Most of us are driven by tangible rewards, toys, ice cream and stickers when we were kids, good grades, a prize or trophy when we were teens, a monetary bonus, incentive or promotion, stock or stock options for meeting and exceeding those goals when we are adults. It gets us into an occupation and career and keeps us there.
I played T-ball and softball in the summer recreation program long, long before the contentious participation trophies were ever a thing. I wasn’t particularly good but there was one game that I will always remember. My team was behind and I hit a grand slam home run clearing the bases for us to win the game and earn us a ribbon for the season. I was considered the hero at however old I was. No participation award will ever create a memory or reward like that.
Participation, however, is important. I grew up the middle child between two brothers who are at least a foot taller than me. They would play basketball, whiffle ball, Nerf football and whatever else they could come up with. They allowed me to play if I wanted to and many times I did. And I almost always lost. For all the times we played H-O-R-S-E (basketball game), it was the one time when my older brother was home from college that I beat them both in a single game. It was challenging, fun and oh, so satisfying. It was the unexpected, ultimate childhood reward that made it all the more meaningful.
Participation teaches values with intangible characteristics such as curiosity, challenge, risk, respect and enjoyment. These values are rewarded with high-quality relationships with teammates (brothers), colleagues, coaches and bosses, mastery of skills, expertise along with purpose and fulfillment. These intangible values and motivation reinforce the importance of intrinsic rewards.
If we never learn the importance of intrinsic motivation and those corresponding rewards, once we stop working it won’t be the reward we are seeking. This is especially true for those on the FIRE – Financial Independence Retire Early track. If you don’t have something so good to pursue for its own sake when you stop working, you find out it’s not as enjoyable or rewarding as you thought, losing your former identity and purpose and reason for getting up each morning.
What kind of work would you pursue for non-monetary, intangible rewards if you were financially secure and didn’t need the money? This is the difficult question in our highly driven, tangible world. Tangible is innate, it’s so much easier to comprehend and comparatively value.
Understanding the intangible is an acquired sense. It’s recognizing the counterintuitive quality of something being invaluable. It’s what we perceive as extremely valuable, priceless, having incalculable intellectual, emotional or spiritual worth because it’s irreplaceable. No monetary value can be placed on it and once lost, it becomes even more costly to us. And that brings us back to how valuable our time is and that it’s impossible to measure how much it is truly worth.
“One of the cruel ironies of life is that…literally… every… single… thing that is unbelievably important it is impossible to measure, contentment, belonging, purpose, joy, trust, wonder, love, beauty, the list goes on.” – Tom Goodwin
Intrinsic Motivation: How Internal Rewards Drive Behavior
Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation: What’s the Difference?
Retirement: Pursuing The Non-Monetary Rewards Of Work?