By: Richard Zhao

I’m usually a lazy person, but one minor annoyance, and I will spend entire years of my life proving a point.

Many of the relatively important and time-consuming things I’ve done have been out of spite. Take my role as a D&D game master. The initial motivation that prompted me to run games for years now wasn’t some praise from a teacher, an advertisement, or even a recommendation from a friend. No, the initial reason I decided to throw away 3 years, and all my free time for the foreseeable future, was that I thought the campaign I was playing in at the time was too boring.

If spite, my personal superpower, is powerful enough to bless me with ungodly motivation, then I think it should be extended to other situations. Motivational speeches for sports teams? No need, just have the coaches exchange minor slights about each other’s team in a staged skit. There will be no pressure to win and the stress would be less compared to a traditional motivational speech. Instead both sports teams would be driven by the engines of petty revenge, inspiring them to beat the other team. In fact, it would probably make sports interesting again.

I think the thing with petty motivators is that they attach absolutely no importance to what they are doing, which means there is zero stress or pressure to succeed. A task with no importance and no consequence for failing is probably more likely to get done than something important and stressful. I would recommend changing the education system to better fit this concept of stress-free work, except there is always going to be a handful of students who will never get anything done due to having no motivation to accomplish a meaningless task (regardless of petty incentives), and who can blame them? According to Zippia, the average employee spends an average of 2.9 hours per 8-hour workday doing non-work activities. No one likes to waste their time on seemingly pointless assignments.

Of course, everything I just said is based on personal experience and next to zero actual research. If anyone decides to prove me wrong, I highly encourage them to do so. I just want to let them know that if they do so, I’ll write another article out of spite.