Interview
18
in the human energy system is purpose. If you have no purpose, chaos reigns.
There has to be a reason for investing energy in something. It’s all about taking energy from your body and putting it into something you care about. We know that drive is the number on predictor of success. It answers the question, ‘How bad do you want it?’ It is more important than ability, more important than personality, intelligence, or anything else. What matters is how driven you are. Are you willing to endure all sorts of hardships and not surrender? What we’ve learned is that there are some forms of purpose that are much more enduring, more fulfilling, more sustaining, and those tend to be intrinsically driven.
Intrinsically driven actions are reinforcing in themselves. The reward for doing it comes from the act of doing it itself- the joy, the pleasure, the love of learning for its own sake, etc. If you’re working at a job, it’s not the pay check that continues to drive you if you’re intrinsically motivated. Rather it might be what you truly want to do with your life or a path that you freely want to follow. It could well be a cause much bigger than yourself. The touchstones that drive intrinsic motivation connect us to our basic needs. If we are driven intrinsically, we’ll fight harder to succeed. We do so because it makes sense from our view of the world. When we see we’re fighting for a truly noble cause – a cause much bigger than our own self-interest, we will persist in the face of great obstacles. We simply won’t surrender our spirit as readily because we deem it too important to do so. I’ve learned an important lesson for myself in all this: start everything by exploring the why behind it. Make sure it’s worth doing and the purpose is right. Far too many of the high achievers I have had the privilege to work with have struggled with getting the purpose right. With the right ‘why,’ so many more things are within our grasp. With a misguided purpose, even if we succeed in accomplishing the goal, feelings of disillusionment are likely to follow.”
Schweyer: “Let’s talk about how you do this, how to get started. How difficult is it to lead this kind of life?”
Loehr: “I think the first step in taking this path is to reward effort over outcome every time. You can’t control outcome but you can control effort. Effort is your ability and willingness to continue to move forward and not surrender your spirit. We all must learn that we get things because of the work we put in. Our work ethic is far more important to success in life than what we are given. It’s a hard but crucial lesson. Effort is also the stuff from which character is formed – the bedrock of moral and ethical strength. The attributes of integrity, honesty, caring, compassionate, generous, humble, just, and loyal, etc., are developed in only one way and that is through hard work.
The stresses of competition are absolutely necessary to forge the muscles of character. Who we really are is revealed most clearly in moments of great stress. Failure is an indispensable element in the building process. Failure pushes us much harder than winning does. We rarely reflect after following a win. Losing forces us to go back and recalculate, recalibrate, and rethink. And the most important conversation we should have with ourselves concerns character issues. A personally designed character-based scorecard should accompany every competitor. Were you humble in victory? Were you respectful of players and coaches regardless of how they treated you? Did you give your best effort regardless of the outcome? Did you remain positive throughout? In what ways did you use the pressure of play to grow your character? These are the issues that matter most to me in my work with high level performers. Character development, even in adults, is definitely doable, but it’s hard, and you have to do some heavy lifting every day. You have to be very careful about where your energy and effort goes. Know that there will be temptations all the time to go off the rails, to cheat just a little bit, particularly when you see everyone else cheating, or to join in belittling somebody when everyone else is doing it.”
Schweyer: “Dr. Loehr, this has been terrific and I know it will cause a lot of readers to think about how they conduct their own lives. But how does this work in an organizational setting?”
Loehr: “We have a number of companies that have taken this on. For instance, Next Jump, located in New York City, hires mostly engineers and is an internet marketing firm that is doing unbelievably well. They have been following the principles I’ve been articulating here for several years. Next Jump CEO Charlie Kim remains committed to the notion that if you take care of your people and help them to grow as persons, it’s one of the most powerful drivers of business success he has thus far ever discovered. If his employees can say that they became better, stronger persons because of the culture created at Next Jump, he believes it would be the greatest gift he could give them. And, as a result, retention, engagement, and earnings for the business go straight up. When employees feel they