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There was a troubled-looking guy in Petco this afternoon giving away packets of Natural Balance dog food. He looked like a meth addict or something.

As I walked past him, he mumbled, without making eye contact, “Want some free dog food?”

“My dog won’t eat that shit,” I said, which is not true, but it certainly took the wind out of his sails.

Now you might say I wasn’t very charming but by verbally assaulting him in that way, I was motivating him to rehabilitate himself and get a real job.

Tough love . . .

There is no accountability without volition, you’ve noticed, right? You can’t go “You got to ship that by November 1st and I am holding you accountable.” It doesn’t work that way.

You can’t hold someone else accountable, you’ve got to hold yourself accountable. It’s just like you can’t motivate someone else; you got to motivate yourself. And the more that you motivate people and hold them accountable, the more infantile they become.

— Jim McCarthy

My friend G.L. Hoffman has a great post over at U.S. News and World Report called “The One-Sentence Motivator.” His own one-sentence motivator (spoiler alert) is “Be the man you dreamed you could be when you were a little boy.”

Here’s mine:

To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.

— Albert Camus

It’s not as heartwarming as the little boy one but it gets me out of bed in the morning . . .

In 1960, Douglas MacGregor of the MIT Sloan School of Management developed two theories of workplace motivation, Theory X and Theory Y.

Theory X assumptions

• People have an inherent dislike for work and will avoid it whenever possible.
• People must be coerced, controlled, directed, or threatened with punishment in order to get them to achieve the organizational objectives.
• People prefer to be directed, do not want responsibility, and have little or no ambition.
• People seek security above all else.

Theory Y assumptions

• Work is as natural as rest or play.
• People will exercise self-control and self-direction in the pursuit of organizational objectives.
• Commitment to objectives is a function of rewards associated with their achievement.
• People usually accept and often seek responsibility.
• Imagination, ingenuity and creativity are widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population.
• The intellectual potential of the average person is only partly utilized.

I come down strongly in favor of Theory Y. I don’t feel like I’m an inherently unmotivated person, that my boss has to keep coming up with new ways to get my head in the game, and I don’t find that most other people do either. People want to do good work. They want the opportunity to do good work.

The key, really, is not to motivate people, but to avoid demotivating them. A lot of managers haven’t figured that one out yet.