During a recent episode of Beyond Coaching, my co-host Dustin and I got into a conversation about motivation. I had been listening to Shane Parrish’s Knowledge Project podcast, where Parrish admitted something about his own book hitting the New York Times bestseller list. His first thought wasn’t gratitude. It was: I proved that person wrong. Someone from twenty years ago who probably doesn’t remember his name.
Parrish called it dirty motivation. Pure, altruistic drive is clean. Proving someone wrong is dirty. That distinction made sense to me. Our world, especially the athletic world, is filled with dirty fuel as motivation.
The haters. The doubters. The coach who didn’t recruit you. The AD who passed you over. These become motivation, and we treat that like a feature and something to be proud of.
A caveat though….dirty motivation works. You can win with it for a period of time. But there’s a ceiling, and there’s a cost, and most coaches don’t see either until they’re already past both.
Dustin brought up Bobby Knight’s son taking over a program in Texas. Success early, then a hard fall. The tactics that built a legend under one man didn’t translate when someone else tried to run it the same. That’s what happens when the method is driven more by personality and edge than by principle. It’s not transferable. And today’s athlete, as Dustin noted, will sniff out inauthenticity faster than any generation before them. If that’s not genuinely who you are, it will collapse.
The other problem with dirty fuel is that it’s external. You’re dependent on someone else’s slight, real or invented (and it is often invented), to sustain your drive. I’ve seen coaches manufacture it and create something that is not there. It may work short term but it does not build a program.
Clean motivation has its own complications, though. That’s where the conversation got more interesting.
In research we’ve done through ICP, surveying almost two thousand college athletes, Family consistently ranks in the top three motivators. On the surface, that sounds like clean fuel. But dig into it and it gets complicated fast. A lot of those kids have had parents invest enormous amounts of Money and time into a scholarship dream. When they get to college and face real competition, the motivation isn’t purely internal. It’s performance for the people who paid for the Travel club and the private lessons.
What happens when a kid starts to develop a healthier identity outside of sport? When they stop needing it to define them? Some get better. When I was Coaching, I experienced many quietly lose the edge that was carrying them. Not because the coaching failed, but because the external pressure lifted and they realized the internal drive was thinner than anyone knew and it did not matter as much any more.
That’s not an argument against healthy identity development. It’s a reason to take it seriously rather than assume it automatically produces elite performers.
Know what fuel you’re running on. Dustin and I both admitted to moments of dirty motivation, and I’m not judging it. The question is whether you’re managing it or whether it’s managing you. Watch how you respond to criticism and recognition. If a win only matters when it gets acknowledged, or if a challenge from a supervisor turns into something to prove, that’s important information.
Build Relationships that can carry honest feedback. Dustin made the point that when criticism comes from someone who genuinely cares, it lands differently. It becomes fuel for Growth instead of ammunition. That’s only possible when the relationship underneath is solid. And don’t manufacture a villain for your team. There’s a decent chance your athletes will see through it, but if they don’t, it’s still not a way to build a program.
The tweet that stuck with me from our conversation was a state championship cross-country coach in California complaining publicly three days after winning that his AD, his principal, and his school board hadn’t reached out to congratulate him. He won a state title and then aired that grievance publicly. You can hear the dirty fuel in it. All of it external. All of it about recognition from someone else.
Clean fuel is harder to sustain. But it compounds over time in ways dirty fuel never will.Impactful Coaching Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Things That Are Making Us Think
I am reading a great new book by Jim Collins called “What To Make of a Life”. Jim Collins spent a decade studying what happens when life forces a reset, the moments he calls cliffs, and how different people navigate them differently. It’s less a self-help book and more a research project on how lives actually unfold. I have found it to be a great read and incredibly helpful.
