If you compare a prisoner serving time with an ascetic monk in seclusion, you’ll discover an extremely absurd fact. They both eat the simplest vegetarian food, live in tiny rooms of just a few square meters, and have to stay in this space for 24 hours a day, without even having a phone to play with. From a physical standpoint, their situations are almost identical. Yet, for the prisoner, every day feels like a year, every second is torment, and his mental state is on the verge of collapse. Meanwhile, the monk feels inner joy and can even experience great spiritual freedom in such austerity. With the same physical parameters, why are their emotional outcomes so drastically different? Many would say it’s because one is punishment and the other is faith, but that explanation is too vague.

Psychologist Edward Deci once conducted an even more interesting experiment. He gathered two groups to play puzzles: Group A was paid for completing puzzles, Group B just played for fun without any reward. It turned out that once the payments stopped, Group A immediately lost interest and even found puzzles boring, while Group B became more and more engaged, willing to keep playing even during their breaks. This leads to a truth we’ve overlooked for half a century: human motivation never comes from temptation or coercion. So where does it come from? Let’s go back to the prisoner and the monk: the only difference is whether the door was locked by someone else or closed by themselves. This is called the locus of control. When your locus of control is external, you’re a slave—your motivation system is called compliance. When your locus of control is internal, you’re the master—your motivation system is called autonomy.

So here’s the question: if autonomy feels so great, why do so many of us feel like going to work is like going to a grave, and living feels like being in prison? Is it because we lack self-discipline? No, it’s because our social operating system is based on 19th-century behaviorist design. Think about what the earliest factories needed: they didn’t need you to think, just to repeat tasks with machine-like precision. To make you obey, they invented the simple carrot-and-stick system: work well and get paid, mess up and get fired. This logic has been used for 200 years. It has trained us to be donkeys who only move when we see a carrot. We take this passive response as truth. We’re used to waiting for orders, used to being whipped by KPIs, used to handing over the remote control of our lives. When even your meal and sleep times are decided by your boss or a punch clock, your brain concludes, “I don’t own my life; I’m just renting out my time.” Nobody wants to decorate a house they’re only renting.

That’s the biological root of why you clearly want to work hard but always end up slacking off by habit. So how do you break free? Should we resign and become monks? Of course not. The real experts—the decisive, tireless killers in the workplace—do one extremely subtle thing: they shift the locus of control inward. Here’s a practical example: whether you’re coding or working on a plan, the average mindset is “the boss asked me to do this, I get paid for it, if I don’t do it I’ll get scolded.” At that moment, your locus of control is in the boss’s hands—you’re the prisoner, facing huge resistance, and you’ll procrastinate as much as possible.

But the expert’s mindset is to mentally strip away the boss’s assignment—even if it’s arranged by the boss, they redefine it internally: “I’m using the company’s resources to level up my own skills. This project is tough, so it’s a perfect test for the new architecture I’ve been learning. I’m tackling this debt issue not because I’m unlucky, but because I’m taking an expensive course in financial risk control.” See, the task remains the same, but when you shift the subject from “for him” to “for me,” in that instant, you’re no longer the prisoner staring blankly at the wall—you become the monk proactively closing the door to train yourself.

This isn’t just a change of mindset—it’s a rewrite of your brain’s core programming. That’s why we often feel powerless or confused—not because we’re out of fuel, but because we aren’t the ones in the driver’s seat. We care too much about other people’s evaluation systems: how much we earned this year, whether our car is better than the neighbor’s, whether our job looks prestigious. When you live by these external metrics, you’re a slave to behaviorism, always waiting for the next carrot. But a real beast never cares about the circus’s rewards.

Try pulling that finger pointing outward back and point it at yourself. In this world full of noise and algorithms, in this era where even anxiety is mass-produced, take back the right to interpret your own actions. When you realize that the pain, challenges, and even failures you’re experiencing are storylines you’ve chosen to become a better version of yourself, that long-lost, endlessly flowing motivation will finally return to your body. Don’t be the donkey turning the millstone—be the one who creates the wind. It’s hard, but only then will you have truly lived.