How can you maintain the motivation to build something of your own while working full-time to fund it? Self-Determination Theory says the magic recipe for motivation at work is autonomy, competence, and relatedness. But for those of us trying to keep a side hustle moving while meeting the relentless demands of a “mortgage job”, that’s not enough. In this post, I reflect on how SDT almost works for me, and suggest a reinterpretation of the ingredients: freedom, confidence, and legacy. I found that for me, the very act of writing this blog provides all three.
Trying to Fly
As a workaholic, my happiness comes from being gainfully engaged, from moving toward solutions, from growing and transforming. This is what Maslow (1954) called self-actualisation: the quiet thrill of becoming who I’m meant to be. It takes focus and will, and if you get a little run up you can build some momentum. Then, the sky’s the limit.
These days, I never get more than a few steps before I have to turn around. I haven’t seen my wings in weeks.
I’m caught between two worlds. By day, I pour my energy into a demanding job that pays the bills and feathers someone else’s nest. By night, I try to muster the courage of my convictions, building an intangible belief in myself as master of my own flight.
For me, it’s not about getting clients, it’s about managing them; it’s not about creating solutions, it’s about communicating them. Sometimes I can almost feel confident insight beginning to bloom…. before the day job calls and I have to set it aside. My energy and momentum get co-opted and when I return with a few spare moments, I find the bloom is wilted, the creation unravelled and difficult to find.
Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory (1959) helps explain my dwindling motivation. The mortgage-job delivers what he called ‘hygiene factors’ like salary, job security, and working conditions, but lacks ‘motivators’ like growth, meaning, or ownership. My day job meets my basic needs but leaves the part of me that wants to build something cool completely underfed. My consultancy, by contrast, hits the motivators, but it’s starved of time, energy, and oxygen.
Even the small things that bring me joy – the quick flights of fancy, the muscle-building whimsy – become lost by the roadside. This blog post? Over a month late. The spark didn’t fade. I just couldn’t get to it. It plummeted in my priorities. After all, it’s not that important in the grand scheme of things.
The Conditions for Motivation
I’ve been thinking about Self-Determination Theory (SDT), a model of human motivation proposed by Ryan and Deci (2000). They suggest the benefits of a Maslowian journey from extrinsic motivation, which relies on external factors like being able to buy a new car or pleasing someone important to you; to intrinsic motivation, when you live a life doing things because they bring you personal enjoyment and satisfaction. How is this achieved? By finding ways to meet three basic psychological needs: autonomy (having the freedom to act in line with your values), competence (feeling capable and effective), and relatedness (feeling connected to others in meaningful ways) (Ryan & Deci, 2019).
The model makes sense to me, and I’ve used it successfully to coach others through change and growth. But it doesn’t speak to me. I feel that it describes the conditions that may help someone thrive in a traditional work environment, one where your work contributes, your will supports, and your identity participates. But what about those of us trying to fly our own course, where our contribution is to ourselves, our will is the driver of enterprise, and our identify is about forging, not following?
And how does this alchemy happen while you’re furiously flapping your wings just to stay aloft? When your working environment is the “side hustle” or entrepreneurial dream stacked precariously alongside the grind of what I call my “mortgage job”?
I decided we need to evolve a new set of preconditions for the side-hustlers and day-job-jugglers: Freedom, Confidence and Legacy.
Freedom: Autonomy Released
In SDT, autonomy means having control over your actions. At work, it’s about being able to choose how you want to approach a task or achieve a goal. Instead of following orders, you can make meaningful decisions and act in ways that align with your values and goals. You can have ownership over what you do and why you do it.
But that control can feel hollow when your hours are consumed by other work. I can do whatever I want with Infinite Raven, but only if my day job allows and my energy holds.
What I experience is false autonomy: the illusion of choice without the resources to act. Any currency I have is spent on keeping the lights on, on doing good work for someone else. My own work waits. It’s the Raven blessed with beautiful wings and an open window – but shackled to the floor.
Freedom, to me, is autonomy plus time, energy, and mental space.
Confidence: Competence Forged
Competence is about feeling effective and understanding how to succeed. In the workplace, it’s about having opportunities to use and grow your abilities, with feedback that shows you’re improving. It feels good to know you can do something, and do it well. Psychologist Albert Bandura (1977) described this as self-efficacy, and he found that the most powerful source of self belief isn’t encouragement or praise, but mastery experiences, moments when you take action, face a challenge, and see it through.
Most of my energy and creativity go into solving problems for someone else’s business. The sad truth of transferable skills and the mortgage-job marketplace is that it produces legions of people like me who develop their competence in areas that do not fulfill their own aspiration, but instead meet the needs of someone else.
When it comes to the entrepreneurial essentials, I rarely get the chance to test myself in ways that stretch or develop my ability to sell myself, create a network, or build relationships. And without those real, meaningful challenges, I can’t build momentum or trust in myself when it comes to my consultancy. It’s the Raven let out of the cage for a fleeting moment, never flying far enough to learn its limits.
Confidence, to me, is about being able to leverage competence. It’s about knowing that you can cope, adapt, and persist because you’ve already faced difficulty and grown stronger through it.
Legacy: Relatedness Extended
Relatedness, in SDT, is about feeling connected to others. At work it’s about feeling that you belong and that you matter. It’s about respect, value and trust.
While I can see the importance of this for teamwork and cohesion, how does that apply to weirdos like me? I don’t thrive in social environments and I’m not driven by traditional workplace belonging. I’m antisocial, easily overstimulated, and I find most social interaction mysterious and distracting. And yet, when I work with my own clients or stakeholders, I do feel something that matters, an intense, idea based link, fuelling myself from another’s brain, another’s experience. These one-to-one connections are important and in my mind they are equally valid experiences of relatedness. I have no doubt that they are important for me at a human level and for my mental health.
But that doesn’t motivate me. I want to relate to humanity through its purpose and aspirations, not through the medium of social identity and populism. In these moments I see the Raven who wants to fly above the clouds, but is held back by a conspiracy of ravens in flight, forced to take its place in the formation.
Legacy, to me, is about creating new thoughts and seeing different ideas, connecting to the theorists and thinkers of the past, and considering all the lives and experiences that can emerge in our future.
The Purpose of Priorities
So how does this help me in the daily struggle to move myself forward toward the work I want to do? Motivation doesn’t need grand gestures. That’s the big idea behind the Progress Principle, a concept developed by Amabile and Kramer (2011). They found that small, intentional steps can create joy in increments. Progress comes from movement at any scale.
And so I write this blog. To you.
These blog posts are my way of stretching outward. They encourage me to go beyond just doing the work; they provide the space to think about it in a way that isn’t constrained by clients, mortgages or even reality.
These posts provide the preconditions for my motivation: Freedom, Confidence and Legacy.
- Freedom: I created a space in which I could express my ideas. I moved beyond the possibility of expressing my values and gave myself the freedom to actually do it.
- Confidence: In that free air, I can test and challenge myself, experiment, and develop confidence in my thoughts, ideas, and beliefs.
- Legacy: By writing these posts, I feel connected to a wider legacy, a continuing discussion of these concepts with an audience of minds across the ether.
The Raven is the harbinger of my motivation, and I need to remember that the next time I push this blog down my list of priorities.
References
- Amabile, T., & Kramer, S. (2011). The Progress Principle: Using small wins to ignite joy, engagement, and creativity at work. Harvard Business Press.
- Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological review, 84(2), 191.
- Herzberg, F. I., Mausner, B., & Snyderman, B. (1959). The motivation to work (2nd ed.). New York: John Wiley.
- Maslow, A. (1954). Motivation and personality. Harper and Row
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary educational psychology, 25(1), 54-67.
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2019). Brick by brick: The origins, development, and future of self-determination theory. In Advances in motivation science (Vol. 6, pp. 111-156). Elsevier.
Infinite Raven 
Penny for ‘em