What’s your motivation as you cook? Eating soon? Minimal cleanup? Impressing your spouse? Learning a new cooking technique? Preparing an Instagram-worthy meal? Healthy, delicious food? Delicious, comforting food? As you can imagine, the same cook, starting with the same available ingredients, will get a dramatically different result depending on their motivation for cooking. And it’s perfectly fine to have different motivations from one meal preparation to the next. But if you’re intentional about your motivations, and how they affect your result, you can reduce your cooking stress and get more predictable outcomes.
I learned a few cooking tips from my father, Art. His cooking tended to be grilling, which often turned out well. In the kitchen, I guess I’d say he always “got the job done”. Professionally, Art far exceeded basic performance, and I learned a few management tips from Art as well.
One tip Art explicitly shared with me one day was the wisdom that “people tend to do what they’re motivated to do, rather than doing what they should do.” Sure, this smacks of “people will always do what’s in their own interest”, but it’s more nuanced than that. One nuance is that people will often do the right thing – regardless of the consequences to themselves. And another is that for a given situation, you’ll have a hard time predicting which people will do the right thing, and which will behave opportunistically. But what’s certainly true is that if people are motivated to do the wrong thing over time, then over time their behavior will tend favor the wrong thing over the right thing, regardless of how “good” a person they might be.
Art applied this when he was trying to anticipate what action someone might take when faced with a given situation. “Watch their motivations”, he’d say. And their action will tend to align with their motivations, and not necessarily with what an impartial panel might judge to the the “right” course of action. For example, consider a design project being executed mostly by contractors, who anticipate that their employment will end once the project is completed. If you want that project done, ever, you’d best assign them to a new, engaging project they can start only once the current project has completed testing and meets requirements.
So consider others’ motivations as you interact with them, and consider your own as well. And go for that Instagram-worthy meal from time to time.