Some researchers referred to such residents as “subversives,” because so many of their decisions manifested as small rebellions against the status quo. One group at a Santa Fe nursing home, for instance, started every meal by trading food items among themselves in order to construct meals of their own design rather than placidly accept what had been served to them. One resident told a researcher that he always gave his cake away because, even though he liked cake, he would “rather eat a second-class meal that I have chosen.”
A group of residents at a nursing home in Little Rock violated the institution’s rules by moving furniture around to personalize their bedrooms. Because wardrobes were attached to the walls, they used a crowbar—appropriated from a tool closet—to wrench their dressers free. In response, an administrator called a meeting and said there was no need to undertake independent redecorations; if the residents needed help, the staff would provide it. The residents informed the administrator that they didn’t want any assistance, didn’t need permission, and intended to continue doing whatever they damn well pleased.
These small acts of defiance were, in the grand scheme of things, relatively minor. But they were psychologically powerful because the subversives saw the rebellions as evidence that they were still in control of their own lives. The subversives walked, on average, about twice as much as other nursing home residents. They ate about a third more. They were better at complying with doctors’ orders, taking their medications, visiting the gym, and maintaining relationships with family and friends. These residents had arrived at the nursing homes with just as many health problems as their peers, but once inside, they lived longer, reported higher levels of happiness, and were far more active and intellectually engaged.
“It’s the difference between making decisions that prove to yourself that you’re still in charge of your life, versus falling into a mindset where you’re just waiting to die,” said Rosalie Kane, a gerontologist at the University of Minnesota. “It doesn’t really matter if you eat cake or not. But if you refuse to eat their cake, you’re demonstrating to yourself that you’re still in charge.” The subversives thrived because they knew how to take control, the same way that Quintanilla’s troop learned to subversively cross a pit during the Crucible by deciding, on their own, how to interpret the rules.
The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation, in other words, are decisions that do two things: They convince us we’re in control and they endow our actions with larger meaning. Choosing to climb a mountain can become an articulation of love for a daughter. Deciding to stage a nursing home insurrection can become proof that you’re still alive. An internal locus of control emerges when we develop a mental habit of transforming chores into meaningful choices, when we assert that we have authority over our lives.
Quintanilla finished boot camp in 2010 and served in the Corps for three years. He then left. He was finally ready, he felt, for real life. He got another job, but the lack of camaraderie among his colleagues was disappointing. No one seemed motivated to excel. So in 2015, he reenlisted. “I missed that constant reminder that I can do anything,” he told me. “I missed people pushing me to choose a better me.”
V.
Viola Philippe, the wife of the onetime auto parts tycoon of Louisiana, was something of an expert on motivation herself before she and Robert flew to South America. She had been born with albinism—her body did not produce the enzyme tyrosinase, critical in the production of melanin—and as a result, her skin, hair, and eyes contained no pigment, and her eyesight was poor. She was legally blind, and could read only by putting her face very close to a page and using a magnifying glass. “You have never met a more determined person, though,” her daughter, Roxann, told me. “She could do anything.”
When Viola was a girl, the school district had tried to put her into remedial classes despite the fact that it was her eyes, not her brain, that had problems. But she refused to leave the classroom where her friends sat. She stayed in that room until administrators relented. After she graduated, she went to Louisiana State University and told the school she expected them to provide someone to read textbooks to her aloud. The school complied. During her sophomore year, she met Robert, who soon dropped out to start washing and greasing cars for a local Ford dealer. He encouraged her to quit school, as well. She politely declined and got her degree. They were married in December 1950, four months after she graduated.
They had six children in rapid succession, and while Robert built his empire, Viola ran the household. There were morning meetings and charts showing what each child had to accomplish each day. There were Friday night check-ins, during which everyone laid out their goals for the coming week. “They were like two peas in a pod, both totally driven,” said Roxann. “Mom refused to let her disabilities stop her. I think that’s why it was so hard for her when Dad changed.”
When Robert’s apathy took hold, Viola initially focused her energy on caring for him. She hired nurses to help him exercise, and worked with his brother to form a committee to oversee and then sell off Robert’s companies. After a while, however, she ran out of things to do. She had married a bon vivant, a man so full of life that it was hard to go to the grocery store because he constantly stopped to chat with everyone. Now Robert sat in a chair in front of the television all day. Viola was miserable. “He didn’t speak to me,” she told a courtroom when the family sued for insurance money they felt owed because of Robert’s neurological injuries. “He wasn’t—it didn’t seem like he was interested in anything I did. You know, I would fix his meals and I was more or less a caretaker. I guess you would call me a caretaker.”
For a few years, she felt sorry for herself. Then she became angry. Then busy. If Robert wasn’t going to show any motivation to reclaim his life, then she would force him to get moving again. She would make him engage. She began by asking him ceaseless questions. When she made lunch, she would pepper him with choices. Sandwich or soup? Lettuce or tomato? Ham or turkey? What about mayonnaise? Ice water or juice? She didn’t really mean anything by it at first. She was just frustrated and wanted to make him speak.
But then, after a few months of harassing him, Viola found that whenever Robert was pressured into making decisions, he seemed to come out of his shell a little bit. He would banter with her for a few moments, or tell her about a program he had been watching. One night, after she had forced him to make a dozen choices about what he was going to eat and which table they should sit at and what music to listen to, he began talking at length, reminding her of a funny story from after they had gotten married, when they had locked themselves out of the house in a rainstorm. He told the story in an offhand way, and chuckled as he recalled trying to jimmy a window. It was the first time Viola had heard him laugh in years. For a few minutes, it was like the old Robert was back. Then he faced the TV and went silent again.
Viola continued her campaign, and over time, more and more of the old Robert emerged. Viola congratulated, cajoled, and rewarded him whenever he seemed, for a moment, like his former self. When he went back to Dr. Strub, the neurologist in New Orleans, for his annual checkup seven years after the trip to South America, the doctor could see the difference. “He was saying hello to the nurses, and asking them about their kids,” Dr. Strub said. “He would initiate conversations with me, ask about my hobbies. He had opinions on the route they should drive to get home. It was stuff you wouldn’t have noticed with anyone else, but with him, it was like someone was turning on the lights again.”
As neurologists have studied how motivation functions within our brains, they’ve become increasingly convinced that people like Robert don’t lose their drive because they’ve lost the capacity for self-motivation. Rather, their apathy is due to an emotional dysfunction. One of the things Habib, the French researcher, noticed about all the people he studied was that they shared an odd emotional detachment. One apathetic woman told him she had hardly reacted when her father died. A man said he hadn’t felt the urge t
o hug his wife or children since the passivity had taken hold. When Habib asked patients if they felt sad about how much their lives had changed, they all said no. They didn’t feel anything.
Neurologists have suggested that this emotional numbness is why some people feel no motivation. Among Habib’s patients, the injuries in their striata prevented them from feeling the sense of reward that comes from taking control. Their motivation went dormant because they had forgotten how good it feels to make a choice. In other situations, it’s that people have never learned what it feels like to be self-determined, because they have grown up in a neighborhood that seems to offer so few choices or they have forgotten the rewards of autonomy since they’ve moved into a nursing home.
This theory suggests how we can help ourselves and others strengthen our internal locus of control. We should reward initiative, congratulate people for self-motivation, celebrate when an infant wants to feed herself. We should applaud a child who shows defiant, self-righteous stubbornness and reward a student who finds a way to get things done by working around the rules.
This is easier in theory, of course, than practice. We all applaud self-motivation until a toddler won’t put on his shoes, an aged parent is ripping a dresser out of the wall, or a teenager ignores the rules. But that’s how an internal locus of control becomes stronger. That’s how our mind learns and remembers how good it feels to be in control. And unless we practice self-determination and give ourselves emotional rewards for subversive assertiveness, our capacity for self-motivation can fade.
What’s more, we need to prove to ourselves that our choices are meaningful. When we start a new task, or confront an unpleasant chore, we should take a moment to ask ourselves “why.” Why are we forcing ourselves to climb up this hill? Why are we pushing ourselves to walk away from the television? Why is it so important to return that email or deal with a coworker whose requests seem so unimportant?
Once we start asking why, those small tasks become pieces of a larger constellation of meaningful projects, goals, and values. We start to recognize how small chores can have outsized emotional rewards, because they prove to ourselves that we are making meaningful choices, that we are genuinely in control of our own lives. That’s when self-motivation flourishes: when we realize that replying to an email or helping a coworker, on its own, might be relatively unimportant. But it is part of a bigger project that we believe in, that we want to achieve, that we have chosen to do. Self-motivation, in other words, is a choice we make because it is part of something bigger and more emotionally rewarding than the immediate task that needs doing.
In 2010, twenty-two years after her South American vacation with Robert, Viola was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It took two years for the disease to consume her. At every step, Robert was there, helping her out of bed in the morning and reminding her to take her medications at night. He asked her questions to distract her from the pain and fed her when she became feeble. When Viola finally passed, Robert sat by her empty bed for days. His children, worried he was slipping back into apathy, suggested another visit with the neurologist in New Orleans. Perhaps the doctor would recommend something to forestall his listlessness from returning.
No, Robert replied. It wasn’t apathy keeping him indoors. He just needed some time to reflect on sixty-two years of marriage. Viola had helped Robert build a life—and then, when everything had slipped from his grasp, she helped him rebuild it again. He just wanted to honor that by pausing for a few days, he told his kids. A week later, he left the house and came over for brunch. Afterward, he babysat his grandchildren. Robert passed away twenty-four months later, in 2014. He was active, his obituary noted, until the end.
TEAMS
Psychological Safety at Google and Saturday Night Live
Julia Rozovsky was twenty-five years old and uncertain what to do with her life when she decided it was time for a change. She was a Tufts graduate with a bachelor’s degree in math and economics who had previously worked at a consulting firm, which she found unfulfilling. Then she had become a researcher for two professors at Harvard, which was fun but not a long-term career.
Maybe, she thought, she belonged in a big corporation. Or perhaps she ought to become an academic. Or maybe she should join a tech start-up. It was all very confusing to her. So she picked the option that meant she didn’t have to decide: She applied to business schools, and was accepted to start at the Yale School of Management in 2010.
She showed up in New Haven ready to bond with her classmates and, like all new students, was assigned to a study group. This group, she figured, would be an important part of her education. They would become close friends and learn together, debate important issues, and discover, with each other’s help, who they were meant to be.
Study groups are a rite of passage at most MBA programs, a way for students to practice working in teams. At Yale, “each study group shares the same class schedule and collaborates on each group assignment,” one of the school’s websites explained. “Study groups have been carefully constructed to bring together students with diverse backgrounds, both professionally and culturally.” Each day during lunch or after dinner, Julia and the four other members of her study group would gather to discuss homework and compare spreadsheets, strategize for upcoming exams, and trade lecture notes. Truth be told, her group wasn’t all that diverse. Two of them had been management consultants, like Julia. Another had worked at a start-up. They were all smart and curious and outgoing. Their similarities, she hoped, would make it easy for them to bond. “There are lots of people who say some of their best business school friends come from their study groups,” said Julia. “But it wasn’t like that for me.”
Almost from the start, study group felt like a daily dose of stress. “I never felt completely relaxed,” she told me. “I always felt like I had to prove myself.” Dynamics quickly emerged that put her on edge. Everyone wanted to show they were leaders, and so when teachers issued study group assignments, there were subtle tussles over who was in charge. “People would try to show authority by speaking louder, or talking over each other,” Julia said. When it came to divvying up tasks for projects, one group member would sometimes preemptively assign roles, and then the others would critique those assignments, and then someone else would claim authority over some part of the project, and then everyone else would rush to grab their own piece. “Maybe it was my own insecurities, but I always felt like I had to be careful not to make mistakes around them,” said Julia. “People were critical of each other, but they would play it off like they were making a joke, and so the group was kind of passive-aggressive.
“I was looking forward to making friends with my group,” she said. “It really bummed me out that we didn’t gel.”
So Julia started looking for other groups to join, other ways to connect with classmates. One person mentioned that some students were putting together a team to participate in “case competitions,” in which business school students proposed innovative solutions to real-world business problems. Teams would receive a case study, spend a few weeks writing a business plan, and then submit it to high-profile executives and professors who picked the winner. Companies sponsored these contests and there were cash prizes as well as, sometimes, jobs that came out of the competitions. Julia signed up.
Yale hosted about a dozen different case competition teams. The one Julia joined included a former army officer, a think tank researcher, the director of a health education nonprofit, and a refugee program manager. Unlike her study group, everyone was from different backgrounds. From the start, though, they all clicked. Each time a new case arrived, the team would gather in the library and dive into action, spending hours brainstorming options, assigning research duties, and divvying up writing assignments. Then they would meet again and again and again. “One of the best cases we did was about Yale itself,” Julia said. “There had always been a student-run snack store, but the university was taking over food sales, and so the business school sponsored a cont
est to overhaul the shop.
“We met every night for a week. I thought we should fill the shop with nap pods, and someone else said it should become a game room, and there was also some kind of clothing swap idea. We had lots of crazy ideas.” No one ever shot down a suggestion, not even the nap pods. Julia’s study group, as part of their class assignments, had also engaged in a fair amount of brainstorming, “but if I had ever mentioned something like a nap pod, somebody would have rolled their eyes and come up with fifteen reasons why it was a dumb idea. And it was a dumb idea. But my case team loved it. We always loved each other’s dumb ideas. We spent an hour figuring out how nap pods could make money by selling accessories like earplugs.”
Eventually, Julia’s case team settled on the idea of converting the student shop into a micro-gym with a handful of exercise classes and a few workout machines. They spent weeks researching pricing models and contacting equipment manufacturers. They won the competition and the micro-gym exists today. That same year, Julia’s case team spent another month studying ways for a chain of eco-friendly convenience stores to expand into North Carolina. “We must have analyzed two dozen plans,” she said. “A lot of them turned out not to make any sense.” When the team traveled to Portland, Oregon, to present their final suggestion—a slow-growth approach that emphasized the chain’s healthy food options—they placed first in the nation.
Julia’s study group dissolved sometime in her second semester after one person, and then another, and then everyone stopped showing up. The case competition team grew as new students asked if they could join. The core group of five teammates, including Julia, remained involved the entire time they were at Yale. Today, these people are some of her closest friends. They attend one another’s weddings and visit each other when traveling. They call each other for career advice and pass along job leads.
Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business Page 4
