Boycott Badge Culture

Our society is built on badges. Hard-earned badges sewn onto children’s clothes, bags and sashes. Badges framed on walls in offices and digital badges dutifully doled out by online media to celebrate a milestone, or in return for a few dollars a month.

Society’s most successful are in the business of badges. If it’s not an academic accolade, it’s a brand badge, communicating “elite wealth” to the mainstream, or to a discreet insider few.

The bottom line? Badges signal social status, and John Harsanyi, Economist and Nobel Laureate (what a badge!) reminds us that “apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behavior.”

As the first, most obvious indicator of status, badges matter more than we might think. Heck, if you didn’t know Harsanyi before, all you now know about the guy is that he wears a Nobel Laureate badge.

The Problem with Badges

Badges are extrinsic motivation. Working hard to earn badges is a dangerous game. They reward us for the act of achieving, rather than for the act of doing or enjoying.

There’s no “thank you” for the process, just the positive outcome. Next time the process doesn’t lead to a similarly badge-shaped outcome, we lose our motivation and we give up.

Worst of all, minutes after we earn a badge, we deem it worthless and move on to pursue another, shinier one. There’s a reason top designer brands don’t discount their products: the moment they price drop, they somehow lose their exclusive appeal.

Designer goods aside, when we feel ourselves obsessing over badges and credentials or chasing shiny objects, there is an antidote. We can tap into our intrinsic motivation. It starts with a single question: “why did I begin doing this in the first place?”

Intrinsic motivations might look like relishing opportunities to learn and grow, or doing something because it makes you happy.

Why did you first pick up the guitar before you starting studying for all those music exams or tirelessly building your profile to audition for bands? Why did you first choose to go into the industry you work in, before you got fixated on that next promotion? Or why did you choose to solve the problem you’re solving with your startup, before you became overwhelmed by the necessary self-promotion?

If you’re enjoying this, you’ll love my 1-minute mid-week roundup I send to my readers.

Next time you start something you love (work or play) and decide you will go “all-in”, do ‘future you’ a favour and write down your why. When your motivation gets cloudy because you’re focused on elusive end rewards, go back to that piece of writing and reflect on it. Do you still feel the same?

The thing no one tells us about intrinsic motivation is that sometimes it takes a well-earned vacation. We all know someone (or have been that someone) who trained relentlessly for a competitive sport as a young adult, only to wind up hating it so much they take a permanent vacation from it.

If you’re frustrated you can’t find your way back to your initial “why”, there’s a point where it’s no good trying to search for it anymore. The best thing we can do to help the “why” reemerge is to take a break.

Of course, it’s often not realistic to walk away from it all, especially if we’re relying on the activity to earn a living. But we can identify and change some parts of the whole: perhaps a social media platform is grinding you down, or meetings are eating into family time, and you can take a break or put some blocks in your calendar.

Identifying where the motivation is still there and where it’s disappeared can help us to continue to perform well whilst giving certain activities a well-deserved vacation, ready to come back to them when we feel our intrinsic motivation returning.

Can We Really Live Without Badges?

If life were simple, this article would have been a summary of the headline: “to hell with badges.”

Here’s the thing: even if we ditch striving for badges and tap into our intrinsic motivation, our motivation is only half the equation.

If you want to stick your head above the parapet in any arena, other people want you to have badges. Badges are shorthand for credibility and people don’t have time to dig deeper unless you make it clear it will be worth their while. In order to do more of what you love, you need badges to show you’re worthy. Badges beget eyeballs, and eyeballs beget opportunity.

Of course, like all good paradoxes, there’s a trap. And many of us fall into it. The more we focus on striving for the badges other people want us to earn, the less we’re able to connect with our own “why”.

We risk getting sucked into a badge-earning vortex and spat out the other side, either covered in meaningless accolades wondering why we did all this in the first place or badgeless and feeling like a failure.

Don’t Tell Me it’s About Balance

“Everything in moderation…” Spare us! There’s no way a dose of “care just enough but not too much” is going to get us out of this badgey quagmire.

Despite the glitzy accolade-driven culture of the music industry, DJ and Producer Fred Again has pulled himself out of this (lyric reference intended!). His intrinsic motivation shines through in the bucket-loads of passion he brings to his live sets. When asked by a reporter how he felt about the award he’d won, he replied with a shrug:

Find your intrinsic motivation and live by it, to hell with badges. Enjoy the creative freedom and experimentation that comes with doing something you love. And stick with it long enough and hard enough that when the badges do come along, you’re not really fussed.

If you enjoyed this, you’ll love my 1-minute mid-week roundup I send to my readers.

Lastly, here’s a Dad joke to brighten your day.