The Daily Freelancer: Freelancing and Intrinsic Motivation
I was going to write that if you’ve been in a workplace, been a worker, or managed others for a minute, you’ve seen intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in action. But the reality is that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation plays into our lives in so many different ways both inside and outside of work.
Whether you’ve heard the words or not, you know the meaning. Intrinsic motivation is motivation that comes from within, like the desire to do a good job, wanting to achieve a dream, or doing something because you know it’s the right thing to do. It’s the kind of work you lose time doing, or the kind of work you’d do for free. Essentially, you do it because you enjoy doing it, and there’s a kind of self-motivation involved.
Extrinsic motivation includes outside factors that aren’t your own but that spur you on, like doing a good job to get a pay raise or a reward. They could also be rules you have to abide by, like getting to work on time or paying your rent.
When you become a freelancer, a lot of those extrinsic motivators, like clocking in, putting in your time, finishing your projects, getting a paycheck, and not getting fired disappear.
Actually, no — they don’t disappear, they just transfer to you.
There’s no clock-in time now, so you need to create your hours. You won’t have a boss giving you work; you have to go out and find it. And you only get paid if complete your projects. You can’t rely on your workplace to provide you training opportunities; you have to make your own plan for learning and growing. You’ll no longer get performance reviews, so you need to make sure you’re putting out your best work (in fact, you could consider that every client’s experience is your performance review).
Self-motivation suddenly needs to be compounded with self-discipline in order to make this work. I’m discovering more places where my extrinsic motivations have disappeared (I no longer need to leave the house at 7:00am, and for a night owl, that’s fantastic! But I can’t sleep the day away), but also areas where my extrinsic motivations are spurring me on to work harder (I didn’t used to have to worry about making rent, but now I do).
Having that kind of weight of responsibility isn’t for everyone. It’s why you see so many articles about going freelance start out by asking if you think you can motivate yourself enough to do it. I’ve always had a huge amount of intrinsic motivation, so I’m doing Ok so far!
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