Intrinsic Value

Every action that you perform is linked to some sort of stimulus. This stimulus is some force that makes you want to behave in a particular manner. There are those driving forces which we are born with, such as the desire to seek food when hungry, and there are learned driving forces, such as the desire to obtain money. Every learned driving force is a result of the association of that action with obtaining one of the basic goals. For example, in an attempt to get food you realize that you need money. This event happens often enough that you begin to realize that in order to get food you must seek money first. After a while the desire for money is disassociated from food and becomes valuable on its own. This would happen when someone realizes that they can use money to obtain other things besides just food. Once this happens the desire to seek money become internalized, since you no longer need the desire for food to cause you to seek money. Money becomes its own motivator and is no longer solely extrinsically valuable because of what it can bring you, but is intrinsically valuable because you desire it without thought of what it can bring you.

The important thing to note here is the process by which something becomes intrinsically valuable. Everything besides our very basic of needs must have external motivation. Behavior is like a child. When it is young it must be nurtured and cared for. Many people neglect the behaviors that they are trying to instill in themselves and the behavior is lost. So how do you nurture your behavior? You must use it to achieve a goal, something that you already identify as intrinsically valuable. For example, suppose there are two people who want to lose weight. One person decides to lose weight because its not healthy for them. The other person wants to attract a girl. Why would one fail and the other succeed? The person who is seeking to lose weight because its healthy probably does not intrinsically value life. This is not to say they don't want to live. Rather, they have never had the fear of losing their life that they would do anything to stay alive. They take their life for granted because it doesn't feel like its in danger. The second person however, very likely has realized that he likes girls and that he would like to date one. He has probably already internalized the desire to seek a mate. As a result his goal is more valuable to him and so the behavior that is going to allow him to attain his goal becomes more valuable as well.

There is a second step though, before the behavior is learned with lasting power. Using the example before, what happens when the second person obtains his goal and gets a girlfriend? Satisfaction is the death of desire. If the goal that was driving the behavior is gone the behavior will die unless it has some other stimulus. This is where the generalization of the goal for the behavior is necessary. You must disassociate this behavior from the original goal and attach it to many goals. Ask yourself what are some things that are valuable about my current behavior besides my main goal? Think about what valuable things you can do because of those positive results. By doing this you are identifying other reasons to continue in your behavior. With these many forces pushing you to maintain your behavior you are no longer dependent upon any one stimulus. If you get that girlfriend you still have other reasons to maintain a healthy lifestyle. For example, you realize that while you're losing weight you're also becoming stronger and more athletic. Before when you tried to play sports it was so difficult because you were out of shape, but now it is easily in the realm of possibility. You also realize that because you can play more sports you can interact with your friends and strengthen your relationships through bonding.

There is one last thing I want to go into in relation to generalizing your driving force. There is an idea called the six degrees of separation. Basically, through your relationships you know everybody else in the world through by no more than six degrees also the human web. When you attempt to build a behavior, you should attempt to build a degree of separation between your driving forces. Continuing in the previous example, if you attach the desire to be able to run fast as a driving force for exercising and you've attached running fast because it allows you to run marathons better, which you run because you support charities, you are associating all of these behaviors together. You are essentially building a chain of behaviors that each reinforce the step that precedes it. However eventually, you associate exercising with allowing you to support charities. At this point even if you removed the desire to run fast, exercising would still be valuable. By creating this degree of separation between a behavior and a desired result you eventually build a web of desired behaviors that are mutually reinforcing of each other. Think of it again in the six degrees of separation where everyone you know introduces you to everyone they know. If you repeat that, you will eventually know everyone. By building relationships between behaviors in a chain you are building closely related behaviors that also become reinforcers. Once you have done this your behavior will become such a great part of your being, such that the only way to remove it is to destroy a dozen other behaviors simultaneously. You will have made that behavior intrinsically valuable to you because it is indistinguishable from who you are because of all the other behaviors you have which compliment it.