What is needed for success?

It’s likely that if you’re reading this site, you are interested in learning.  It’s likely that you also want to get good marks in school.  You want to be successful.  What does it take to be successful in school and in your professional life?  You probably have some ideas (these are the ones that I came up with):

• Intelligence
• Focus and discipline
• Opportunity
• Money (e.g. tuition)
• Quality of information available to you (e.g. your professor, your textbooks)
• Learning/studying environment (e.g. your desk, the classroom, your home life)
• Mood/emotions (e.g. test anxiety, inability to perform under pressure, factors such as depression)
• And some (or a lot) of luck

I’d argue that motivation comes high on that list.  You could be a brilliant student with a brilliant professor and great course notes, but a lack of motivation could easily prevent you from doing well in school.  I’ve seen it, and I’m sure you’ll see it as well.

A side note: I’ve never subscribed to the belief that success means that you work 50 hours a week at some office and sit in traffic in your S-class for 2 hours a day to bank 6 or 7 figures.  Success, as I discuss it here, simply means the ability for you to achieve your goals, as clichéd as that sounds…

Say that you are lacking some of the items on that list above, which I think is inevitable for most of the population.  Maybe you’re even missing most of those factors that I’ve (loosely) defined for success.  They aren’t easy to come by for most of the world.  But motivation is a bit different.  It can be a powerful force that can help fill the gaps, help restore the balance.  Think of any person that persevered – any person that remained persistent, that struggled on, even with seemingly insurmountable odds, and eventually found success.  You can probably think of a few people like this – maybe someone you know, maybe someone you’ve read or heard about.  Think for a minute about the challenges that they overcame.  The majority of them were probably external – challenges presented to them by the world, by other people, by accidents, by sheer randomness.  Most external factors/events you don’t have control over – a frightening reality, and exactly why luck is such an important factor in success.  But we can affect our motivation.  That’s internal.  And if it can make up for external shortcomings, then maybe we should get to know this powerful equalizer a little bit better.

And so the first question to ask would be: where does your motivation come from?  You might have never tried to define this before.  It might be intrinsic to you – doing well at school makes you feel good.  It might also come from others.  Your parents – a need to be viewed as successful to them.  It could be from your classmates.  You want to viewed as intelligent and successful by your peers.  Additionally, it might comes from other external factors. Motivation to do well in school might come from the possibility of landing your dream job when you graduate, or the opportunity to pursue higher education at an elite college.  You might be motivated to finish your studies so that you can leave, travel, see the world.

That’s all fine.  Motivation can come from many places, and it is rarely just a single source.  But however it adds up, motivation can ebb and flow, especially in the workplace when work can be tedious or difficult.  Motivation can be fickle, and sometimes it’s difficult to understand why.  So lets try to answer that question.  Why does motivation vary?  Where does it come from?  We’ll try to answer these questions using the Expectancy Theory of Motivation.

Expectancy Theory of Motivation

This theory was developed by Victor H. Vroom, a business professor at the Yale School of Management.  The theory examines why individuals do what they do in the workplace, and it applies to school as well.  You can apply it to almost anywhere in your life, in an attempt to explain the courses of action you take.  The theory has three key stages.

Stage 1: Expectancy

Effort -> Performance

Expectancy is the belief that effort correlates with performance.  Put more plainly: you expect that if you put more effort into something, you will do better.  How true this is depends on a few things:

• Self-efficacy
  • Efficacy means the ability to produce the desired or intended result.  Self efficacy is your own belief that you have the skills and abilities to perform a task or behaviour.  It is similar to confidence.
• Perceived control
  • Do you think you have control over the outcome of something?  If you perceive that you lack control, then you believe that you won’t be able to influence the outcome.
• Goal difficulty
  • If the goal is exceedingly difficult, or the performance expectations are too high, then what is the point?  You don’t expect that your effort will lead to performance.

Those three items will affect your expectancy.  If your self efficacy is low, if perceived control is low, if the task seems too difficult, then your expectancy is low.  You think that if even if you put significant effort into the task, it won’t lead to better performance.

1st Year Student: I don’t know anything about partial differential equations.  I don’t know how much of this material will be on the exam, and I’ve heard that last year’s test was extremely difficult.

This person’s self efficacy is low.  They don’t think they know anything about PDE’s (and I don’t blame them).  They are unsure about the test material, and so they think it is out of their control.  And the first years are in disbelief because they all heard the test average last year was 45%. These numbers tend to fly around with seemingly no source – and so perceived task difficulty is high.  Does this person think that their efforts will lead to high performance?  No.  The cards are stacked against them.  They believe the correlation between effort and performance will be weak.  They could study for 4 days straight and only receive 60%.  What’s the point, then? Expectancy is low.

Stage 2: Instrumentality

Effort -> Performance -> Outcome

This stage refers to the link between performance and the outcome.  It is the belief that the person will receive a reward based on their performance.  This does not have to be a reward in the typical sense – it doesn’t have to have monetary value (although it very well could be, especially in a work setting).  The reward could be a high mark on a test, or being published in an academic journal.  This link is based on a few factors:

• Trust
  • Do you trust that you will receive a reward?
• Control
  • Who is in control of the rewards?  Who controls how the rewards will be distributed?
• Policy
  • What is the policy between performance and rewards?  Will I receive a bigger Christmas bonus if I do a great job on this work assignment?

Whether these factors are applicable or not depends on the environment.  If it is a work environment, and the reward could be a bonus or a promotion, then those three factors are important.  You need to trust that you will get the bonus.  You need to understand who is in control of the bonus.  Your boss?  Your general manager?  Who decides?  What are the deciding factors?  You need all of this information to understand how performance correlates with rewards.

1st Year Student: But if I do well on this test, I could get an A in this class.

Stage 3: Valence

Effort -> Performance -> Outcome -> Reward

This is the intrinsic attractiveness of the reward.  This is the value of the reward to the person.  And this depends all on the person – their needs, values, preferences, goals.  It really depends on their personality.  One person might find a high test mark extremely rewarding, and another might be more indifferent to it.  Ultimately, it is the value the person places on the outcome, and can be classified as three positions: (-1) would like to avoid the outcome, (0) indifferent to the outcome, or (1) welcomes the outcome.

1st Year Student: And that means I might be able to get into that Masters program, or get that amazing job.

And so the final step in determining your motivation is to examine the link between these three steps in motivation.  You could even assign some number to each of them and multiple them together, which is often done:

Motivational Force (MF) = Expectancy x Instrumentality x Valence

In the example of our test taker: expectancy was low, because they lacked self efficacy, they perceived the task was difficult, and they felt it was beyond their control.  But instrumentality was high.  They recognized that if they could find a way to do well, then there would most certainly be a reward – in the form of a high mark.  And valence was high as well.  They valued the reward, because it meant it could provide them with more opportunities in the future.  They didn’t have much expectancy that they would do well on the exam, because the effort performance link was weak.  But there was a lot riding on the test.  The rewards would certainly be good.  And so they are likely to study fairly hard.  I’d predict based on this that motivation would be reasonably high.

For another student, the same test could have gone like this:

___________________

I love PDEs, and I have a copy of the past exam – so I have a good idea of what will be on the test.  Plus, I heard the Teaching Assistant say what should be on the test – thankfully I went to that tutorial.  But, I am already getting an A in the class, and so even if I do poorly on this exam it won’t matter much.

___________________

This person’s expectancy is high.  They are good at the subject, and they have all the tools they need to do well on the test, if they put a little bit of effort preparing for it.  But they don’t really care about the outcome – they know the reward will be a high mark, but they are indifferent to this because they already have such a high mark that the exam won’t really affect it.  Their motivation would probably be at some medium level.

You can really apply this theory to anytime motivation is required.  It helps to identify why your motivation is lacking, and so you can pinpoint the step that needs attention.