Motivation

Motivation is defined as a psychological feature that arouses an organism to action toward a desired goal and elicits, controls, and sustains certain goal directed behaviors. Researchers have shown that you can influence your own levels of motivation and self-control.
Dan Pink in his piece called The Puzzle of Motivation, talked about how by rewarding someone if they do something well motivates them to do it faster, but they do the job worse because of it. He talks about the candle experiment, where people are given a box of thumb taks, a candle, and matches and are told to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip on the table. He talks about how the scientist who invented this test did two trials with it. One to see how fast it takes people do solve the puzzle, and one group that he said he would reward if they solved it faster. The result was that the group who was going to be rewarded took three times longer to solve the puzzle than the "control" group.This is evidence that motivation with reward often causes harm. Pink later stated that the scientist presented the test in a simpler way, so that the answer was in clear view. He did the same two trial groups, control and motivated with reward, and the rewarded group solved the puzzle way faster than the control group did. Pink said that the group that had the insensitive to solve it faster, did because "rewards by their very nature narrow our focus, concentrate the mind, that's why they work in so many cases"
People are driven to do anything because of the feeling they get during or after what ever it is they are doing. Whether that's happiness, pleasure, pain, uncertainty, or just a rush of adrenalin. People sometimes do things for the purpose of having closure on some aspect in their life and getting the satisfaction that comes with that, or because someone is making them to do it. Whether or not we actually want to be doing what ever it is that we are doing, we are doing it for a reason.