A hard job is good to find
Illustration credit: Maren Kranking
It is difficult to find a corporate mission statement more audacious than Google’s: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
At the company’s inception in 1998, the task involved organizing 26 million web pages into a system that would allow anyone to find anything within seconds. At the time, users of the world wide web mostly still typed in URLs to navigate from page to page or used portal sites such as Alta Vista, Yahoo! or AOL to surface content. Setting about organizing the whole growing mess of data was a difficult, perhaps impossible undertaking. And what began as audacious as has only gotten more inconceivable over time— except that it is being achieved. By 2008, the number of unique web pages had topped one trillion and google had become a verb. Google set out to do the impossible, and in attempting such a bold task, fundamentally altered the way the world finds information.
In the process, the company also managed to attract and retain a hugely talented group of employees. I spoke with Jim Lecinski, a Vice President who leads Google Chicago, about his personal experience.
“For me, the process of solving a difficult problem— one that doesn’t have a clearly defined, well-worn way to approach it, and has complex multi-part interdependent components— is in itself rewarding. There is mental and emotional satisfaction along the way in tackling the steps of defining the actual problem statement, defining what success looks like, defining what’s in and what’s out of scope, what are actual givens, boundaries and rules versus what are only imagined givens, boundaries and rules.”
Googlers get to work in an environment where tough challenges are the everyday norm. Google's co-founder, Larry Page, learned to have “a healthy disregard for the impossible” while attending a summer camp for leaders in college, and it’s been the rallying cry of the innovators who are creating the new way the world works. Google engineer Brian Fitzpatrick finds it disappointing that the majority of organizations are not attempting more. Google stands out in a field where, as he puts it, “most companies have stopped going after all the hard problems.” Googlers are attracted by the big-picture audacity of what the organization routinely attempts, as well as the personal challenge it offers to them as individuals. They have discovered that it is more fun to utilize one’s full capabilities than not to. They know that a hard job is good to find.
The notion of offering adequate challenge is equally embraced at Montessori schools, where Google’s founders were educated. The methods used at Montessori schools are based on the lifelong work of Maria Montessori, who observed that the most fundamental human longing is the urge to explore. Her approach to education at each level is predicated upon this basic behavior: that human needs are met through exploration of the environment, and with success comes the exhilaration of achievement. We are hard-wired to seek the challenge of the unknown.
Modern science is proving this out. In his work with primates in the 1940s, psychologist Harry F. Harlow discovered that when a puzzle was placed in the habitat of a group of monkeys, they would begin to play with it. The monkeys showed signs of focus, determination, and even enjoyment. Over time, they figured out how it worked and solved the puzzle. And they kept at it too, solving the puzzle more quickly and frequently as time went on. No one had taught the monkeys how to do it. In fact, no one had prodded them to approach the puzzle at all— no treats for getting it right, no external rewards for a job well done.*
This led Harlow to the radical notion that the joy of the task was its own reward. He called it intrinsic motivation. Evidently, monkeys solve puzzles because that’s what monkeys do. And what’s more, they seem to enjoy it. We monkey-like humans are intrinsically motivated to solve problems and to strive to do what we could not do before. All of human progress attests to this. The task of the educator, then, and the leader too, is to appeal to this intrinsic desire for exploration and challenge.
*Footnote: In the experiment with monkeys and puzzles, adding external rewards for performance actually led to performance declines— more errors and fewer attempts. Harlow’s work at the University of Wisconsin was continued by Edward Deci at Carnegie Mellon and is discussed eloquently in Dan Pink’s book Drive.