What Drives You —
and What's Running
on Autopilot

When I was playing, I thought motivation was one thing — either you had it or you didn't. If you were working hard, you were motivated. If you weren't, something was wrong with you. That model doesn't hold up. I've seen people grind themselves into the ground and still not feel like they were performing from a place that was actually theirs.

Self-Determination Theory — the research framework underneath a lot of what I do — makes a distinction that's worth sitting with. There are two fundamentally different kinds of drive. Not good drive and bad drive. Just two different sources, with different consequences for performance, wellbeing, and staying power.

Intrinsic motivation comes from three internal needs being met. Autonomy — do you feel like you have genuine agency in your work? That you're making real choices, not just executing someone else's plan? Competence — do you feel capable? Do you understand why things are working or not? Relatedness — do you feel like you belong? That you're connected to the people around your work in a real way?

When those three needs are being met, something opens up. You do the work because the work itself is the reward. You're not grinding — you're in it.

Extrinsic motivation isn't inherently bad. Approval, comparison, avoiding failure — these are real forces and they can drive real performance. The problem is what happens when they're the primary source. Performance becomes about managing self-image instead of doing the work. The work gets heavier. The wins feel hollow. The losses feel catastrophic because they threaten the identity you've built around the outcome.

Most performers are running on some mix of both. The question isn't which one you have — it's where the weight is sitting, and whether the balance is one you'd actually choose.

Below are seven domains of your performance life. For each one, rate how well your three core needs are currently being met — not how they should be, not how they used to be. Right now. As honestly as you can.

One dot means barely there. Five means fully met. Trust your gut on the first pass. You can always adjust.

In my time in baseball operations — first with the Cubs, then with the Pirates — I kept seeing the same pattern. Performers struggling, but struggling in two very different ways that looked the same from the outside and required completely different responses.

The first: over-controlled. Someone is telling you what to do, how to do it, when, and why. You have no real say. Your expertise is ignored or overridden. The work might be objectively fine but it doesn't feel like yours because it isn't. Autonomy is starved. What you get is compliance — not commitment, not creativity, not the kind of effort that changes outcomes.

The second: under-competent. You don't actually understand why things are working or not. The feedback isn't specific enough or it isn't coming at all. You're doing the reps without understanding the mechanism. Competence is starved. What you get is anxiety — the performance equivalent of trying to navigate without a map.

Most performers in a difficult stretch are dealing with at least one of these. Some are dealing with both simultaneously, which is a particularly brutal place to be. The reason this matters: the intervention for each is completely different. If you're over-controlled, you need more agency — more genuine choice and ownership. If you're under-competent, you need better understanding — more specific feedback, clearer mechanisms, real mastery. Applying the wrong one makes things worse.

Underneath the goals, the metrics, the expectations — yours and other people's — there's a simpler question that most performers never get around to asking. Not what you're supposed to want. Not what the program demands. Not what would make the people around you proud.

What do you actually want from your performance?

I'm not asking about outcomes. I'm asking about experience. What does it feel like when you're in it and it's right? What would you be doing, and how would you be doing it, if no external measure existed? If no one was tracking it, ranking it, judging it?

This is a hard question because most performers have been operating under external frameworks for so long that the internal signal has gotten quiet. They know what coaches want, what the numbers say, what a good performance looks like from the outside. The question of what they themselves want — from the inside — often hasn't been asked directly in years.

I want you to ask it now. And I want you to sit with the answer long enough that the first-pass, acceptable version gives way to something truer.

Every performer I've worked with has at least one domain where they've lost contact with why they started. The external framework has taken over so completely that the original reason — the thing that made this matter before anyone was watching — is buried somewhere they can't easily reach.

This is a writing practice, not a reflection prompt. The goal isn't to analyze the disconnection. The goal is to make contact with it.

Think back to when this thing first mattered to you. Before the structure. Before the evaluation. Before the goal-setting frameworks and the development plans and the external measures of whether you were any good at it. There was a version of you who chose this — or was drawn to it — before they fully understood what they were getting into.

Write to that version of yourself. Tell them why it still matters — or be honest that you're not sure it does anymore, and what that means. Don't perform. Don't motivate yourself with the letter. Just tell the truth about where you are and what you're trying to find your way back to.