god money i'll do anything for you

Begin: Sunday, May 2, 1999 17:04

Submitted: Sunday, May 2, 1999 17:40

An article I just read has reaffirmed a hypothesis I have pondered on many occasions in my life. I believe, based on my own experience, the assertion that being rewarded externally, be it with money, compliments, or grades, is detrimental to both the enjoyment and output quality of an activity.

Case in point: the fact that I'm about to flunk my math class. (That one has really been bugging me to no end lately.) Typically, I enjoy math. I love trying to figure out the solution to a problem. Not only to I enjoy it, but I'm good at it when I really throw myself into it. This time, I haven't. Why? It just wasn't any fun anymore. Slaving over the book to try to get the homework done got tiresome really fast. Especially when the grader would just write "show your work" even for problems which were patently obvious. My enjoyment of the experience was diluted by the promise of a reward.

On the other end of the spectrum, look at this web page. I've probable thrown more hours of work into Bitscape's Lair than time spend doing homework for all my classes combined this semester. A few months ago, someone (wink if you're reading this) suggested that I might consider running banner ads on my homepage if it starts drawing traffic. I shrugged it off with the excuse that my page doesn't generate enough hits to be worth it. But inside, the idea just sickened me, and I couldn't put my finger on exactly why. Now I get it. Doing so would dilute my motivation, and my enjoyment of the craft.

I think this is also why Linux is such a success. (Incidentally, I found the above article because it was linked to off a comment from the Slashdot story where Linus talked about the enjoyment of programming Linux.) Linux developers do such a good job because many of them aren't being paid big bucks for it. They do it out of joy.

That's how I want to live my life. I want to do things because they're intrinsically enjoyable, not chasing some apple on a string being held by the devil who rides on my back.

As a side note, I pity Trent. I fear (I could be way off base with such speculation) that his huge success has stinted his ability, and his desire to create the tortured yet masterful music I and other NIN fans gleefully devour. I suspect that the creative block which has delayed the new album more times than a Microsoft product may have been caused by this very phenominon. Of course, that's all just my uninformed theories. Only Trent knows the his own truth.

Anyone who is completely lost might want to consult a lyrics database with the text of the title as the search phrase.