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One of the things we know about motivation is that we’re able to trigger those parts of our neurology that are related to motivating us when we feel in control. And very frequently this comes from making a choice. Something that allows us to assert ourselves into a situation. One of the most fascinating examples of this is how the Marine Corps revamped basic training.
About 15 years ago the Marine Corps found it was having this problem. They were getting a bunch of recruits that were coming in who were completely unpracticed at self-motivation. Now, for the Marine Corps, this is a real problem because the Marines are kind of different from other branches of the military. They’re usually the first in and the last to leave. And so what they need is they need real self-starters, people who know how to take the initiative. Charles Krulak, who is the head of the Marine Corps, told me that a lot of these recruits had never been on sports teams. They had never learned how to assert themselves. They had never practiced self-motivation.
So Krulak looked at the literature and he found that there were a bunch of studies that said the most effective Marines are ones who have learned an internal locus of control. We all have an internal or external locus of control, and what that means is, it’s how we see the world, whether we believe that we have the ability to assert ourselves and control our destinies or whether we believe that the things that happen around us determine whether we’re successful or not. Krulak wanted to teach his recruits how to have an internal locus of control – what in the Marines they call a “bias towards action.”
And so he redesigned boot camp completely. Now when recruits enter boot camp, instead of learning discipline and learning how to follow orders, which is how most of us think about it – that’s the cliché. Instead, they’re trained on making decision after decision after decision.
At the end of boot camp is this thing called “the crucible.” It’s a 56-hour obstacle course that every recruit has to complete in order to become a Marine. And during the crucible what’s really interesting is, some of the obstacles can only be completed if you kind of disobey the orders you’re hearing. One of my favorites is this thing called “Sergeant Timmerman’s Tank,” where you have to use these ropes and logs to move across this big sand pit. You’re told not to do anything unless you get a direct order from your platoon leader. But the thing is everyone’s wearing gas masks. You can’t hear your platoon leader, and your platoon leader is wearing a gas mask. Whatever he shouts nobody can make out. The only way to actually do the obstacle is if everyone pretends that they’re listening to their platoon leader and sort of self-organizes on the fly. Now, we don’t think of the Marines and we don’t think of the military as someplace that teaches us to be subversive. But this is the biggest insight: is that when people feel the subversive instinct when they feel this need to take control and assert themselves that’s when they learn how to generate self-motivation.
One of my favorite studies about motivation comes from this examination of how nursing homes work. What they found is that the people who are most successful in a nursing home setting are the ones who try to break the rules. They found that the people who lived the longest, who sort of did best once they were in the nursing home, was this group of seniors who, as soon as they got their meal tray from the cafeteria, they would trade among themselves and kind of make their own meals. And they talked to this one guy, and he said that he always traded away his chocolate cake. And that he actually loved chocolate cake, but that he would rather eat a meal of his own creation than just placidly take what was being handed to him. And that’s actually why he was successful in the nursing home. Because people who look for ways to prove to themselves that they’re in control, whether they’re in control of their own life or whether they’re in control of their own decisions, those are the people who manage to motivate.
This subversive instinct, if you can encourage that, then you learn how to self-motivate. And it just pays these huge dividends in your life.