What leaders (usually) get wrong about motivation

This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.

One day during the COVID-19 pandemic, Carl Hendrick decided to run a 5K. A former musician, Hendrick had spent most of his career in education, earning a Ph.D., working at schools in England and turning to research. But facing middle age, and in the midst of lockdown, he decided to be more active.

For motivation, he bought a fresh pair of running shoes, a nice set of earphones and a supply of caffeine drinks. Then, he started running and everything went terribly wrong.

“I just didn’t understand what I was doing,” he said.

To compensate, he downloaded one of those simple couch-to-5K training apps. In the first week, it told him to run for 30 seconds, walk for 90 seconds and repeat the cycle for 30 minutes. The second week, it told him to increase his runs to 60 seconds. And so on.

Every week, he was running a little longer. And every week, he felt “these small hits of achievement.” He wanted to keep going. He wanted to run even more.

Hendrick is telling me this story not because he wants to sell me on the benefits of a running app, but because he has a much bigger idea to share: A lot of people get motivation wrong.

Hendrick says this happens in all facets of life, from professional sports to Fortune 500 companies to all levels of education. People imagine that motivation leads to success, that a teacher or coach can motivate through reward, threat or inspiration — that we might see a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow — and the student will feel propelled to go after it.

Hendrick, however, believes we have the causal relationship backward.

“It’s not that you need to be motivated in order to get the achievement,” he said. “It’s actually this reverse kind of way around.”

In other words, Hendrick believes that it’s success that leads to motivation.

Hendrick has no serious background in sports. He’s never coached above the English equivalent of a private high school. He is, however, among a handful of education researchers and thinkers who might reframe how you think about coaching, teaching or even leading.

It turns out, some coaches are listening.

In 1997, Nike released a Michael Jordan advertising campaign built on failure. You’ve probably seen the commercials: In a dramatic narration, Jordan is talking about all the shots he’s missed, all the games he’s lost, the 26 times he hoisted a game-winning shot … and it didn’t go in.

“I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life,” Jordan said. “And that is why I succeed.”

Hendrick calls this the Michael Jordan model of motivation, the idea that you can inspire someone to greatness. He thinks it’s largely rubbish.

In his view, it’s a perfect encapsulation of “growth mindset,” a concept that has come to dominate all manner of disciplines over the last three decades.

Introduced by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University, the core idea of “growth mindset” is that intelligence, knowledge or talent can be developed through dedication and effort. Talent was not fixed.

It’s a sensible idea, Hendrick says. Who wouldn’t benefit from understanding that hard work is valuable? But in the years after Dweck published her research in the 1980s and 1990s — and later released a bestselling book — the idea morphed into a “greeting card model” of motivation: posters on the wall, slogans in the weight room, quotes from Michael Jordan. Students were taught lessons on grit and perseverance, then were expected to go out and learn.

“But motivation is just a lot more boring than that,” Hendrick said.

I came across the work of Hendrick earlier this year, during a conversation with Doug Lemov, an influential American educator and author who has consulted, among others, NBA franchises, the U.S. Soccer Federation and Michigan men’s basketball coach Dusty May, the architect of the reigning NCAA champions.

Lemov met Hendrick more than a decade ago, when Hendrick was the head of learning and research at Wellington College in England, an elite private high school.

Hendrick’s path to education was unusual. Growing up in Dublin, he played in a band that recorded with Michael Beinhorn, an American producer who had worked with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Soundgarden. But when his band didn’t break through, he earned a Ph.D. from King’s College, worked at an inner-city school in London and later took a job at Wellington.

It was there that he started helping coach the school’s soccer team, which created a bond with Lemov, another educator who had grown up playing the sport.

Hendrick and Lemov are chiefly concerned with improving learning outcomes in the classroom. But the debates over esoteric ideas like “growth mindset,” “direct instruction,” and “testing effect” often play out in the sports world, just with fewer labels.

For instance, in the NFL, Pete Carroll, the former head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, built an entire program around the idea of “grit,” which Hendrick sees as a different name for “growth mindset.” And then there was the notion that some players possess more motivation than others.

Chuck Noll, the legendary coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, believed that the best players possessed self-motivation. Former San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh called it “passion, focus, competitiveness.” Every spring, in the lead-up to the draft, NFL front offices agonize over the intangible qualities of players.

“If I have to motivate you,” Noll once told a player, “I will fire you.”

From an academic perspective, grit is defined as perseverance toward long-term goals, but Hendrick remains dubious about the concept. For one, it seems like a repackaged version of “conscientiousness,” one of the Big Five personality traits in a widely accepted psychological framework.

However, if grit exists, Hendrick says, it’s almost surely domain-specific, meaning that, similar to motivation, it stems from experiencing success in a given field, often at a young age.

At one point, you realize an aptitude for a skill. You experience a minor success. You want to keep going.

At its core, Hendrick believes the recipe for motivation is simple. It doesn’t require mind games, fear or inspirational Nike commercials. It requires experiencing success.

The best coaches create the conditions for small victories, just as a running app might. They focus on knowledge gaps, highlighting what the player hasn’t yet learned. They assign tasks that hit a sweet spot, requiring a player to stretch and push beyond their limits while remaining achievable.

They also pay attention to feedback loops. When a player learns something new — like when a point guard learns a new pick-and-roll action —  Hendrick says the coach should focus on how the new information makes their existing knowledge more valuable — and what new questions it might inspire.

In one sense, coaches have always understood this cycle.

Legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden saw himself as a teacher first. So does NFL coach Andy Reid. Maybe they lacked the vocabulary to explain the methods — or to cite research or scientific literature — but their tactics did foster motivation among their players.

But now that’s starting to change.

Through his relationship with Lemov, May became intentional about implementing the ideas of Hendrick and Paul A. Kirschner, co-authors of the 2020 book, “How Learning Happens.” He focuses on daily feedback and encouragement. When a player is trying to improve a weakness, he tries to be intentional about celebrating progress.

“Even just the way we teach and coach on a daily basis, celebrating the smallest wins, the invisible plays,” May said. “The intangibles are celebrated in our program more than the big plays. And improvement is praised as much or more than anything else, other than effort.”

When point guard Elliot Cadeau began experiencing more success early last season, May noticed his motivation began to tick up. The same cycle happened with forward Morez Johnson Jr.

“I don’t think it’s this spontaneous combustion that just happens,” May said. “It’s just a day-to-day approach, and I think if you get the right people, they feel great about just the simple daily improvements.”

A few years ago, someone told Hendrick to read the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. Hendrick wasn’t convinced.

“I hate self-help stuff,” he said. “It’s not my field — blah, blah.”

But when he finally did, he came across a line that crystallized something in his head.

Every action is a vote for your future self.

That’s it, he thought. That was the motivational cycle.

Experience a morsel of success. Then keep going.