34. People Are Motivated By Progress, Mastery, and Control

Why do people donate their time and creative thought? People volunteer to write entries for Wikipedia. Or they program code for the open source movement. When you stop to think about it, you realize that people engage in many activities, even over a long period of time, which require high expertise and yet offer no monetary or even career-building benefit. People like to feel that they are making progress. They like to feel that they are learning and mastering new knowledge and skills.

Small Signs of Progress Can Have a Big Effect

Because mastery is such a powerful motivator, even small signs of progress can have a large effect in motivating people to move forward to the next step in a task.

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Mastery can never actually be reached

In Drive, Daniel Pink says that mastery can be approached but never really reached. Figure 34.1 shows what this constant getting closer but never reaching looks like on a graph. The graph is known as an asymptote. You can get better and better, but you don’t really reach an endpoint. This is one of the factors that make mastery such a compelling motivator.

Figure 34.1. According to Daniel Pink, mastery is an asymptote—it can never be fully reached.

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You can design your presentations to stimulate and respond to this desire for mastery, especially if you have a session of a few hours. Plan your presentation and your activities so that people are mastering concepts and exercises as they go along. Set up exercises throughout the presentation so that they get a chance to try out what they have just learned and have an opportunity to show you, others, and themselves that they have mastered a particular idea or skill.