Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: Is there such a thing as action without motive? Dr. Yasemin Yazan, Marc, Jürgen and Layla take apart the intrinsic/extrinsic split neuroscience says our brain doesn’t actually recognize, land on a brutally honest test for whether something really matters to us, and explore why reward can boost motivation in one context and quietly kill it in another. Along the way: Star Wars wisdom on trying versus doing, and why “the journey is the destination” might be the healthiest way to survive reaching your own goals.
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
Yasemin opened the room with today’s topic: Action and Motivation. What is motivation, and what influence does it have on our action? She noted they’d touched on motivation before in earlier rooms, so they could revisit some of that ground while building a fresh bridge specifically to action. She invited everyone to bring in impulses, thoughts and experiences, ideally concrete examples to anchor the discussion, reminded newcomers the room was recorded and would be published, and repeated the three room rules: a recognizable profile photo, first and last name, and at least one sentence in the bio — to keep out Clubhouse trolls — or, alternatively, contributing via chat.
Marc opened, saying he wanted to start with motivation itself, since for him motivation is the reason we act, or don’t act. He offered his own working definition: motivation refers to the reasons people do certain things, and can be intrinsic (inner joy or interest) or extrinsic (external rewards like higher pay or a bigger company car, or, just as often, the avoidance of pain). He gave his own example: he rarely visits the doctor proactively to prevent something — usually the pain is already bad enough that he has no other choice. He said he was looking forward to discussing motivational trainers later, since a lot of money gets made promising that a single magic word, “motivation,” could make everyone leap out of a room fully inspired — if it were really that simple, that would be wonderful, but it’s not, because motivation is deeply tied to feelings and inner dialogue, coming from within rather than from someone waving their arms outside trying to activate your emotions without understanding the full complexity involved. He also flagged that many people associate motivation automatically with “fun” — but motivation doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with fun; it can, but doesn’t have to.
Yasemin thanked him, picking up on his last point: they’d often discussed, in the context of change, that there are essentially two driving forces — either the pressure of suffering is great enough (rarely about “fun” at all, but about escaping dissatisfaction), or, on the other side, joy itself, like the classic example of falling in love: suddenly nothing can stop you, you feel capable of moving mountains, since so many emotions are contributing that nothing seems able to hold you back — the “how” becomes irrelevant, you’ll figure it out somehow, as long as that feeling gets fed. That same mechanism, she noted, can transfer to other areas too. She reminded everyone this ultimately runs on biochemistry too — messenger substances released in the background either driving us toward joyful action or toward action out of enough accumulated suffering — ultimately, a drive toward movement either way. She recalled that our brain automatically answers two questions within split seconds whenever facing any external stimulus: does this threaten my existence, and what’s the benefit for me? If existence is threatened, we act immediately (sometimes even freezing counts as an action); otherwise, we only move into action if we can identify some benefit — without a perceived benefit, action becomes difficult, whether internally or visibly to others. She found Marc’s intrinsic/extrinsic distinction interesting too, but noted that neuroscience is quite explicit that our brain doesn’t actually recognize this distinction at all — we can classify it conceptually (is this something I’ve set for myself internally, or something externally triggered, like in a classroom or training setting where we’re deliberately trying to activate and motivate participants), but for the brain itself, it’s irrelevant whether the initial trigger came from outside or inside; the same underlying pattern plays out either way, since the brain doesn’t want to expend unnecessary energy, and if it can identify a benefit, it becomes active — regardless of the stimulus’s origin.
Marc picked this up, noting that everyone either has kids or knows people with kids, where motivation plays a huge role too — and that sometimes things simply have to get done. Kids do plenty out of pure fun, he said, but as adults we have countless tasks that can’t all be fun — taking out the trash, telling kids to brush their teeth. Whether kids at that age even understand the consequences of not doing it is questionable, and the same likely applies in companies too — you always have to explain why something matters, what happens if it’s skipped. For him, motivation isn’t about always chasing some big burst of fun where everyone’s singing and grinning through the halls — kids don’t exactly celebrate bedtime at seven, or homework, and husbands don’t celebrate taking out the trash. Many things, he repeated, simply get done out of a basic understanding of what the consequences would be if they didn’t.
Yasemin thanked him and welcomed Jürgen. Jürgen said his trigger, beyond the various existing definitions of motivation, was to stay close to the room’s title and its causal link to action specifically. He raised two questions: first, it’s common lived experience that we want something (are motivated, have a motive, a goal), yet don’t move into action because certain obstacles or circumstances make it impossible right now, or because the action itself is a future intention lying further ahead. A different kind of action would be: I’m motivated to learn these vocabulary words, here’s the vocab book, and I start immediately — motivation translating directly into action. The real challenge, he said, often isn’t the initial motivation itself but staying motivated tomorrow, and the day after. His conclusion: motivation differs along two dimensions — it’s a momentary state one can feel (approaching one’s work with joy and desire), but it’s also something like a behavioral directive, a process that ensures we actually reach our goals: direction (where do I want to go) and persistence (staying with it, seeing it through). These, he said, are two distinct expressions of motivation, deliberately tied to action rather than thinking.
Marc thanked him and offered a provocative angle: he often asks himself a brutally honest question, and the answer, when he’s truly honest, is always no. Whenever he notices he’s not moving into action in some area of life — work, personal life, or, as they’d discussed before, going to the doctor — there’s really only one painful but true answer: it simply isn’t important enough to him. No motivation needed, no excuses needed — the brutal question is: is this important enough to you? If you don’t do it, it wasn’t. And of course, he added, you can always find reasons and justifications for not doing something — fear of the unknown, the energy required, and so on — but strip all that away, and only one question remains: is it important enough to me?
Yasemin picked this up, connecting “important enough” back to the concept of benefit — we’re back at the same point: what’s in it for me, and is the goal attractive enough (referencing the SMART framework’s emphasis on goal attractiveness, checked precisely because otherwise we never even start moving). But, she asked, are there things that genuinely matter to us, where we see the benefit and the attractiveness, and we still don’t move into action? If so, what are the underlying reasons, or blockers, in those cases?
Jürgen answered from his sports background: total physical exhaustion is one clear example. Once his physical resources are depleted and he simply has no strength left, he can be as motivated as he likes but simply won’t manage it. This led him to a broader question: is there such a thing as motivationless action — can I act without any underlying motive at all? And conversely: are there cases where I’m motivated but, as Marc put it, don’t move into action — tied to will (“I don’t want to”)? He saw a slightly different connection there. Physical exhaustion, he clarified, can also include health issues or being generally run down — unable to physically follow through on motivation. He added a second point: negative emotions are a motivation killer — he distinguishes between emotion and feeling — negative feelings that distort us in the moment, operating as unconscious bias, effectively killing off otherwise positive motivation.
Yasemin thanked him and welcomed Layla. Layla said she found the topic lovely, and that she isn’t torn on Jürgen’s point — she understands it, since it essentially echoes familiar literature and sayings she’s heard often, like “I can’t” often really living on “I-won’t Street.” She likes that framing, and it may well be true — but, trying to stay solution-oriented, she pushed back a bit: framed the way Marc described it, the implication becomes “you just didn’t want it badly enough” — a “millionaire mindset,” no-excuses framing that, while understandable, can leave the listener with a heavy guilty conscience. A more solution-oriented question, she suggested, is: what exactly didn’t work? Maybe I was hugely motivated, tried extremely hard, and it still didn’t work out — and if my only conclusion is “I clearly didn’t want it enough, didn’t try hard enough,” that’s not necessarily useful. If something genuinely didn’t work despite real effort, the process itself likely needs to change, rather than concluding you’re just not committed enough, not in the “5am club,” didn’t check your mindset before dawn, and so on.
Yasemin thanked her, noting this touches on motivational gurus and how genuinely complex this topic is, given the sheer number of interacting factors. She raised another one: expectation and reward-expectation play a role too — do I actually believe I can achieve what I’ve set out to do (tying directly into belief systems), and is it realistic? Reward matters too — if something becomes routine and expected (like fruit baskets in offices), it loses its motivating power precisely because it’s no longer a surprise; an unannounced, occasional treat motivates far more than an expected, routine one. She pushed back gently on the “you don’t want it enough” framing Layla had flagged, since many other factors can be at play — inner parts or “inner team” conflicts (one part cheering on the goal, another shaped by past pain trying to protect us and raising doubts), or things we’ve internalized from society without them actually being our own goal (like weight loss driven by external pressure rather than genuine desire, leading to a repeating cycle of failed attempts and feeling bad). She emphasized that when we notice we’re stuck, some genuine reflection and analysis is usually needed to understand what’s actually happening — is the incentive simply not strong enough, do I not really want it, is it externally imposed, are there internal parts in conflict? Many different factors can shape whether we move into action or not. She also praised Jürgen’s open question about motivationless action, wanting to explore that distinction further.
Jürgen picked this up, wanting to elaborate on one point and drop another. He wanted to introduce a further concept tying into the overarching theme: reason, as the counterpart to motivation — this inner drive to do something, often less rationally grounded than emotionally or experientially driven — reason acting as the “executioner” against it. Reason, in his framing, is what leads to the inner statement: “I don’t want this, despite what my inner system is offering me as motivation, for various reasons.” His second point connected to Yasemin’s weight-loss example: his own go-to example is mountain hiking, and the familiar saying “the journey is the destination.” He’d often suggested testing people who’ve internalized that phrase by asking them why the journey is the destination. His own answer: because once you reach the summit, the longing, the motivation itself, dies. You’ve reached your goal — and then comes the question, and now what? Same with reaching a target weight: what comes next? This, he said, points to the two key dimensions of motivational strength: direction (I want to lose 10 kilos) and persistence (maintaining the achieved goal, sustaining it). His conclusion: motivation toward a specific goal always requires an overarching vision that continues beyond the fulfillment of that particular motivation.
Yasemin thanked him and invited Marc, then Layla, to continue and draw further connections.
Marc thanked Layla and Jürgen for their contributions, especially the sports example, and suggested that our various goals and desires compete with one another. If Jürgen invited him diving and asked him to hold his breath underwater for five minutes and he said he couldn’t, and Jürgen responded “well, diving clearly isn’t important enough to you, you’re just not motivated enough” — that would miss something crucial: a new, competing goal has entered the picture. The desire to go diving with Jürgen might genuinely be huge, but the self-preservation instinct then introduces a competing goal that takes priority — the desire to stay alive simply outweighs the desire to dive with Jürgen. His second point: he’s always conscious that we’re emotional beings, and whenever emotions get involved, he finds himself on much thinner ice. Returning to Yasemin’s earlier question — is there action without motive — he offered an example: if Yasemin accused him of being absent from Deep Talk Club a few times lately, suggesting maybe it’s just not important enough to him, he might immediately go into defense mode, thinking “how can she say that, that’s not true, I had my reasons” — and that reaction, he suggested, is action without a clear motive, purely emotionally driven, triggered by the instinct to defend himself. He thanked Layla and Jürgen for raising awareness around the sports example, noting that these competing goals genuinely do compete, and that it’s unfair to simply dismiss one activity as “not important enough” — a dialectic he noted is sometimes used unfairly by people trying to motivate others purely for their own self-interested reasons.
Yasemin thanked him, then raised the concept of routines in relation to motive and action — tying back to the tooth-brushing example from earlier. Do we still need a motive once something has become a fully established routine, or do we act automatically, without conscious thought and without any active motive at all, simply because it’s become routine? She invited Layla to continue.
Layla admitted her head was spinning a bit given all the input, but agreed this was a good place to connect. She recalled reading extensively about motivation, including the Marshmallow Test, which left her with the impression that even with high motivation, some people simply lack results-orientation — taking the smaller immediate reward (say, 100 euros now) over the larger delayed one (5,000 euros at year’s end), sometimes shaped by socialization: people who’ve had little may not trust future promises and prefer the certainty of the present. On the other hand, she noted, some people’s working memory simply operates differently, and for them the issue isn’t “I-won’t Street” but genuinely “I-can’t Street” — and telling them it’s really an “I-won’t” issue doesn’t help at all. Returning to routines: she suggested that the more we automate something (which is exactly the point of a routine), the less motivation we need to sustain it — something practiced since childhood eventually feels strange to stop, similar to how it feels strange to skip exercise once it’s become a habit. She closed with a jab at coaches who tell clients “you clearly just set the wrong goal” when someone says they want to lose weight but doesn’t follow through — it’s not that simple; sometimes it’s worth looking inward at what’s actually resisting, including resistance to that very kind of argumentation itself.
Yasemin thanked her and picked up the routine/automation thread, using Deep Talk Club itself as an example: when they started, it wasn’t yet a routine; over time, through sheer frequency, it became one, to the point where the question of whether to open the room at 8am, or whether she’s feeling tired that day, essentially no longer arises — it simply happens. Once something becomes a genuine routine, reaching certain goals becomes easier. This connected back to Jürgen’s “the journey is the destination” point, which she found fascinating in relation to Deep Talk Club too: a goal had presumably been defined at the start, but as had come up around the 1,000th episode, when someone asked how many more episodes she planned, her honest answer was that she doesn’t know, and deliberately doesn’t want to fixate on a number, because she does this fundamentally because she enjoys it. That, she said, is exactly the “journey is the destination” principle in action: as long as she keeps running these rooms and feels something meaningful, enjoyable, and fulfilling emerging from them — possibly serving some larger purpose too — rather than chasing a specific fixed target like reaching episode 2,000, the focus stays on how the journey itself feels, and if it feels good, continuing simply follows naturally in most cases. She found Jürgen’s introduction of “vision” in relation to goals fascinating too — distinguishing the overarching purpose a goal serves. She noted we’re socialized early, as children, into if-then thinking (do this, get that reward), which conditions us to believe we must constantly set and achieve goals to feel happy and fulfilled — which becomes problematic when, upon reaching a goal, we’re left thinking “now what?” — Jürgen’s exact point earlier — and most people simply respond by immediately setting the next goal, raising the question of whether that’s actually productive in terms of genuine satisfaction, happiness, or fulfillment.
Jürgen picked up on her closing remarks, using them as an anchor to point out something he felt bridged nicely: the discussion had shown that most people associate motivation primarily with a goal or task — I’m motivated to achieve X. But there’s another definitional aspect he considers at least equally important: motivation also serves to generate and sustain (or suppress) a particular behavior. He connected this to Deep Talk Club specifically: there are days, he admitted (not true for Yasemin, he noted), when he’s mentally and physically exhausted — genuine obstacles preventing motivation from translating into action, since he simply can’t bring himself to engage with the topic that day. In those moments, this second definition of motivation kicks in for him: wanting to maintain how he’s perceived by others — behavior being, by definition, the outward appearance one presents, recognizable to others. There can be no Deep Talk Club without Jürgen, he joked, exaggerating deliberately — which is exactly why he sometimes consciously steps back, precisely because of this internal contradiction: needing first to find himself, get right with himself, when he isn’t, in that moment, ready by his own quality standards and original motivation to engage with such complex topics. The counterpart, though, is that everyone has simply grown accustomed to him being part of Deep Talk Club and chiming in. These, he said, are two legitimate perspectives on motivation that can lead him to act in a completely unmotivated way while still showing up, even if he can’t contribute much.
Yasemin thanked him, noting this touches on expectation again, and evaluation: what’s expected of me, or what do I assume is expected, and how do I evaluate that against external expectations — a genuinely fascinating angle. She invited Jürgen and then Marc to continue.
Jürgen said he’d be brief. He’d previously admitted he’s not someone who instinctively treats evaluation and values negatively — quite the opposite: he firmly believes we are always evaluating, always judging ourselves and others, and that one of his own key motivational drivers is precisely how he assumes others evaluate him, regardless of whether he can say how important that actually is to him — he simply wants that evaluation.
Marc picked this up, saying he’d never voiced this publicly before, thanking Jürgen and Yasemin for bringing up evaluation specifically. He said he genuinely is motivated every day to participate in Deep Talk Club — but the fact that sessions are recorded was, for a long time, a major reason he stayed away from certain topics. Not because his motivation was gone, but because of his own evaluation of things being replayable, combined with fear — the fear Jürgen had just described, of wanting to be perceived a certain way. If he were invited onto a TV show and hadn’t prepared on a topic, he’d never sit there and, when asked a question by the host, simply say “I haven’t thought about that, I really have no idea.” That feeling of exposure, shame, fear of saying something foolish rather than admitting “honestly, I haven’t thought this through” had kept him away from certain topics on Deep Talk Club at times — not because the topics overwhelmed him, but because he wasn’t ready or couldn’t prepare quickly enough. That had nothing to do with lacking motivation, and everything to do with fear — fear of exposure, fear of shame, fear of saying something completely wrong instead of simply admitting he hadn’t thought about the topic. In a small group, that’s easier for him; but the fact of public recording was a real factor keeping him away from certain topics he doesn’t want to discuss on record, especially given that clients of his might listen back later. In a small group of two or four, he’ll discuss anything; in a public recording, it becomes a matter of strategic consideration rather than lacking motivation.
Yasemin agreed, recalling a past discussion when they were testing LinkedIn as a live-audio format and considering switching platforms entirely, where a similar point came up: Clubhouse had been preferred partly because it reaches a different audience than LinkedIn, where his own clients might well be present — affecting both whether he speaks up at all and what he chooses to say, tying into these different roles, evaluations, and underlying strategic considerations. She noted that evaluation plays a huge role in relation to achieving or failing to achieve goals too: how do we handle it when we set a goal and don’t reach it? On one extreme, we can be brutally hard on ourselves — feeling like a failure who constantly sets goals without follow-through — or we could take a completely different, gentler approach: “I guess I lost interest along the way, and that’s not necessarily a big deal.” This, too, comes down to how we evaluate and categorize ourselves — whether we set goals at all, whether we achieve them, how we treat ourselves and interact with others when certain things don’t get achieved, and how external evaluation factors in too — which, she noted, varies significantly by culture: some cultural contexts might simply smile off an unmet goal, whereas in their own circles, if she announces an intention and someone later asks whether she’s followed through and she says no, she’s sometimes noticed a latent judgment in the other person’s reaction — “ah, interesting, not done yet then” — without knowing the actual reasons, and possibly still assuming there must be some hidden fear behind it. This, she said, can vary hugely depending on the environment and who exactly you’re talking to. Given the sheer number of interacting factors, there’s no single universal key or fix — it’s always important to return to reflecting, thinking, weighing options, before making an evaluation and possibly deriving decisions that then lead, in the next step, to action or inaction (inaction shouldn’t be forgotten here either) — always context-dependent, individual, and personal, rather than a one-size-fits-all formula. That said, having awareness of the underlying processes and how our brain works gives us real levers to pull — for instance, knowing that reward is an influencing factor lets us ask what actually constitutes a meaningful reward for us personally (which will differ completely between Marc, Jürgen, and Layla), always requiring individual, context-specific new decisions.
With time running short, she moved into the closing round, inviting Marc, Jürgen and Layla, in that order, to share any final thoughts and their personal highlight from the room.
Marc wanted to share two things: first, he pays close attention to his own language, drawing on a quote from Star Wars — not being a huge fan himself, but Master Yoda’s “do or do not, there is no try” has stuck with him at work. He often catches himself saying things like “I’ll try to get to that next week,” and asking himself Yoda’s question helps him gauge how serious he actually is about something. Second, a story from childhood: remembering Pippi Longstocking, whose friends Tommy and Annika once asked her, since she has no parents, who tells her when to go to bed — Pippi answered, “I do. First I tell myself nicely, and if I don’t listen, I tell myself again, a bit more sternly.” He wished everyone a wonderful start to the week.
Yasemin thanked him warmly and invited Jürgen. Jürgen picked up on Marc’s closing point about awareness — awareness of goals, of how goals come about, and how we become more focused. He drew a bridge to the previous day’s room on the distinction between complicated and complex: if we take the common definition that motivation’s essential purpose lies in achieving a goal, then he’s back at the same underlying theme as with reflection and thinking: he needs awareness — awareness that his motivation is guiding him toward this specific goal. That’s why the classic rules of goal formulation apply here too — a goal must be operable, realistic, achievable, and so on. His conclusion: understanding motivation and action, like so many of their other topics, requires both a certain awareness and knowledge of the underlying dynamics — the potential complicatedness and complexity involved in reaching a goal, and what complexity a given goal might conceal. From that, he drew a logical follow-on point: this ultimately determines how well one can handle setbacks and failing to reach a goal. If you’ve thought this through in advance, drawing on your own toolkit of methods, handling failure becomes noticeably easier. He thanked everyone for the room and wished them a wonderful start to the new week.
Yasemin thanked him, noting that his use of the word “failure” at the end was itself an evaluation — a more neutral framing might simply be “not achieving” — and said they’d dig deeper into this the following day with Action and Procrastination, and also look more closely at action competence, continuing to deepen both the practical toolbox and the underlying knowledge, along with the overlaps and distinctions between them.
Layla closed by admitting she needed a moment to gather her thoughts, since following the conversation while preparing a closing comment simultaneously is tricky. She picked up on something Marc had said earlier that reminded her of another famous quote — “marry, or don’t, you’ll regret it either way” — which fit nicely here too. On motivation, she reflected: we spend so much energy thinking about how to motivate people into action, whether that’s a childhood lollipop or an adult office fruit basket. She recalled hearing about a study suggesting children naturally help others by default, and that introducing a reward system actually seems to reduce that motivation — though she couldn’t name the study or fully explain why, and admitted some hesitation saying so on a recorded room. She said she personally struggles with reward systems — not wanting to hand out a gold star for everything — but does still occasionally give younger students a sticker in their notebook when they do very well, and finds joy in their happiness. As an adult, she said, she wants to feel that same joy and appreciation too, and that recognition is a big part of what motivates her — perhaps something like a verbal gold star, which might well be fine, depending on the moment.
Yasemin thanked her, and offered a simplified answer to the “declining motivation” question Layla had raised: it’s not universally true, but applies to specific cases. There are two distinct scenarios: if children are already motivated to do something and you reinforce that with an external reward, motivation actually declines — entirely logical, since you’re attaching a conditioning mechanism to a reward the child didn’t actually need, since they were already doing it happily. Take school grades as an example: if a child genuinely loves learning and thrives doing, say, German, and you start promising a reward for good grades, motivation for the subject itself declines — especially once an expectation forms around the reward and it becomes the norm; if the reward is later withheld, disappointment follows, which is where this apparent decline in motivation, despite originally strong intrinsic motivation, comes from. In that case, there’s really no reason to attach a reward at all, since doing so can actually endanger the existing motivation. It’s a different story, though, when offering a reward for something where motivation wasn’t present to begin with — there, rather than declining, motivation can actually be boosted. From there, other factors like habit formation come into play too. So the underlying mechanics of motivation, tied to reward expectations, can work either positively or negatively depending entirely on the context and whether the need for that motivational boost genuinely existed in the first place — understanding that lets you avoid using rewards where they’re counterproductive, and deploy them deliberately where they can genuinely help shape behavior.
Yasemin closed by saying so many different aspects had come together today, and how lovely it was to see how the room developed, the examples they explored, and the range of directions the conversation took. She said she was very much looking forward to the next day’s topic, Action and Procrastination — why we keep putting things off, what the possible reasons are, and what can help, building directly on today’s insights. She looked forward to seeing everyone again at 8am tomorrow for Deep Talk. Until then, ciao.
