“You know when you’re stuck in traffic on the freeway and you see an exit approaching, and you want to take it even though you know it’ll probably take longer to get home?” said Delgado. “That’s our brains getting excited by the possibility of taking control. You won’t get home any faster, but it feels better because you feel like you’re in charge.”
This is a useful lesson for anyone hoping to motivate themselves or others, because it suggests an easy method for triggering the will to act: Find a choice, almost any choice, that allows you to exert control. If you are struggling to answer a tedious stream of emails, decide to reply to one from the middle of your inbox. If you’re trying to start an assignment, write the conclusion first, or start by making the graphics, or do whatever’s most interesting to you. To find the motivation to confront an unpleasant employee, choose where the meeting is going to occur. To start the next sales call, decide what question you’ll ask first.
Motivation is triggered by making choices that demonstrate to ourselves that we are in control. The specific choice we make matters less than the assertion of control. It’s this feeling of self-determination that gets us going. That’s why Delgado’s participants were willing to play again and again when they felt like they were in charge.
Which is not to say that motivation is, therefore, always easy. In fact, sometimes simply making a choice isn’t enough. Occasionally, to really self-motivate, we need something more.
IV.
After Eric Quintanilla signed his name to the form that officially made him a U.S. Marine, the recruiter shook his hand, looked him in the eye, and said he had made the right choice.
“It’s the only one I see for myself, sir,” Quintanilla replied. He had meant the words to sound bold and confident, but his voice quavered when he spoke and his hand was so sweaty that both of them wiped their palms on their pants afterward.
Quintanilla was twenty-three years old. Five years earlier, he had graduated from high school in a small town an hour south of Chicago. He had thought about going away to college, but he wasn’t certain what to study, wasn’t positive what he wanted to do afterward—wasn’t sure about much, to be honest. So he enrolled at a local community college and got an associate’s degree in general studies. He had hoped it would help him get a job at a cellphone store in the mall. “I filled out, I don’t know, like ten applications,” Quintanilla said. “But I never heard back from anyone.”
He found part-time work at a hobby supply shop and occasionally drove an ice truck when the regular guy was sick or on vacation. At night, he played World of Warcraft. This wasn’t how Quintanilla had envisioned his life. He was ready for something better. He decided to propose to the girl he had been dating since high school. The wedding was fantastic. Afterward, though, he was still in the same place. And then his wife got pregnant. He tried the cellphone stores once more and scored an interview. He rehearsed with his wife the night before his appointment.
“Honey,” she told him, “you have to give them a reason to hire you. Just tell them what you’re excited about.”
The next day, when the store manager asked him why he wanted to sell T-Mobile phones, Quintanilla froze. “I don’t know,” he said. It was the truth. He had no idea.
A few weeks later, Quintanilla went to a party and saw one of his former classmates, freshly home from basic training and twenty pounds lighter, with bulging muscles and a newfound sense of confidence. He was telling jokes and hitting on girls. Maybe, Quintanilla said to his wife the next morning, he should consider the Marines. She didn’t like the idea, and neither did his mom, but Quintanilla couldn’t think of anything else to do. He sat down one night at the kitchen table, drew a line down the center of a piece of paper, wrote “Marine Corps” on the left side and tried to fill the right with other options. The only thing he could come up with was “Get promoted at the hobby store.”
Five months later, he arrived at the San Diego Marine Corps Recruit Depot in the middle of the night, shuffled into a room alongside eighty other young men, had his head shaved, his blood type tested, his clothes replaced with fatigues, and embarked on a new life.
The thirteen-week boot camp Quintanilla entered in 2010 was a relatively new experiment in the Corps’ 235-year-old quest to manufacture the perfect marine. For most of its history, the service’s training program had focused on molding rowdy teenagers into disciplined troops. But fifteen years before Quintanilla’s enlistment, a fifty-three-year-old general named Charles C. Krulak had been promoted to commandant, the Marines’ top position. Krulak believed basic training needed to change. “We were seeing much weaker applicants,” he told me. “A lot of these kids didn’t just need discipline, they needed a mental makeover. They’d never belonged to a sports team, they’d never had a real job, they’d never done anything. They didn’t even have the vocabulary for ambition. They’d followed instructions their whole life.”
This was a problem, because the Corps increasingly needed troops who could make independent decisions. Marines—as they will happily tell you—are different from soldiers and sailors. “We’re the first to arrive and the last to leave,” Krulak said. “We need extreme self-starters.” In today’s world, that means the Corps requires men and women capable of fighting in places such as Somalia and Baghdad, where rules and tactics change unpredictably and marines often have to decide—on their own and in real time—the best course of action.
“I began spending time with psychologists and psychiatrists, trying to figure out, how do we do a better job teaching these recruits to think for themselves?” Krulak said. “We had great recruits coming in, but they didn’t have any sense of direction or drive. All they knew was doing the bare minimum. It was like working with a bunch of wet socks. Marines can’t be wet socks.”
Krulak began reviewing studies on how to teach self-motivation, and became particularly intrigued by research, conducted by the Corps years earlier, showing that the most successful marines were those with a strong “internal locus of control”—a belief they could influence their destiny through the choices they made.
Locus of control has been a major topic of study within psychology since the 1950s. Researchers have found that people with an internal locus of control tend to praise or blame themselves for success or failure, rather than assigning responsibility to things outside their influence. A student with a strong internal locus of control, for instance, will attribute good grades to hard work, rather than natural smarts. A salesman with an internal locus of control will blame a lost sale on his own lack of hustle, rather than bad fortune.
“Internal locus of control has been linked with academic success, higher self-motivation and social maturity, lower incidences of stress and depression, and longer life span,” a team of psychologists wrote in the journal Problems and Perspectives in Management in 2012. People with an internal locus of control tend to earn more money, have more friends, stay married longer, and report greater professional success and satisfaction.
In contrast, having an external locus of control—believing that your life is primarily influenced by events outside your control—“is correlated with higher levels of stress, [often] because an individual perceives the situation as beyond his or her coping abilities,” the team of psychologists wrote.