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The Art of Motivation Maintenance

Why Some Givers Burn Out but Others Are On Fire

The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than the unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals.

—Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner in economics

Up to this point, we’ve been focusing on how givers climb to the top of the success ladder through the unique ways that they build networks, collaborate, communicate, influence, and help others achieve their potential. But as you saw in the opening chapter, givers are also more likely to end up at the bottom of the success ladder. Success involves more than just capitalizing on the strengths of giving; it also requires avoiding the pitfalls. If people give too much time, they end up making sacrifices for their collaborators and network ties, at the expense of their own energy. If people give away too much credit and engage in too much powerless communication, it’s all too easy for them to become pushovers and doormats, failing to advance their own interests. The consequence: givers end up exhausted and unproductive.

Since the strategies that catapult givers to the top are distinct from those that sink givers to the bottom, it’s critical to understand what differentiates successful givers from failed givers. The next three chapters examine why some givers burn out while others are on fire; how givers avoid being exploited by takers; and what individuals, groups, and organizations can do to protect givers and spread their success.

Recently, the Canadian psychologists Jeremy Frimer and Larry Walker led an ambitious effort to figure out
what motivates highly successful givers
. The participants were winners of the Caring Canadian Award, the country’s highest honor for giving, recognizing people who have devoted many years of their lives to help their communities or advance a humanitarian cause. Many winners of this award have sustained extraordinary giving efforts for decades in order to make a difference.

To reveal what drove them, all of the participants filled out a questionnaire asking them to list ten goals in response to “I typically try to . . .” Then, Walker conducted in-depth interviews with twenty-five Caring Canadian winners and a comparison group of twenty-five people who matched the winners in gender, age, ethnicity, and education, but had not sustained the same level or duration of giving. Walker spent a hundred hours interviewing all fifty people about their lives, covering key periods and critical events in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. From there, independent raters read the goal lists, listened to the interview tapes, and rated the degree to which the participants expressed two key motivations: self-interest and other-interest. Self-interest involved pursuing power and achievement, whereas other-interest focused on being generous and helpful. On which set of motivations did the Caring Canadian winners score higher than the comparison group?

The intuitive answer is other-interest, and it’s correct. In their life stories, the Caring Canadians mentioned giving and helping more than three times as often as the comparison group. When they listed their goals, the Caring Canadians listed nearly twice as many goals related to other-interest as the comparison group. The Caring Canadians highlighted goals like “serve as a positive role model to young people” and “advocate for women from a low-income bracket.” The comparison participants were more likely to mention goals like “get my golf handicap to a single digit,” “be attractive to others,” and “hunt the biggest deer and catch big fish.”

But here’s the surprise: the Caring Canadians also scored higher on self-interest. In their life stories, these highly successful givers mentioned a quest for power and achievement almost twice as often as the comparison group. In their goals, the Caring Canadians had roughly 20 percent more objectives related to gaining influence, earning recognition, and attaining individual excellence. The successful givers weren’t just more other-oriented than their peers; they were also more self-interested. Successful givers, it turns out, are just as ambitious as takers and matchers.

These results have fascinating implications for our understanding of why some givers succeed but others fail. Up until this point, we’ve looked at reciprocity styles on a continuum from taking to giving: is your primary concern for your own interests or others’ interests? Now I want to complicate that understanding by looking at the interplay of self-interest and other-interest. Takers score high in self-interest and low in other-interest: they aim to maximize their own success without much concern for other people. By contrast, givers always score high on other-interest, but they vary in self-interest. There are two types of givers, and they have dramatically different success rates.

Selfless
givers are people with high other-interest and low self-interest. They give their time and energy without regard for their own needs, and they pay a price for it. Selfless giving is a form of
pathological altruism
, which is defined by researcher Barbara Oakley as “an unhealthy focus on others to the detriment of one’s own needs,” such that in the process of trying to help others, givers end up harming themselves. In one study, college students who scored high on selfless giving declined in grades over the course of the semester. These selfless givers admitted “missing class and
failing to study
because they were attending to friends’ problems.”

Most people assume that self-interest and other-interest are opposite ends of one continuum. Yet in my studies of what drives people at work, I’ve consistently found that self-interest and other-interest are
completely independent motivations
: you can have both of them at the same time. As Bill Gates argued at the World Economic Forum, “there are
two great forces of human nature
: self-interest, and caring for others,” and people are most successful when they are driven by a “hybrid engine” of the two. If takers are selfish and failed givers are selfless, successful givers are
otherish
: they care about benefiting others, but they also have ambitious goals for advancing their own interests.

Selfless giving, in the absence of self-preservation instincts, easily becomes overwhelming. Being otherish means being willing to give more than you receive, but still keeping your own interests in sight, using them as a guide for choosing when, where, how, and to whom you give. Instead of seeing self-interest and other-interest as competing, the Caring Canadians found ways to integrate them, so that they could do well by doing good. As you’ll see, when concern for others is coupled with a healthy dose of concern for the self, givers are less prone to burning out and getting burned—and they’re better positioned to flourish.

***

“In West Philadelphia, born and raised, on the playground is where I spent most of my days . . . I got in one little fight and my mom got scared . . .”

When Will Smith wrote these famous lyrics for the theme song of
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
, the hit sitcom that launched his career, he had just graduated from
Overbrook
High School in Philadelphia. Overbrook has a majestic façade, its five-story building resembling a castle perched atop a hill. During his time in the castle, Smith was treated like royalty, earning the nickname “Prince” from teachers for his ability to charm his way out of trouble. Years later, when he started a production company, he named it Overbrook Entertainment. Smith is not the only accomplished person to attend Overbrook, whose alumni include astronaut Guion Bluford Jr., the first African American in space, and Jon Drummond, an Olympic gold medalist in track. Overbrook is one of just six high schools in the entire United States that has seen more than ten students go on to play in the National Basketball Association, one of whom was the legendary Wilt Chamberlain.

But for most students, Overbrook is no fairy tale.

Located at the corner of Fifty-ninth and Lancaster in the heart of West Philadelphia, Overbrook is just a few blocks from one of the top ten drug corners in the country. Take a stroll past the school, and it’s not uncommon to see the drivers of passing cars rolling up their windows and locking their doors. In 2006, Overbrook was one of twenty-eight schools in the United States that was identified as “persistently dangerous” based on crime statistics. As of 2011, there were roughly 1,200 students enrolled at Overbrook, and nearly 500 were suspended at some point during the school year, racking up nearly fifty assaults and twenty weapons or drugs charges. The educational prospects for students are similarly dismal. On the SAT, Overbrook’s average hovers more than three hundred points below the national average, with more than three quarters of students in the bottom 25 percent in the country. Nearly half of all students who start high school at Overbrook will never finish: the graduation rate is just 54 percent.

In the hopes of turning this tragic situation around, a corps of talented, passionate young educators has arrived at Overbrook from Teach For America (TFA), the renowned nonprofit organization that sends college graduates to spend two years fighting educational inequity as teachers in some of the most disadvantaged schools in the country. TFA is filled with givers: research shows that the vast majority of teachers join to make a difference in students’ lives. Many come from privileged backgrounds, and they’re determined to help students who are less fortunate. As one anonymous teacher put it:

I knew throughout my life that I wanted to do something where I help . . . Social justice issues burn within me and the fact that so many students have been so viciously failed by the school systems in this country is infuriating and invigorating. I want every child to grow up able to make choices . . . education can be an equalizer . . . it’s a justice issue, and by joining TFA I saw a way to help make it my issue too.

In the past twenty years, more than twenty thousand teachers have worked for TFA, making tremendous strides toward promoting educational equity. But sheltered lives in suburbs and sororities leave many teachers dramatically unprepared for the trials and tribulations of inner-city schools.

In the Overbrook hallways, the school’s massive difficulties fell hard on the shoulders of a twenty-four-year-old TFA neophyte named
Conrey Callahan
. With white skin and blond hair, Conrey stood out in the halls like a sore thumb: 97 percent of Overbrook’s students are African American. Conrey—a dog lover who lives with Louie, the mutt she rescued—grew up in a cozy Maryland suburb, attending a high school that was named one of the best in the country. Calling her a ball of energy would be an understatement: she runs half-marathons, captained her high school soccer and lacrosse teams, and competed for six years in jump rope competitions, making the junior Olympics. Although her intellectual prowess led her Vanderbilt professors to encourage her to pursue history, Conrey set her sights on more practical matters: “I set out to make a difference, improving education and opportunities for kids in low-income communities.”

But Conrey’s idealistic dreams of inspiring the next generation of students were quickly crushed by the harsh realities of arriving at school at 6:45
A.M.
, staying up until 1:00
A.M.
to finish grading and lesson plans for her Spanish classes, and days marked by breaking up fights, battling crime, and trying to track down truant students who only showed up for two days of class in an entire year. One of Conrey’s most promising students was living in a foster home, and had to drop out of school after giving birth to a child with developmental problems.

Conrey was constantly complaining to one of her closest friends, an investment banker who worked a hundred hours a week and couldn’t grasp why teaching at Overbrook was so stressful. In an act of desperation, Conrey invited the friend to join her on a school field trip. The friend finally understood: “she couldn’t believe the sheer exhaustion that she felt at the end of the day,” Conrey recalls. Finally, Conrey hit rock bottom. “It was awful. I was burned out, overwhelmed, and ready to give up. I never wanted to set foot in a school again. I was disgusted with the school, the students, and myself.”

Conrey was displaying the classic symptoms of burnout, and she wasn’t alone. Berkeley psychologist Christina Maslach, the pioneer of research on
job burnout
, reports that across occupational sectors, teaching has the highest rates of emotional exhaustion. One TFA teacher admires the organization but says it is “focused on hard work and dedication almost to a fault . . . you leave training with the mindset that unless you pour every waking hour of your life into the job then you’re doing a disservice to your kids.” Of all TFA teachers, more than half leave after their two-year contract is up, and more than 80 percent are gone after three years. About a third of all TFA alumni walk away from education altogether.

Since givers tend to put others’ interests ahead of their own, they often help others at the expense of their own well-being, placing themselves at risk for burnout. Four decades of extensive research shows that when people become burned out, their job performance suffers. Exhausted employees struggle to focus their attention and lack the energy to work their hardest, longest, and smartest, so the quality and quantity of their work takes a nosedive. They also suffer from poorer emotional and physical health. Strong evidence reveals that burned-out employees are at heightened risk for depression, physical fatigue, sleep disruptions, impaired immune systems, alcohol abuse, and even cardiovascular disease.