Intrinsic Motivation Paper

One of the most powerful experiences of intrinsic motivation, for me came shortly after a devastating occurrence upon the city of Aurora Colorado. On July 20th, 2012 I was an attendant of midnight premier of the “Dark Knight,” at the Century 16 Movie Theater, also known as one of the U.S worst massacre ever. Two days after the shooting, I assembled a group of friends to create “Colorado Strength Ribbons.” The reason I choose this topic to write about is because before this class, I still looked back and wondered as to why I was motivated go as far as I did to create this project. I saw no reward, but I strived to continue pushing forward. Thanks to the course content of this class, I am able to evaluate and analyze plausible theories to answer …show more content…
This was by far the most important reason for my motivation during this time. I realize I wanted to do something that would be beneficial to a group of people I believe were much stronger than me. I was motivated to work a little harder because I believed the well-being of this community was more important than myself, and I was willing to do my part to encourage healing. No amount of money can replace the satisfaction I received from the amount of thanks and hugs for thinking about the people first. I felt a sense of personal fulfillment that is quiet hard to explain. My emotions were running rampage, but I knew what I did was the right thing to do. I did not require any external rewards to continuously work. However, if I had one thing I could improve for this project, I would change how I would motivated the other members of my group. Although I was motivated mostly through intrinsic means, and extrinsic factors were nonexistent, everyone else within the group should have been rewarded with some form of compensation because they were not as committed, therefore extrinsic reward would have increased the sustainability of their work performance. Overtime, the amount of effort seeped into their own personal time such as work and free time. It was easy for them to quickly lose motivation for this cause. We discussed in class about the topic of minimum wage, one note that struck me was the mentioning of work wages for basic task, the fact that anybody is able to do that simple task, should be compensated for that job due to its low motivational value (such as getting coffee or running errands). I thought about the type of job I asked my group members perform. The job was relatively simple, repetitive and time consuming, if I would have known sooner, I would have responded to the failing motivation by providing incentives. I