Skills

Drive Motivation

Design motivation systems using Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose (AMP) for products and...

Install

npx skills add wondelai/skills --skill drive-motivation -g -a claude-code -y
Repository
wondelai/skills2.6k
Category
Design
Updated
2mo ago
License
MIT
Context cost
Mediumabout 2,919 tokens
Runs scripts
No, instructions only

What it does

Design motivation systems using Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose (AMP) for products and teams. Use when the user mentions "intrinsic motivation", "gamification isnt working", "rewards arent working", "autonomy", "mastery", "purpose-driven", "my team is disengaged", or "how do I motivate people". Also trigger when designing onboarding progression, fixing broken gamification, or building team structures that sustain high performance. Covers why carrot-and-stick fails and how to build progress systems. For habit-forming product loops, see hooked-ux. For retention behavior design, see improve-retention.

Drive Motivation Framework

Design motivation systems for products, teams, and organizations using the science of intrinsic motivation.

Core Principle

The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishment, it's the deeply human need to direct our own lives, learn and create new things, and do better for ourselves and our world. For any task requiring even rudimentary cognitive effort, external rewards either don't work or actively worsen performance. Intrinsic motivation, Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose (AMP), drives lasting engagement.

Scoring

Goal: 10/10. Score any motivation system (product features, team incentives, gamification, engagement loops) against the Quick Diagnostic: start at 5, add 1 for each of the first five rows answered "yes," then subtract 2 if the sixth row is also "yes", an "if-then" reward doing the motivating crowds out the rest. Bands:

  • 9-10, autonomy, mastery, and purpose all present; no if-then crowding-out.
  • 5-6, one pillar carries the system; the other two are weak or extrinsic.
  • ≤3, relies on rewards, mandates, or controlling behaviors; intrinsic motivation absent.

Always state the current score, which diagnostic rows failed, and the specific fixes to reach 10/10.

Motivation 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0

VersionCore AssumptionApproachEra
1.0Humans are biologicalSurvival drivesPre-industrial
2.0Humans respond to rewards/punishmentsCarrot and stickIndustrial age
3.0Humans seek autonomy, mastery, purposeIntrinsic motivationKnowledge economy

The Seven Deadly Flaws of Extrinsic Rewards

"If-then" rewards ("If you do X, then you get Y"):

Read the whole SKILL.md on GitHub

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