#448 – What's so fulfilling about challenging tasks?

Challenging tasks feel fulfilling, not because they’re hard, but because they give us what we crave: choice, growth, and connection.

Yesterday, in my morning pages, I wondered why my current AI job feels so fulfilling. This morning, running along the beach, the answer popped into my head: self-determination.

Back in the 80s, psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan asked an intriguing question: what makes us want to do something for its own sake? 

Three conditions: autonomy, mastery, and relatedness.

• Autonomy –– you make decisions about your life and work
• Mastery –– you have (or are developing) the necessary skills for the work you're doing
• Relatedness –– you feel connected to others

The work I'm doing now meets those three conditions. That's why, despite how challenging it is, how difficult and time-consuming, I find it energizing.

My son's current life meets none of the conditions.

• Being on house arrest, his autonomy is zero.
• Having a felony conviction attached to his name, he can't find a job where he could self-master at something.
• Not being allowed to go to the gym and not finding work, his ability to connect with others is drastically reduced.

He's sad, demotivated. Unable to start the projects he said he wanted to start.

But video-games give him all three: he can play whenever he wants and make decisions as he does; he's using his skills in masterful ways; he's connecting with others (they play in teams).

I'm angry at the system that believes this is justice: to confine a 20-year-old man to live online for three years because he made a judgment mistake.

The way I see it, there's no justice in stripping a young man of the very things that make life fulfilling: choice, growth, and connection.

Where in your life are you meeting the three conditions for fulfillment?

Love,

Carolina