What motivates us?

What motivates us? Well there are countless answers to that question, but the three main ones we are focusing on are: Automany, Mastery, and Purpose. Most people think of motivation as external rewards like money, but now we are learning that is not always the best method of true motivation. Many people are challenging that traditional notion of "if you want someone to do something for you, give them money/a reward", with saying high performance and satisfaction at work is the basic human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do things better by ourselves. Like the youtube clip stated, "The reward-based incentive actually creates poorer performance in any group of workers for cognitive tasks, regardless of economic background or complexity of the task involved." This notion has now been proven over and over again. I loved the example of a software company giving their employees one day off to work on whatever they would like and at the end of the day would have a party and share what they had worked on. Having such an open forum to create things fosters innovation and creativeness so well, and as I'm learning has led to the companies success.  I am someone who loves sports and has always had them come very easy to me, so when I joined Ship women's rugby it was a shock to be to not master it right away.  I was driven and motivated to work even harder in a sport I barley understood because I wanted to master it.  Going to practices and extra practice sessions gave me purpose to continue on with rugby and expand my knowledge of the game. Every week we have runs, gym hours, and library hours and it makes us embrace the idea of automany. If we attend all these things will will reap the benefits on Saturday in a game when we are in better shape and can play longer and harder than the other team.  So if I were to ask myself what motives me, I would say to become the best I can be at something. What would you say motivates you?