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100 Things You Should You Know About People: #82 — People Are Motivated By Progress And Mastery

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Why do people donate their time and creative thought process to Wikipedia? Or the open source movement? When you stop and think about it you realize that there are many activities that people engage in, even over a long period of time, that require high expertise, and yet are of no monetary or even career building benefit. People like to feel that they are making progress. They like to feel that they are learning and mastering new knowledge and skills.

Small signs of progress can have a large effect — Because mastery is such a powerful motivator, even small signs of progress can have a large effect in motivating people move forward to the next step in a task. At Linked In, they encourage you to finish filling in information on your profile by showing you how much information you have already answered.

Picture of Linked In

LiveMocha is a website where you can learn languages. They have several forms of mastery and progress built in:

At a glance you can see where you are in the course, where you are in the lesson, and how much progress you have made overall.

They have points that you can earn by completing your training, as well as by helping other people learn a language you already know. The points can be accumulated and redeemed for access to premium learning exercises.

Everytime you sign on to LiveMocha you see a dashboard that shows your progress.

Daniel Pink has a great animated video about motivation and mastery from his book, Drive.

What do you think? Are you motivated by mastery?

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3 responses to “100 Things You Should You Know About People: #82 — People Are Motivated By Progress And Mastery”

  1. […] making progress. They like to feel that they are learning and mastering new knowledge and skills.whatmakesthemclick.netI recently wrote a short post listing my initial thoughts of ‘Reeder’ the RSS app for Mac.I had […]

  2. 设计师应当了解用户的100件事情: #81 — 进步和掌握能激励人们

    […] 以上内容经原作者Susan Weinschenk同意摘自其博客,原文地址:100 Things You Should You Know About People: #82 — People Are Motivated By Progress And Mastery。 […]

  3. […] By admin on 29 März 2011 in kuehlhaus-blog with 0 Comments. via whatmakesthemclick.net […]

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