.
An MTP is both a crucial driver and a great foundation for a commercial enterprise. Don’t sleep on this second detail. If you really want to cultivate your passion and purpose, you’re always going to need a way to pay for that passion and purpose.
But don’t expect this to happen quickly, and find stopgap measures in the interim. I was a bartender for the first decade of my writing career, which allowed me the time to develop my craft without the terror of having to pay my bills off the results. This was critical to my success. This is also why Tim Ferriss tells entrepreneurs to start out with a hobbyist approach to their first start-up: nights and weekends.21 Curiosity into passion; passion into purpo
se; and purpose into patient profit—that’s the safest way to play this game.
But how to make sure you stay in the game long enough to achieve your purpose—that’s exactly where we’re going next.
3
The Full Intrinsic Stack
Curiosity, passion, and purpose are a launching pad toward the impossible. They’re the moves that get your pieces on the board, the place where this game begins. But the impossible is a long game, and if you’re interested in seeing it through to the end, then the boost you’ll get from these three initial drivers isn’t nearly enough to carry you through.
Toward those ends, we’re going to take the drivers we examined in the last chapter—curiosity, passion, and purpose—and add autonomy and mastery to our stack. Both are exceptionally potent drivers, and both are biologically designed to work in conjunction with the previous stack.
Autonomy is the desire for the freedom required to pursue your passion and purpose. It’s the need to steer your own ship. Mastery is the next step. It drives you toward expertise; it pushes you to hone the skills you need to achieve your passion and purpose. In other words, if autonomy is the desire to steer your own ship, mastery is the drive to steer that ship well.
And this is where Edward Deci and Richard Ryan return to our story.
OUR NEED FOR AUTONOMY
In 1977, when Edward Deci and Richard Ryan were both young psychologists at the University of Rochester, they bumped into each other on campus.1 Deci had just become a clinical practitioner, and Ryan was still a grad student. They shared an interest in the science of motivation, which led to a long conversation, which led to a fifty-year collaboration that overturned most of the foundational ideas in that science of motivation.
Until Edward Deci and Richard Ryan pioneered self-determination theory, psychologists defined motivation as “the energy required for action.” Assessments were binary: a person either had the right amount of motivation for the job or they didn’t.
Psychologists also viewed this motivational energy as a singular characteristic. You could measure quantity of motivation—the amount of motivation a person felt—but not quality or the type of motivation a person felt.
Yet, hints in the research had led Deci and Ryan to believe there were different types of motivation and that different types of motivation produced different results. So they tested their ideas in head-to-head competition. In a lengthy series of experiments, they pitted intrinsic drivers such as passion against extrinsic drivers such as prestige and tallied the results. Very quickly they discovered that intrinsic motivation (a term that is synonymous with drive) is much more effective than extrinsic motivation in every situation excluding those where our basic needs haven’t been met.
But they also discovered that one of the more critical divisions was found between “controlled motivation,” a type of extrinsic motivation, and “autonomous motivation,” a form of intrinsic motivation.2 If you’ve been seduced, coerced, or otherwise pressured into doing something—that’s controlled motivation. It’s a job you have to do. Autonomous motivation is the opposite. It means you’re doing what you’re doing by choice. Deci and Ryan discovered that in every situation autonomous motivation throttles controlled motivation.
Autonomy is always the more powerful driver.
In fact, in many situations, controlled motivation doesn’t produce the desired results. When pressured into action, people routinely look for shortcuts. The example Deci likes to give here is Enron.3 The energy company decided that the best way to motivate its employees was to give the best performers stock options—an example of motivation by seduction. But people quickly figured out that the best way to get those bonuses was to artificially inflate stock prices, committing corporate fraud and ultimately bankrupting the company. The history of Enron is often retold as a cautionary tale of greed and hubris, but it’s really a story about how the wrong motivation can easily produce the wrong behaviors.
According to Deci and Ryan, we’re tapping autonomy correctly when we’re doing what we’re doing because of “interest and enjoyment” and because “it aligns with our core beliefs and values.” Put differently, the seeking system likes to be in charge of exactly what kinds of resources it’s seeking.
This is also why we started our exploration of drive with curiosity, passion, and purpose. This trio establishes interest and enjoyment—via curiosity and passion—and then cements core beliefs and values via purpose. In other words, this trio of drivers came first in this book because they’re the foundation required to maximize autonomy.
Another thing Deci and Ryan discovered is that autonomy turns us into a much more effective version of ourselves. The boost in neurochemistry provided by autonomy increases our drive, of course, but it also amplifies a host of additional skills. When we’re steering our own ship, we’re more focused, productive, optimistic, resilient, creative, and healthy. But if adding autonomy to our motivational stack is required to get this added boost in performance, this raises another question: How much autonomy do we need to add?
TWENTY PERCENT TIME
How much autonomy is required to capture the full power of this driver has been a tricky question to study, yet there have been long series of “living experiments” on which to base our decisions. In these experiments, companies have tried to motivate employees by giving them “autonomy” as a benefit, with Google being the most famous example.4
Since 2004, Google has tapped autonomy as a driver with their “20 Percent Time,” wherein Google engineers get to spend 20 percent of their time pursuing projects of their own creation, ones that align with their own core passion and purpose. And this experiment has produced incredible results. Over 50 percent of Google’s largest revenue-generating products have come out of 20 percent time, including AdSense, Gmail, Google Maps, Google News, Google Earth, and Gmail Labs.
But it wasn’t Google who invented this practice. They actually borrowed it from 3M, whose own “15 Percent Rule” dates back to 1948.5 In the case of 3M, engineers get to spend 15 percent of their time pursuing projects of their own devising. For a company with a research budget of over $1 billion, allowing employees the freedom to experiment with 15 percent of that amounts to an annual $150 million bet on autonomy. As with Google, the products that have emerged from 3M’s 15 Percent Rule have more than covered this bet. Post-it Notes originated from 15 percent time back in 1974. This one product consistently generates over $1 billion a year in revenue, annually putting them $50 million in the black, which is quite an upside for 3M’s investment in autonomy.
It’s for this same reason that today Facebook, LinkedIn, Apple, and dozens of other companies have instituted autonomy programs of their own.6 But the more important point is what we learn from their examples. Google taps this driver with 20 percent time, meaning they’re giving people eight hours a week to pursue an idea about which they’re passionate. Yet 3M gets amazing results from just 15 percent time, which is only about an afternoon a week. In other words, if you’ve already worked your way through the passion recipe and are now trying to figure out how to make room in your life to pursue that dream, these living experiments tell us you can get the results you desire by spending four to five hours a week devoted to your newfound purpose. In fact, as we’ll see in the next section, the magic number of hours required to tap into autonomy might actually be less than that—provided those hours are spent in a very particular way.
PATAGONIA’S BIG FOUR
The outdoor retailer Patagonia routinely ends up on lists of the best places to work in America.7 If you drill down into the particulars, employee autonomy is one of the most frequently cited reasons.8 But Patagonia isn’t really giving their employees all that much autonomy. Instead, they’re giving them very particular types of autonomy.
Patagonia allows employees to make their own schedules. They still have to work full-time, they just get to decide when to work. Also, because the company is filled with outdoor athletes and their corporate headquar
ters sit right on the Pacific, whenever the waves are good, employees are allowed to stop working—even when they’re on deadline, even if they’re in the middle of a meeting—and go surfing. It’s a corporate policy that Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard famously dubbed “Let my people go surfing.”
This combination tells us something critical about the amount of autonomy required to utilize this driver. If Patagonia’s example holds true, then the answer is very little autonomy, provided that very little is well deployed. Let’s examine the two categories at the center of their efforts: scheduling and surfing.
Making your own schedule works well for two reasons. The first is sleep. The freedom to control your schedule gives you the best chance of getting a good night’s rest. The research shows that we all need seven to eight hours of shut-eye a night.9 We’ll explore this in further detail later, but here, know that without proper sleep we experience a smorgasbord of performance deficits. Motivation, memory, learning, focus, reaction times, and emotional control all suffer. This is too big a list of detriments to overcome on a regular basis.10
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