Micro-motives: how artists and creatives can find joy and purpose in business

I am an artist and a writer, and I am happy working at a marketing consultancy. I don’t feel like a sellout. I don’t worry that my talents are unused, or my purpose unfulfilled. And I arrived—emerging from a tangled forest of eclectic work experiences and wildly varied interests—at this place of sanguine satisfaction by identifying my micro-motives.

I can attribute a significant portion of my on-the-job happiness to my colleagues, who see my skills and recognize my worth, and to the values-based culture we’ve built at Mix. But those external factors would likely not be enough to sustain me if I couldn’t also reconcile my internal desires and inclinations with the work we do. That alignment happened serendipitously, in a lightning-strike moment, early in my marketing career, when I caught the tail-end of a radio show on NPR as I drove through a COVID-shuttered town in the rain.

It was 2020 and—surprise—things were bad. Pre-pandemic I had worked (most recently) as a fine art painting instructor and a monologue performance coach, who also conducted cognitive enrichment activity sessions in a dementia unit at a nursing home. COVID shut down all the art studios I taught in, as well as the tutoring company where I coached. The nursing home, to protect the residents, eliminated the comings and goings of extracurricular staff.

I went for a couple of months with no paid work at all, before stumbling upon a LinkedIn post from a dance class friend. She needed freelancers who could write and who had some graphic design skills to help her execute a massive marketing campaign for a household-name technology company in a short amount of time.

I sent her a message on a rising tide of false confidence and desperation: I can write. I can design things. Pick me.

To my surprise, she did, and I guess I did alright because that project led to another, and another, and another. By the dawn of 2021 I had to face the fact that I now worked in marketing, primarily with clients in the technology sector. Dance class friend*, it turned out, is a brilliant, seasoned, and well-connected principal in the field. With her as my mentor and guide, I added words and acronyms that felt like a foreign language to my vocabulary. I learned about software integrations and cloud automation. I joined client meetings and strategized. I made eBooks and slide decks and sell-sheets, and I was good at it.

But here is the thing that bothered me: I liked it. 

Let’s pause for a moment here and talk about judging others. We all do it—hopefully just in our heads. You see a woman with her eight kids at the park or the grocery store and you have thoughts. Whether those thoughts are “I’d love to have a big family, how nice” or “nope, nopity, nope” depends on who you are. You watch a hospital drama on TV and think “I could be a doctor” or “why would anyone want to do that?” or “ewww blood!”

Whatever the situation, your judgments help you figure out what you do—or definitely don’t—want out of life.

As a creative writer and an artist by a dozen varied definitions, I still had long-held ideas about what I should be doing with my time and talents when I found myself working what felt very much like a traditional, lucrative (heaven forefend!) office job in marketing.

I should have been editing my novel, or my poetry collection. I should have been experimenting more with songwriting or producing more paintings. I should not be so excited to develop a user-friendly messaging hierarchy for a complex report of customer insights.

But I also had to admit that those concepts of should and shouldn’t stemmed from a clichéd framework of stereotypical ideas and were never really mine. When I was honest with myself in considering creatives who lived the tortured, starving-artist lifestyle (a romanticized version of productivity culture, and just as toxic) my true judgment was that it was kind of dumb—the unnecessary suffering—and I never fully saw myself as one of them.

Yet could I ever regard a career in marketing as honoring my creativity? Could I settle the bulk of my working hours happily on this path and acknowledge reconciliation of all my artistic and intellectual interests in a unified direction? In short, could I commit to this career path and strive to excel without feeling that I was abandoning myself?

So, it’s raining, and I’m crying for many reasons, as we all did in those years, and I turn on the radio.

I catch a few words about social psychology, and something called a micro-motive, which intrigues me, so I tune in and hear this story unfold:

(Adapted and abridged from Ideas.TED.com.)

Saul Shapiro likes aligning physical objects with his hands. When he encounters something awry, like a wobbly wheel on a shopping cart or a tilted picture frame, his mind is drawn to manipulate the components until they are square and right. You won’t find the urge to align things on any list of universal motives, yet for Saul, this desire is genuine, potent, and deeply personal.

In college, Saul’s design professor instructed the class to carve a sphere out of a block of wood by hand. Saul became obsessed. After chiseling a rough sphere, he placed it in a bag that he carried wherever he went. All day long, he put his hand inside the bag to feel for uneven spots, then used sandpaper to smooth them. It filled him with gratification. When Saul turned in the sphere, it was so perfect that his teacher refused to believe he hadn’t used machine tools.

You might be thinking, that’s nice … but what profession could harness this micro-motive? One possibility is orthodontics, where the central task is aligning people’s teeth. Another possibility is electrical engineering, which is what Saul chose. He was hired to create a physical interface that would convert an electrical signal on an old-style copper wire onto a laser signal on a newly invented fiber-optic cable. It required precisely aligning a semiconductor chip the size of a grain of sand with a fiber the width of a human hair—within a fraction of a micron.

Saul did it, and his interface ended up widely adopted by the telecommunications industry. It also made his employer a fortune. Saul received only a small bonus. This disparity led him to question his role. “I would see guys with MBAs making presentations, and they were making much more money than me and getting to run the company, too,” he says. “I started to think to myself, Maybe I should be one of those guys.”

Saul abandoned a fulfilling engineering career and moved into middle management. But he did not enjoy supervising others, presenting his ideas, or persuading people to his point of view. His most potent micro-motives—working with his hands, tinkering with gadgets and mechanisms, doing math calculations, working alone, and aligning objects—never got much use.

Saul spent the next 16 years as a middle manager at media and tech organizations. By his late forties, he could no longer find work but couldn’t return to engineering. His knowledge was outdated. Saul Shapiro was unfulfilled, and not making money—the reason he had changed careers in the first place.

Saul made the decision to investigate buying a franchise business and met with a broker.

One surprising franchise caught Saul’s eye: upholstery repair. Even though he had no experience with it, he recognized that success depends on one’s ability to align fabrics and patches, a process he knew he’d enjoy. He’d be able to use his hands and immediately see the fruits of his labor. He could do jobs from home so he wouldn’t have to own a shop, and he could work by himself so he wouldn’t need to oversee employees.

In 2013, Saul opened an upholstery-repair franchise in Manhattan. He mastered the trade, and now he does repairs for Broadway shows, TV personalities and Times Square hotels. “People who know me best would agree that I’m happier now than with anything else I have done with my career,” he says. “I enjoy what I do almost every day and I’m financially secure. In the end, I figured out how to align my livelihood to my nature.”

Readers, as the story ended, I pulled my car over and sat in wonder. This thing the radio voices were talking about—a micro-motive—seemed to suddenly make sense of all my wandering interests across the years. At the same time, it allowed me to access within myself the permission I needed to be okay with being happy in a desk job in marketing. It made it okay for me to be good at it, and to enjoy it.

They said that micro-motives are “the collection of super-specialized things that make your particular heart sing.”1

There was a through-line to all of it—and in an instant I could see it as clearly as if I’d always known it was there: my micro-motives are to present ideas well, and to make things better than they are. Those are the closely related threads that tie it all together.

I write because I want to use words to present ideas well. I love editing because I want to make existing writing better.

I paint, sew, draw, and design because I want to use visual media to present ideas well. I love rebranding, brand audits, asset redesign, and video editing because I want to make existing visual media better.

I am drawn to consumer psychology, visual hierarchy, and user experience principles because they are the tools that aid in presenting ideas well and making things better.

Arranging flowers, decorating cakes, interior design, tablescapes… it all fit into place.

Even when I was singing songs and doing memory exercises with the sweet old folks in the dementia ward, I loved it because I challenged myself to somehow present ideas that they could, in the maze of their minds, still connect with—and to make, for that moment, their experience of life that day better.  

That day I became, on the side of the road in a rainstorm, a micro-motive evangelist to everyone I met.

Imagine this: in a classroom full of children—maybe even in your own childhood memories—how many children will claim that they want to be a travel influencer (rock star back in my day), a professional athlete, president, or an astronaut when they grow up? I’d venture a guess at 40% in elementary school-age kids.

Statistically, though, how likely is it that those kids will become those things? It isn’t, frankly. And it isn’t kind to tell them that they can “do anything” without providing the how-to instruction and opportunities to educate them and challenge their convictions to those lofty goals. But neither is it kind or helpful to discourage their interests. What if we could help them, instead, to discover their micro-motives?

Teacher: Emma, why do you want to be an astronaut?

Emma: Because I want to sit in a quiet place and solve math problems on a computer.

Teacher: That’s wonderful. Here’s a list of a whole bunch of other careers that would also give you that opportunity.

Or

Teacher: Leo, why do you want to be a professional baseball player?

Leo: Because I love talking about baseball.

Teacher: You’re also a good writer, Leo. Have you ever heard of a sports journalist? Or a sports announcer?

If only we’d all had such guidance as children. If, like me, you didn’t—it’s not too late.

Pull the car over. It doesn’t even have to be raining, and you don’t have to cry. Apply that conversation to yourself and your adult experience. Why are you drawn to the particular tasks, jobs, and hobbies that you are? When you look at others around you, what judgments do you make about their lives, careers, choices, and hobbies?

Once you’ve identified your micro-motives, how can you reframe your own perception of the choices you’ve made and the path you’re on to accept yourself and allow for your own happiness? If you haven’t been true to yourself, perhaps now is the time.

I’ll be here. Presenting ideas well and making things better in my own little happy corner of the marketing world.

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*Dance class friend = our very own Kathryn Courtney, President of Mix Consulting.

1. https://ideas.ted.com/how-can-you-uncover-your-best-self-start-by-judging-other-people-really/