What Drivers Motivation

Studies have shown that people who make physical efforts are motivated by money rewards, however people who are into brain activities such as R&D, creativity, and the like are not really motivated by prizes! Of course salaries MUST be fair in order not to let them worry about their living, but if this is the only given incentive their performance will go down the hill.

Why would their performance decrease? Because people doing brain activities are seeking to realize something to have a footprint in order to feel self satisfaction. They are looking to get recognition and become a reference in their domain.

These people are actually looking for ways to meet the challenges and acquire mastery. A typical example is the highly skilled people who write open source softwares like linux, apache and many others...These people work on their free time to achieve what they want; they are driven by the need to realize the idea they have in their head, despite little reward (money) they may earn.

This has reminded of an old story; I was just a fresh graduate and was recruited by a startup called TrilogGroup. At that time I was a guy who is fan of compilers; I was amazed by how these pieces of software work. Since my company, was doing workflow software I thought that the best way to make this software highly customizable is to integrate in it a Javascript engine that can make calls to any Java APIs. Of course Javascript engine means the ability to read and execute javascript codes, and that involves compiling. I worked on this feature during the weekends and once I had something to show, I presented it to my employer and was extremely happy to be told to work on it as a priority feature in the product.

Bottom line, if you are a person who has a dream or a purpose, don't shy away from it. You can work on it at night, in the weekends, during vacations...Because believe me there is nothing better than the FEELING OF SUCCESS!

Saying that, this does not mean that people who are working hard to achieve their target will pass unnoticed (well actually not at all of them). Years ago, I witnessed a success story of three people who built a free drawing tool called Paint.Net. This tool used the new Microsoft.Net technology to allow people to have enhanced functionalities that are not found in the standard Paint tool that ships with Windows. The tool was a great success and each of the creators got a job in a big company. However they are still working on it in their free time.

As a conclusion, don't drop an idea that you believe in because it will take time to achieve, time will pass anyway. You will stop at a moment; look back and think that if you had worked on it a little bit each day you would have finished it by now.

Ziad Salloum is a software engineer, who used to be a "product guy" and now an IT/Dev consultant. He has over 10 years of experience in the development domain and a expertise in a wide variety of technologies. His article What Drives Motivation is part of a series of articles found on his blog Sharing Experience.