Spend time managing people, and a few observations start repeating themselves. An obvious one: your highest performers are usually those with the best combination of natural talents, acquired skills and motivation. But often, just below them in the upper tiers, is someone with fewer natural gifts and/or acquired skills (though they might be accumulating skills quickly), but motivation through the roof.

At the bottom of many performance stacks in product, engineering and design are often people with good natural talent and even a decent quantity of acquired skills, but low motivation. For whatever reasons - noble, ignoble, in between - their work is a constant seeking process aimed at finding the minimum viable effort to continue in the role.

If talent - whether via nature or nurture - is largely fixed by age 20 or so, and skill acquisition is actually downstream of motivation, then motivation is the biggest lever available to an individual in the workplace to increase their performance, their potential to thrive, and ultimately their lifetime earnings in a tech progression. Assuming that's a goal of theirs. As a manager of people, it's one of your goals for each team member you manage, and it's part of your job to help them see why it should be a personal goal of theirs as well.

So what qualities or inputs are upstream of motivation?

One of the most reliable inputs, one that I feel acutely myself in any competitive workplace, is stress. Whether it's about establishing our place, keeping our place, or climbing the ladder, many of us humans seem to feel a deep-seated drive to belong in the tribe.

Baseline stress level is a thing that we feel, but I also think it's a thing that you can learn to play with. Probably not control, but at least guardrail, nudge and redirect. Especially if you find yourself routinely slipping below what's often characterized as "healthy pressure" and into boredom and unchallenged states.

On the Big 5, this is mostly Neuroticism, with a dose of Agreeableness on the establish/don't rock the boat end and a shot of Extraversion on the striving end. Enneagram, this seems associated with types like 6 and 3 (I am an enneagram 3w4 with slight 3w2, so I feel this one).

One obvious question is, can you ever redline? By upping the stress to anxiety-levels for a short duration - in a similar way you might briefly redline your car's engine to get out of a ditch - can you achieve something in 10% or even 1% of the time you thought it might take? I have a few experiences that suggest it's possible.

One comes from early in my career. I was running technology at a small retirement planning brokerage - designing and developing software while also selling it to our customers. Quite often I'd set audacious goals for an event that was just a week or two a away, for no other reason than just wanting to challenge myself. Later I realized that most of the best features and facets I'd built came from those all-night sessions leading up to the talks, development sessions driven by the intense stress of not wanting to fail to wow on stage.

Another comes from my startup founder days. My co-founder and I got a booth at a trade show we knew investors would be at. Our software was intended to be used on a laptop - intelligent video editing that we didn't think could happen well on a phone. On the Friday before the show, my co-founder, operating on the anxiety of not wanting to be at the mercy of booth location, decided we needed a mobile app. He stayed up all night two nights in a row, and by Monday not only did we have a mobile app, it became the thing we showed off the most, walking around with the app on our phones and engaging with everyone.

As I was telling one of the above stories to an engineer I work with, I playfully/mockingly referred to it as Anxiety-Driven Development or AxDD. Thinking about it though, I think I might be on to something.

A caveat: All of this has to be regulated to be healthy. This is not advice to put yourself - let alone anyone else - into unhealthy situations. There's a baseline set of criteria that a comment under this reddit post defines well: "Part of working hard is the lack of any condition that keeps you from working hard, eg ADHD, sleep disorders, chronic fatigue, depression" - minimize workplace stress while you work on a more important problem being the right guidance.

For those who meet the baseline, I do believe some controlled element of what I'm playfully referring to as Anxiety-Driven Development can be healthy, but it cannot be the default mode you operate in. Rather it's something you want to save for special occasions. Back to the car analogy: you get up into the red to pass a semi, you don't cruise to work in the red. How frequently you can handle those occasions is a thing to be discovered - when I'm working on something I deeply care about and I'm clear from life stressors, I can do it once or even twice a day. Other times when I have a lot going on in my life, once a week might be as often as I can stand it.

Often in tech you have those times chosen for you: a client call that turns ugly and needs a quick reaction, or a Sev0 incident that pops up out of the blue and needs urgent fixing. If those are happening frequently enough, you might not have anything left to get out of yourself.

Pushing yourself also assumes that some level of control is possible for you. For the first 30-some years of my life, I personally found regulating my stress a completely foreign concept. Learning something about mindfulness gave me a glimpse at it. If you haven't been on that journey yet, maybe a takeaway from this is to develop some curiosity around it.

All of this also needs a heavy warning: this is not endorsement for people who manage people to dial up the stress on your team! It's a tool you can apply first and foremost to your own career, possibly enabling you to do the best work of your life. If that makes you smirk and think something like why would I want to do the best work of my life for this stupid company I work for, well, I've been there, and... fix that problem first, before you go experimenting with a technique like AxDD.