Has someone ever told you, "Try harder!"? It usually does not help. Two psychologists, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, say motivation grows when three needs are met. First, we want to choose for ourselves.

Second, we want to feel that we can do things well. Third, we want to feel connected to other people. Like a plant needs water and light, motivation needs these three things.

According to self-determination theory, developed by the psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, people have three basic psychological needs. The first is autonomy, the feeling that you choose your own actions. The second is competence, the feeling that you can do things well. The third is relatedness, the feeling of being connected to others. When these needs are met, motivation lasts longer and people tend to stay mentally healthy.

The theory also sees motivation as a range, from avoiding punishment at one end to true enjoyment at the other. Even something you start for outside reasons can become "your own" once you understand why it matters. A 2014 analysis of 40 years of research found that inner motivation was especially linked to the quality of work.

Telling someone to "get motivated" rarely works, and self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, helps explain why. Rather than a switch that can be flipped by command, motivation is seen as something that flourishes when three basic psychological needs are satisfied: autonomy, the sense of acting by one's own choice; competence, the sense of being effective and growing; and relatedness, the sense of being connected to people who matter. When these needs are thwarted, motivation declines and stress and ill-being become more likely; in fact, researchers now distinguish need frustration from mere dissatisfaction, finding that frustration is more strongly related to maladjustment. The theory also rejects a simple choice between external and internal motivation.

Instead, it describes a continuum running from external regulation, through introjected and identified regulation, to integrated and intrinsic motivation, and it emphasizes internalization, the process by which an activity initially done for outside reasons becomes personally meaningful. A 2014 meta-analysis spanning 40 years found that intrinsic motivation predicted the quality of performance, while external incentives better predicted its quantity. Rewards are therefore not useless, although intrinsic motivation predicted performance less strongly when incentives were directly tied to results.