Chapter 1 – Making of a Cyborg
Preliminary Reconnaissance – What’s the Secret?
The things that make a nerd tick
The closest expert I know of in such matters was my sister. She was pretty much the super-achiever of the clan. Her grades were top-notch, and she had won many academic scholarships. The fact that I was her biological sibling was a scanty yet reassuring morsel of support in my now desperate struggle to find enlightenment. But when I asked her what the secret to success in school was, I obtained no satisfactory answer. She simply told me that she had never really thought about it, and studying just naturally seemed the thing to do. After all, wasn’t that was what every other student on this planet did?
Well, to me it didn’t seem natural at all. Unfortunately the more people I asked, the more their answers resembled my sister’s, and the more appalling the situation looked. Students were to follow the directions given by the teacher, read the books assigned, do the homework, and write the exams. They gave me a generic equation. It seemed simple enough. All one needed was discipline.
Aye, there’s the rub – discipline: The rarest commodity on this planet. And how was it obtained? All my life I was told that it was earned, cultivated, trained, whipped and bred into you. I felt like a race-horse. But somehow, logic saved the day: How can one create discipline in oneself, when the very process of this creation requires discipline itself?! It was a vicious circle. There had to be something I overlooked.
Resorting to drastic measures, I decided to seek my answer in – horror of all horrors – the library! The good news was that my university had an excellent library. There were books and magazines on almost any subject you could imagine, not to mention slides, videos, cassettes, and even compact-discs. Browsing around, my antiquated stereotype of a library being the most boring place on earth dissipated.
I spent a good amount of my spare time perusing the library’s contents. I checked indices and catalogues for any material there was on learning, on education, on memory, on reading skills and, of course, on discipline.
What I found was disappointing. Apart from some reasonably useful information on memory skills, the material I obtained was mostly common knowledge. The generic equation was repeated: Work hard! The situation seemed hopeless – was I really going to have to just sit down and force myself to study?
Then – while contemplating suicide by holding my breath underwater in the bathtub – it occurred to me: I already had discipline! I mean, going to the library and researching all that stuff did take discipline did it not? So what was the difference between the researching that I did, and the researching that I would have to do for a class assignment?
Passion – The Critical Difference
What’s your pleasure?
The difference was passion. I was driven by passion (and some fear) to do the research. I was curious, I was hungry for information, I was haunted day and night by the elusive solution to my dilemma. I figured that if I could only transfer that passion into my daily school life, I would have it made. I would have seized the very essence of learning – the very fuel of achievement. But intuitively I knew that was too simple an answer. If passion was so easily obtained and managed, why isn’t the world filled with successful students? Why the poor grades and high drop-out rates? In other words, how does one get passionate about school? It was damned near impossible to like school, much less feel passionate about it – except perhaps passionately hating it!
But passion is everywhere. The world is filled with people with passion about many things. From stamp-collectors to mountain-climbers, and book-lovers to video-game addicts, our planet is the home to legions of passionate people. The only problem was, most people were only passionate about certain areas of life, and were either indifferent towards or totally replused by other things.
Take baseball for instance. For those who are absolutely addicted to it, playing and watching this sport is the only important thing in life. Everything else is insignificant. ERAs and RBIs to these people are more important than why Freud thought that people were hung up about sex in their dismal childhoods. But there are people who are equally interested in both baseball and Freudian psychology, and perhaps in many other topics as well. How can they manage that? How can these people equally enjoy doing all these diverse and, apparently, conflicting things? How can I, as a student, learn to enjoy school in addition to my existing interests?
When I rephrased my question and asked the good students about why they were so passionate about studying – instead of asking them about discipline – all of the high-achievers told me that the reason they worked hard to get good grades was either because their parents would kill them if they didn’t – almost literally, in some cases! – or because they were so “naturally high” from the feeling of super-achievement that they would do anything to make the grade.
This meant that these people were either motivated by fear or by passion. It was a push, or a pull. The feeling was, however, so intimately bound within their psychology, they were never consciously aware of the motive force behind their endeavours. This was why my sister could not answer me when I first asked her about the subject: She was so bent on achieving, studying just seemed the “natural” thing to do, exactly as she said.
So, in order for me to be motivated to do well in school, I had to get passionate about it. But for that to happen, I had to find some way of thinking about school that made it interesting, that made every day in class seem like fun. But was there really a way that school could honestly be fun?!
The Binary System – Intrinsic / Extrinsic Motivation
Carrot or stick, or neither?
I found out that it can be. School, taken as a whole, can be regarded as a game – just as life can often be regarded as a game too – a game that you can win. Now, the meaning of “winning” in school, or in life, is not necessarily judged in the same way as winning a game of cards, or a baseball game. There is no scoreboard and no referee. But if you play a baseball game, and your team loses, is that the last time you’re ever going to play baseball in your life? No, of course not. You play again and again. If you win, great. If not, then what the hell. You enjoyed yourself anyway. And that’s the key. Playing the game has merits all of its own, regardless of the score, regardless of whether you’re winning or “losing.”
Psychologists refer to this as Intrinsic Motivation – you are motivated internally by your own desire to play. Extrinsic Motivation would be likened to playing the game because you want to show-off to your friends, or because you can’t allow yourself to lose because have such a fragile ego. The problem with extrinsic motivation is that once the “goal” or the reason behind the action is satisfied, the motivation disappears. If during the game you felt that you had achieved your goal of showing-off, or your ego didn’t need any more nursing, the central motivation to play the game ceases to exist. You now have less certainty why you are playing the game. Of course, you could go on and finish the game all the way to the bottom of the ninth inning, but once the extrinsic motivation vanishes, your mind stops giving it all you’ve got, because the situation isn’t that important to you anymore. In other words, you stop peak performance and simply go through the motions.
With regards to school, a student driven to study because her parents want her to, or are forcing her to, is driven by extrinsic motivation. The same goes for a person who is working simply to earn money, and not because he or she totally loves the job. On the other hand, the student staying up all night reading a textbook on astronomy, or the fall of the Roman civilization, and doing so because he or she finds the material fascinating and interesting (or simply loves learning anything new) is propelled forward by intrinsic motive forces. Even though being interested in the material that one is studying is a better situation than studying hard (even if one finds the material boring) because one is driven towards constantly experiencing the “natural high” from excellent grades, both these situations are far superior to the students doing homework only because they’ll get into trouble if they don’t. The superior student is driven by passion. Unfortunately, most people in the world are solely driven by extrinsic demands. Money is the obvious example. Everyone works and earns money to some extent, but only the intrinsically motivated people are honestly happy with what they’re doing.
A lot of times, people don’t properly differentiate between these two motive forces. They might think that they are intrinsically motivated, when it’s really extrinsic. For example, if a person told me that he was driven to work because he has a passion for money, I would challenge that and ask him whether or not winning the lottery would have any effect on how hard he would continue working! If suddenly, he found himself with an additional five million dollars (or even ten million dollars), would he continue waking up early every day, driving to work, staying there for eight to ten hours, and drive back home through rush hour traffic? Most people would quit the job the next day! Only those who are driven to work regardless of the money, or fringe benefits, or anything else except the job itself, would excel above and beyond anyone else driven by a lesser power. Sir Edmund Hillary wasn’t driven to climb Mount Everest because he wanted to get into the front pages of the newspapers. That was a by-product of his endeavour (as earning money is, from a job). He wanted to climb the mountain “because it’s there.” He climbed it – and risked his life – because he wanted to.
A third aspect of this concept of motivation is that of Affective Reward. This is the emotional experience enjoyed as a result of success. For simplicity’s sake, affective reward can be tied together with intrinsic motivation. Both are founded within the person, and do not depend on variable and temporary external conditions for inspiration and encouragement. Appendix A discusses this, and other psychological concepts, in greater detail. Suffice to say now that we must realise that long-lasting motivation in any human endevaour is intrinsically-driven, not extrinsically.
There are companies that try to create intrinsic motivation and loyalty in their employees through programmes that reinforce the “esprit de corps” or the company spirit, and make employees feel like working for the company, and with each other, are the best things in the world. Japanese firms are famous for instilling a sense of “family” into their workers, with daily programmes such as morning exercises, and other such activities. It seems artificial, but it works. To take their lead, we must try to establish intrinsic motivation in our situation in school, but how do we accomplish that? The answer lies within our minds.
