Pay Day Or Payoff - Which One Are You Working For?

A pay day is a specified day one is paid, usually workers collecting wages from their employers. A payoff is a good result; the advantage or benefit that is gained from doing something worthwhile.

Most people begin their day with the intention or goal of doing something that will bring forth a pay day. For the majority, a job will be a means to this end. But what one has to do in order to experience a payoff cannot be realized until one's motivation, purpose, or mission is determined. In the absence of these things, pay days become more important (along with how much one gets paid). This external incentive, which decreases a person's intrinsic motivation, is appropriately called overjustification in psychology.

Pay days typically come every two weeks. Payoffs often cannot be not be scheduled and are often unpredictable, which puts them out of the reach of instant gratification.

Successful people aren't preoccupied with pay days or distracted from their missions by the pay they aren't receiving or want to receive. Successful people are are obsessed with activities that profit them (i.e., profits their lives or the lives of others), and yield rewards (i.e., provides them with the aforementioned advantages or benefits - which can be financial).

Pay days make people complacent. Payoffs keep people driven.

The question that all of us must ask is whether or not the investment of our time and energy in the work that we do yields the dividends to justify it; not in terms of money made, but by virtue of it being worthwhile in the ways, and in the areas, that will enable us to look back at the end of our journeys and say, "There's nothing else I would have rather done." That's the ultimate payoff. Years of consistently scheduled paydays can never compete with it.