Sacrifice For More Motivation (The Noble Sacrifice)
Every time you say yes to one thing, you say no to a hundred others. But what if that loss — that sacrifice — is actually the secret fuel behind your deepest motivation?
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Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
You can’t do everything. So you have to choose.
Some say you have to prioritize. But does prioritizing actually involve choosing?
Does it involve making the really hard choice? The essential choice?
Sacrifice, instead, forces you to choose.
We already know the power of meaningful choices from Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback. When we have to choose between two irreconcilable goods, or two really bad bads, the choice becomes meaningful.
Core Drives are pulling us in and other Anti Core Drives are pushing us away!
Suddenly our agency matters. Paths diverge. Your future changes.
This might sound a touch dramatic, but if nothing else, life seems to be all about sacrifice.
On the flip side of every decision you make is something you didn’t do, didn’t get to do, didn’t have the time or energy or motivation to do.
And of course, some choices even involve further sacrifice.
The decision to learn the trade of an astrophysicist may involve sacrificing time with the family across many years.
The same could be said for an aspiring all-time-great novelist.
The Noble Sacrifice
Sacrifice is often left out of discussions of top-performing women in the workplace. Many women, and rightfully so, choose to sacrifice career to have kids, raise their children, and build a family.
That is a noble sacrifice.
“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”
That, for many people over and over again, is the sacrifice that, on one hand limits their career, but on the other, augments the total quality of their life.
So let us not too quickly dismiss sacrifice.
Sacrifice in Motivational Design
Sacrifice seems to augment our motivations. It seems to make the things we did choose and will choose to do even more powerful, because the sacrifice itself is of the many things that could have also been done, that were left undone, just so the pursuit of what mattered most could be achieved.
This connects to Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling. When we sacrifice for something larger than ourselves, the sacrifice itself becomes a source of motivation.
It also ties into Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance. The awareness of what you’re giving up (the loss side of sacrifice) sharpens your commitment to what you chose.
Research from the University of Michigan confirms this pattern: approach-motivated sacrifices (those made to pursue something meaningful rather than avoid something negative) boost positive emotions and long-term commitment. The behavioral mechanism resembles what Norton, Mochon, and Ariely identified in the IKEA Effect: the more effort and sacrifice you invest, the more you value the outcome.
In the Octalysis Framework, this maps to a powerful intersection: Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession (you value what you sacrificed for) meets Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment (the sacrifice itself becomes a milestone of progress).
Maybe more sacrifice should be included in our motivational designs, and more human empathy employed toward our users, who are also humans, in making the tough choices they face.
We are all making a sacrifice at almost every moment of our day.
For more thought-provoking design and gamification discussions prompted by input from an active community of thinkers, check out Octalysis Prime.
Related Reading
- The Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design
- Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling
- Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance
- Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback
- The Endowment Effect: Forces Behind Ownership & Possession
- White Hat vs Black Hat Gamification
- What is Gamification?
- Books by Yu-kai Chou