Rewards are useful

Few months back, one evening I was strolling on the busy main road near my house. The whole day was not much rewarding for me so I thought I would try some luck out there, with no specific aim. Suddenly I found the hefty gentleman walking in front of me barging into the medical shop on our right. Within a split second I found him catching hold of the young man at the counter and slapping on his face. He hit the shop man so hard that he had done enough for another month as far as “moral licensing” was concerned! (“moral licensing” is the idea that doing one good action can result in doing fewer good actions in the future, which is a psychological phenomenon).

Why do I say his action was good? Please read on. Once I saw the incident, I stayed back to know why at all it happened. Even though I didn’t have any immediate plans to open a medical shop, I thought it would be worthwhile to know the reasons why one medical store person could be battered so badly. As expected the hefty man narrated the story. Apparently his daughter was walking a few yards ahead of him. Medical store fellow, since there was no much rewarding business happening for him, found another innovative way to keep him motivated. He made paper bullets and using an elastic band like a catapult he targeted the young lady walking across. Curiously I looked around the area. I could find many paper bullets scattered, in complete rest probably after successfully hitting beautiful targets! And the hefty reward the shop man received that day had a long enduring effect; the medical shop is permanently closed now, no more medicines, no more bullets!

Rewards are important in our lives. For example, take the life of a person working in a software industry. It is much rewarding right? He starts with coding, becomes a software programmer. He gets the kick out of it when each of his programs runs successfully. After some time, writing a program is not interesting to him, he moves to design. Once he starts designing, he finds that his salary and position in the organization is not satisfactory. He gets promotion and more salary, and then he finds his job is not rewarding enough. So it goes on and on as long as software development cycle goes on and he is able to see the organization structure from as high as possible. So there is a reward mechanism which is constantly working within him to keep motivated and to do more and to rise more.

Why do we like rewards?  What enables us not only to see the rewards but aslo to take action to achieve them? It’s because of Dopamine. It seems among many centres we have in brain, one of them is “reward and pleasure” centre. There is a hormone, a neurotransmitter called “dopamine” which controls this centre. It’s a good thing to have this dopamine, absence of which will result in Parkinson’s disease- as long as the drive is for good rewards, else it might cause us to behave erratically, to earn bad rewards!

Einstein once fully frustrated said “when god created the ass, he gave him a thick skin”. If a genius like Einstein had, we would surely go through those rough patches in life. Whatever good things we do, we would not be getting enough rewards to keep our dopamine highly active. On the contrary, we might well be criticized. In those few occasions, forget about “moral licensing”, keep trying to do more good stuff, continue to project them - momentarily assuming that you are somebody with a thick skin, if not a complete ass.