How rewards build intrinsic motivation

Much of the popular understanding of intrinsic motivation is flawed, for the same reason that schools taught reading badly for so many years.

**Experts forget what it's like to be beginners.**

By the time you’re an accomplished reader, your brain has learned to recognize words as single units. But that’s not how new readers learn.

New readers need to learn that the letters in words encode sounds, that those sounds can be blended into words, and those words can be matched to spoken language.

Expert reading looks nothing like beginning reading. Expert *anything* doesn’t look like beginning *anything*.

The same is true of motivation.

Adults are familiar with the intrinsic satisfaction of working hard and getting better at something.

But that’s a more abstract feedback loop than it seems.

You practice a skill today. You get better at it tomorrow. And that tiny improvement might not even be that noticeable.

Everyone knows the feeling of "I put in all this work but it doesn't feel like I'm getting better"

That connection between “effort” and “progress” is not innate. It must be learned, and it can be taught.

This is why I think the popular criticism of rewards and gamification is so misguided.

People worry that extrinsic rewards will replace intrinsic motivation. And done poorly, they can.

But done right, rewards and celebrations actually build intrinsic motivation by making the connection between effort and progress legible

Motivation develops when we internalize that our effort creates progress.

We *learn* to enjoy hard work by making progress visible and celebrating it