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Autonomy is the real paycheck
Money buys control
A person can have all the money in the world, but if they do not control most of what they do every day, it is not worth it. The reason people try to make money is to have more autonomy in their life.
A blank slate in the military
The military makes the point clearly. A new recruit gets a blank slate, and nobody cares about the SAT scores or anything else from before. Do a task and do it well, and recognition follows, along with more control over what comes next. Performing well turned into real freedom in what he did.
The long horizon
That showed that what a person does right now affects more than the next hour. It reaches two years, three years, and five years down the road. The more he focused on things that would positively affect his future, the better his life became. It took quite some time to figure out.
Why does control matter so much to motivation?
Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan built self-determination theory on the finding that people have three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy means feeling that one's actions come from one's own choices. In experiments dating to the early 1970s, Deci found that paying people for a puzzle they already enjoyed lowered their interest in doing it for free later.
How does control at work affect the heart?
The Whitehall II study, led by Michael Marmot, has followed thousands of British civil servants since 1985. A 1997 paper in the British Medical Journal by Hans Bosma and colleagues reported that workers with low control over their tasks and decisions had a higher risk of coronary heart disease than those with high control. Marmot's earlier Whitehall study, begun in 1967, had already found that lower civil service grades carried higher mortality.
Why might buying time beat buying things?
In a 2017 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ashley Whillans and colleagues surveyed more than 6,000 adults in the United States, Canada, Denmark, and the Netherlands. People who spent money on services that saved them time, such as cleaning or errands, reported greater life satisfaction than those who did not. The pattern appeared across income levels.
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