Enter the Zone, fight imposter syndrome, and unlock intrinsic motivation

Most of us spend thousands of hours planning what to do and how to do it. We meet with others to discuss details; we draw up requirements documents; we make diagrams; we iterate; we use process management tools and frameworks.

We look for productivity hacks. We invest in tools, work more hours, and spend a huge amount of time and effort on optimizing output metrics.

But we never talk about how we feel. Feelings are to be hidden, and they are indicative of weakness.

This is misguided. When we feel good about what we are doing, we can be ten times more productive — not to mention happier and healthier. If we took 10% of the time we spend on optimising or automating workflows, obsessing over conversion funnels or profit margins, or implementing the latest agile workflow and instead used this time to unlock motivation and people's sense of purpose, we would not only see a huge improvement in results, but we would all be happier in achieving these results too.

And this could be simpler than you think. Let's take a look at how we can go about:

• creating an environment where people are more likely to experience a state of flow or enter "the Zone", where they reach superhuman-like peaks of productivity,
• helping people deal with negative feelings that hurt productivity and motivation, such as imposter syndrome,
• reminding people about intrinsic motivation, and helping them rediscover what it feels like to be motivated.

The Zone, and how to enter it

Most people have experienced the Zone accidentally at some point, but few people know that there's active research around what it is and how we can get there intentionally. (You might also have heard of it referred to as "flow"). When you're in the Zone, you forget about your surroundings for hours or days at a time and focus completely on the task at hand. And instead of feeling drained or tired, you feel more energised and more inspired the longer you keep at it. Better still, in this state you create things significantly faster and of a significantly higher quality, and you love doing it.

If you've experienced the Zone, you know exactly what I'm describing. If you haven't heard of it before, you might be excited that this is an experience shared by others, and that there is active research to help us reach this state more often. If you lead people or are building something as part of a team, your primary goal should be to help those around you reach this state as often and as consistently as possible.

If none of this sounds familiar, you've probably seen many literary references to it. For example, The Social Network portrays Mark Zuckerberg coding for days straight to create the foundations of Facebook. Amadeus shows Mozart locking himself away from everyone to write his famous Requiem. Writers, coders, artists, and (especially solo) musicians — professions which require creativity and are usually done alone — are more likely to reach this state, but anyone can experience it if the conditions are right.

Although the jury is still out on the exact details surrounding the Zone is and how we can intentionally experience it, we have some guidelines. One of the primary prerequisites of reaching this state seems to be that what you are doing is neither too easy nor too challenging. If what you are attempting to create, relative to your abilities, falls in the "just right" window (sometimes referred to as the "Goldilocks" window) of not being boring but also not seeming impossible, you are more likely to enter the Zone.

There are other important factors, including things such as immediate feedback, and well-defined goals, but ultimately we need more research on how to reliably reproduce an environment where people can consistently reach this state. No one (yet) can just say "hey, I'm off to the Zone for a bit", and then go there.

If this sounds disappointing, remember that you have more control over the factors mentioned above than you might think. Keep in mind the conditions I mentioned above and when you break your goals down into smaller tasks, focus on keeping the scope of each task within a likely Goldilocks window. If a task seems too easy, redefine it to be something more challenging. (You can do this either by combining tasks or by making a single task more difficult. If it's something you've done often before, try to do it in a different way, using a different tool, or with more ambitious requirements). If it's too difficult, break it down into smaller, more manageable pieces. (If that's not possible, try to find someone to help you, someone to teach you, or delegate the task entirely). Look for ways to produce feedback through the task, or at least at the end of each sub-task. Make sure you define the overall goal. If you are working with other people, help them to do all of this.

If you care about productivity, instead of reading about yet another management "philosophy" or productivity framework, find some time to help yourself and people around you reach the Zone.

Imposter syndrome

Another state that most of us have experienced is what is often referred to as "imposter syndrome". Imposter syndrome describes the feeling that you don't know enough to be doing what you're doing. That you got your current position only because the interviewers and your colleagues didn't ask the questions that would have made it immediately obvious that you are bluffing your way through life. And that soon this veil will fall away and you'll have to stand intellectually naked in front of the people you have worked with and admit that you conned them all.

Imposter syndrome, like the Zone, also seems to be more common in creative professions where people tend to spend a lot of time working alone, such as music and programming (and it is especially severe in underrepresented groups of people, but that would need a post of its own) but usually it is experienced to some degree by every single person you know. (If you don't believe me, ask — people are normally very happy to talk about it if you admit to experiencing it first).

Again there are several factors that combine to bring about this state. One is that we tend to discount all of our own knowledge as obvious, self-evident and therefore worthless. We assume that our friends and colleagues know what we know, but we are hyper-aware of things that they know which we don't.

Our society and culture are largely to blame for this. We are encouraged daily to hide our mistakes and ignorance, for fear of negative social and professional consequences. Our friends mock us for our ignorance; our superiors promote those who most effectively hide any gaps in their knowledge and expertise; we are punished for any mistakes we make and rewarded for hiding all of our foibles.

We also tend to oversimplify how we think about knowledge into a model of "things my peers know" and "things I know". This results in an unfair comparison of a shared pool of "other" knowledge, to our own smaller individual knowledge.

This is nicely visualised in the image below, which was (and still is) shared widely on social media. Many people I've shown this image to say, "Woah, that describes exactly how I feel".

Dunning-Kruger effect

Related to imposter syndrome is a cognitive bias named after two psychologists who first described it in 1999: the Dunning-Kruger effect. Although this has recently been popularised as the idea of "too stupid to know he's stupid", there is a bit more subtlety behind the idea.

Dunning and Kruger asked people to estimate their own competence by predicting the scores they would get in an upcoming academic test. They then compared the predicted scores to the scores that people actually received.

People who performed very poorly in the test consistently over-estimated their own competence. These people also thought that they were more competent than the actual test score indicated. People who performed very well in the test under-estimated their abilities (though still estimated that they were more competent than the poor performers). Overall, nearly everyone was unable to estimate their own competence, apart from a few average performers who knew that they were average performers.

How does this relate to imposter syndrome? For one, most people at least subconsciously understand that they can never have an accurate and unbiased view of their own competence. Therefore, no matter what you have achieved, you probably have some lingering doubts that maybe you're one of those people in the bottom quartile who just pretends to be smart, and that you've grown so used to "faking" it that most of the time you get away with it.

This lingering doubt can be one of the most damaging knocks to your productivity, sense of self worth, motivation, and mental health. When combined with other factors, such as stress, lack of sleep, or finding yourself at the receiving end of harsh criticism, the damage can be exceptionally severe and sometimes irreversible. Even the smartest, most productive, most consistent and most competent people can suffer from a sudden "burst" of imposter syndrome, and this can be a contributing factor to long-term depression, a nervous breakdown or other serious issues that are very undesirable for the person, their friends and relatives, their peers, their team, their employer, and everyone involved. Evidently, imposter syndrome is an arch-nemisis of the Zone. And yet no one talks about it or spends any time trying to avoid or counteract it.

We need to spend time, effort and resources fighting imposter syndrome and other negative experiences that prevent us from reaching our goals.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Let's drop down a level and look at what "makes us tick" in the most fundamental sense, and then see how this ties back into the Zone and productivity. In 1943, to describe what we humans need and want, Maslow proposed a hierarchy of needs, ranging from survival to something he called "self actualisation". Although research and debate around this goes ever on, Maslow's theory is still a prevailing and useful model to understand ourselves and those around us.

We spend most of our focus on achieving specific needs based on where in the hierarchy we currently exist. If we are starving, freezing or otherwise in danger of dying, all of our focus will be on improving our immediate situation. Humans in this state have very little desire for a society and they largely ignore psychological needs, often at the expense of those around them. As portrayed in Yet Another Hollywood Dystopian Film Coming Soon to a Cinema Near You, people in this situation are often driven mad by the prospect of imminent death and they willingly harm those around them in order to survive.

Once our basic needs are met, we will focus on building ourselves a safety net. We will create some form of community, but we are still focussed on survival. We don't care if people are happy, but we will put systems in place to keep watch, create weapons and fortifications, and otherwise attempt to ensure medium-term survival beyond our next meal.

Although millions of people still exist in the "basic needs" section of Maslow's hierarchy, most of you reading this article are likely not worrying about where your next meal is coming from, or if enemies will try to kill you tomorrow. Your day-to-day worries probably trend more towards caring about your social status, whether your friends like you, finding or maintaining a relationship with a significant other and trying to get a higher salary.

If you are very lucky, you have everything in the middle layers of the hierarchy sorted as well, and you are striving towards something greater, loosely described under "self-actualisation".

It's worth keeping in mind George Box's famous statement that "all models are wrong but some are useful". Of course, many people do not cleanly fit into one section of the hierarchy. Famous artists sometimes continue to strive for self actualization while ignoring their psychological or even basic needs. They allow their social circle to fall apart and may even stop eating while they direct all of their energy into creative activities and achieving their full potential. Nonetheless, these seem to be edge cases, and Maslow's triangle provides a model for us to understand general motivation — both our own and that of those around us.

Motivation

Motivation, or the reason we ever do anything, is broadly divided into two categories: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.

If you arrive bleary eyed at your desk at 8AM after swearing at your alarm clock and not getting enough sleep, this is likely because you want to receive a salary at the end of the month. This is extrinsic motivation. You are doing a task in return for a reward that is not directly related.

If you are super passionate about roses and you spend hours in a garden getting your fingers pricked, worsening your backache, and fighting off aphids in return for a "reward" that you could buy for a few bucks at your local supermarket, then you're not partaking in the activity for the reward. Instead, you are experiencing intrinsic motivation: when you do something because you want to, or because the task is its own reward.

Extrinsic motivation

Extrinsic motivation is the primary driver of our modern economy and workplaces. Extrinsic motivation is also dangerous. Daniel Pink, in his book Drive, compares it to a caffeine shot: it can have a positive short-term effect, but often it leaves people with an escalating dependency problem. Suddenly that one flat-white in the morning not only fails to provide the same kick, but it's not even enough to keep your eyes from drooping at your desk, and you bump it up to two. Then three. Then four.

If you've played games like Candy Crush, Farmville, or whatever the cool kids are playing these days, then you have a very good intuitive understanding of how extrinsic motivation has to constantly increase to keep up a sense of value. Those 100 virtual hay bails that seemed so valuable yesterday, and that you worked for two weeks to receive, are suddenly worthless. You're creating thousands every second now, and you are still far away from your goal of buying a virtual tractor.

We chase external motivations outside of games too. And often they seem equally empty once we have received what we were aiming for. It's easy to get drawn into a vicious cycle of aiming for something only to feel empty and unsatisfied when we get it, and then needing a bigger potential reward to aim ourselves at. People spend more money at slot machines, buy bigger and faster cars, nicer phones, and more expensive clothes just trying to get that initial rush of satisfaction that they first experienced when they spent a week saving their childhood pocket money to buy the Shiny Toy that everyone else wanted.

Extrinsic motivation isn't all bad, and it can still be very effective for people in the middle of Maslow's hierarchy. If you don't have enough money to buy free time and hang out with your friends, or if you haven't yet experienced a feeling of prestige and accomplishment from your first promotion or salary increase, then extrinsic motivation can work very well for you. If you're starting to see the diminishing returns of extrinsic motivation, either in yourself or in those around you, then it's probably time to look again at intrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic motivation

I say "look again", because intrinsic motivation is a far more natural flavour of motivation. When we are young, everything we do is intrinsically motivated. We learn to draw because we want to create drawings. We try to master reading, skating, sports, and games for the sake of those activities themselves.

Then as we become more exposed to society and its values, we have external motivation pushed down our throats. Soon we accept that there are things we must do and things that we want to do, and that we get the things we want in return for doing the things that we must.

But in 2018, more and more of us are privileged enough to embrace a paradox. Can we do what we must more effectively, create more value for those with power over us (ostensibly making them happier too) while simultaneously doing what we want nearly all of the time?

If we have some level of control over the goals and tasks that we must do, we can align them with the things that we want to do. And by doing this, we can set ourselves up in an environment where we are very likely to experience the ecstasy of the Zone, avoid imposter syndrome, and move up through Maslow's hierarchy towards the cryptic "self actualization".

Daniel Pink, again in Drive, suggests that to do this we need three things: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. That is, we want to be in control of our day-to-day actions and goals; we — by default — want to be very good at what we do, and we want what we do to move us towards some larger sense of purpose — for it to be meaningful in some "greater than ourselves" way.

The industrial revolution and the society that formed around it couldn't afford to give people any sense of autonomy (if you wander off, your section of the conveyor belt falls apart and damages all of those further down the line). Mastery was also unimportant, as anyone could do repetitive, simple and well-defined tasks. And the overall purpose was to create heavy machinery that would make a few people exceptionally wealthy, so there was little room to talk about grander goals either.

Now that more and more repetitive work is being automated, our society is changing to encourage bursts of creativity over consistency, giving people space to become experts in highly specialised domains, and to think more about what life will be like after everyone can put food on the table. Already it's becoming more common for organisations to allow employees some autonomy through flexible working hours and no dress codes, and to provide people with money and time to further their own education and specialisations. It's more common for job adverts to talk about what a company is doing in terms of fixing education or poverty at a global level, and to tell potential employees how they could be part of that purpose. Everything is in place to start unlocking the intrinsic motivation that so many of us haven't felt since we were very young.

But although there have been small changes and improvements, the overall system has not changed. Our rewards are still based around performance bonuses and more impressive titles. Our tasks are still required to fit into managers' spreadsheets and Key Performance Indicators. We are still required to work at specific times in specific places, and to work towards other people's goals.

People focus on productivity optimisation while ignoring the simple changes that would unlock intrinsic motivation and increase productivity by a factor of ten. Managers still look at working hours, and shallow metrics. They talk to employees about time management and automating workflows. They build Scrum Boards and bring in professional Agile Coaches to push people into tighter and tighter boxes. They pay commissions and bonuses, and promise bigger monitors and more comfortable chairs.

Bosses spend zero time talking to people about their goals; about what skills people want to improve and what help they need to achieve mastery. They assign people tasks without the context of the bigger picture, or explaining why the task is important. They tell people to meet the deadline or else. They provide shallow incentives and wonder why these rewards only work once or twice before needing to be increased.

Some people believe that we're due a big change. Daniel Pink says that the industrial revolution was Motivation 2.0 (after Motivation 1.0 met the basic survival needs of earlier civilisations), and that current changes are a "patch" or "bump" to the system that runs our society. He calls this Motivation 2.1. But there is a lot to do before we reach Motivation 3.0 — a system that focuses on intrinsic motivation, and allows people to achieve Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.

The research is there, or getting there. Society is slower to adapt — slow to move away from a Carrot and Stick reward system. But we can still build better systems in our homes, communities and workplaces while waiting for society as a whole to catch up. We can unlock our own intrinsic motivation and help others find the delight of being constantly, intrinsically motivated too.

We can take time away from bullshit, outdated ideas like management philosophy and productivity frameworks and use this time to talk to people about what motivates them and why.

Conclusion

If we manage to achieve these huge increases in productivity and satisfaction, either globally or in smaller communities, it will be through a coordinated effort. That means not waiting around for other people to start looking at how to find the Zone, fight imposter syndrome and unlock intrinsic motivation, but to start doing this ourselves.

Simply telling people about the Zone, imposter syndrome, and intrinsic motivation can already have a large effect. If you are working on anything alone or with other people, you can take small, simple steps to increase the likelihood that you will find yourself floating into the Zone. If you work in an organization, you can call out the bullshit that you see around you and ask for help — or help others — by looking for examples of intrinsic motivation and encouraging them.

Do your own task management. Turn down that commision-based compensation. Ask for a safe space to talk about your mistakes. Give other people safe spaces to talk about their mistakes. Work out what you want to achieve. Ask others what they want to achieve. Tell people how you feel. Ask others how they feel.

Don't mock ignorance.

When you see examples of mastery or potential mastery, acknowledge them. Most of all, make time to talk to people about the things that society tells us not to talk about, and use this time to build an environment where people can easily enter the Zone, have the resources to fight imposter syndrome, and are driven by intrinsic factors instead of shallow rewards.

Acknowledgements

Endless thanks to the following people, who read a draft of this post before it was published, or introduced me to some of the ideas.

Theresa Dwyer
Isabel Eyer
Alisa Lochner
Mathe Maema
Long Hoang Nguyen
Ludmila Tydlitátová
Esther van den Berg

None of the ideas in this post are original and I have shamelessly borrowed ideas, images, quotes, and metaphors from many people while providing very limited citations. The internet is vast and it is surprisingly difficult to remember or find where certain things originated. Thank you also, therefore, to everyone who contributed unwillingly, and I hope you agree with anarchist schools of thought regarding the free exchange of information.

A majority of the ideas about motivation come from Daniel Pink's book, "Drive", and he also links motivation to Maslow's Hierarchy. I highly recommend his book, but there's also a decent summary in the form of a Ted Talk if you prefer. The late Andy Grove also provided some of the links between motivation and Maslow's Hierarchy in his book High Output Management, which I'd recommend despite its title.