That's the question the last chapter left hanging — a clear sense of who you are points you somewhere, but it doesn't tell you what you're actually hungry for. So here's a small experiment that two psychologists ran in the 1970s, and it accidentally cracked the whole thing open.
Edward Deci, a researcher at the University of Rochester, gave people a puzzle they already found fun — a three-dimensional block puzzle most people would happily fiddle with for free. Then he split them into two groups. One group got paid a dollar for each puzzle they solved. The other group got nothing. And then, in the part that mattered, he left everyone alone in a room with the puzzle and some magazines, and secretly watched what they did with their free time. The unpaid group kept playing with the puzzle. The paid group, once the money stopped, mostly put it down and reached for the magazines. Paying people to do the thing they already loved made them love it less.
That finding is the seed of an entire framework, and it reframes the problem this whole course has been circling. Deci, along with his longtime collaborator Richard Ryan, built it into Self-Determination Theory — and the core claim is this: you don't actually need approval. You need three deeper things, and approval is just a clumsy, unreliable proxy for two of them. Name those three things and you can finally see what you've been chasing all along.
Let's start with the three. According to Self-Determination Theory — call it SDT for short — every human being runs on three basic psychological needs. The first is autonomy: the feeling that your life is yours, that you're acting from your own values and choices rather than being pushed around by pressure. The second is competence: the sense that you're good at something, that you can handle what's in front of you, that your effort actually lands. And the third is relatedness: the feeling of being connected to other people, of mattering to someone, of belonging.
Deci and Ryan, on the official Self-Determination Theory site, describe these three not as nice-to-haves but as nutriments — their word — the way the body needs vitamins. Feed all three and a person grows, functions well, feels alive. Starve them, and you get the opposite: ill-being, defensiveness, and what they call need-substitutes. Hold onto that phrase. A need-substitute is the junk food of the psyche — something that fills the hole just enough to stop the hunger pang, without ever delivering the actual nutrient.
That's the part most people miss, so it's worth slowing down on. Approval is a need-substitute. When you reach for it, you're not crazy, and you're not vain. You're hungry for something real. The trouble is you're feeding the hunger through the wrong door.
Here's where it gets concrete. Think about why someone fishes for a compliment after a presentation. On the surface they want praise. Underneath, what they're starving for is competence — the genuine, settled knowledge that they did good work. But praise can't actually deliver that. Praise is a stand-in. It tells you what one person thought for one moment, and the second they look away, the hunger comes right back. Real competence comes from the doing — from looking at the work yourself and knowing it's solid. So the approval-seeker is trying to get a competence-vitamin from a relatedness-flavored candy. No wonder it never fills them up.
The same misfire happens with belonging. Picture the person who says yes to every favor, agrees with every opinion, molds themselves to every room. What they want is relatedness — to be connected, to matter to people. But the connection they're buying is connection to a performance, not to them. The room approves of the agreeable mask, and somewhere underneath, the actual person stays unmet and a little lonelier for it. They're getting the candy version of belonging — sugar that leaves you hungrier.
So the through-line tightens here. Approval-seeking is usually competence or relatedness sought through the wrong door — and the door it never opens is autonomy. That's the one approval can't touch at all. The more your behavior is steered by what gets a reaction, the less of your own life you're actually living.
Which brings us back to Deci's puzzle, and the second big idea: the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation comes from inside — you do the thing because it interests you, because it lines up with your values, because the doing itself is the reward. Extrinsic motivation comes from outside — you do it for a grade, a paycheck, a trophy, or, as the positive-psychology literature on SDT puts it plainly, for the respect and admiration of others. Approval, notice, is right there in the extrinsic column.
Now, you might assume those two just add up — that paying someone to do what they already enjoy would make them enjoy it even more. Two motivations stacked, double the drive. That's the obvious reading, and it's exactly wrong. What Deci found is that the external reward crowds out the internal one. This is the part that trips people up, so here's the plain version: when a reward arrives, the brain quietly re-files the activity. It used to be "I do this because I want to." Now it becomes "I do this to get the thing." And the moment the thing stops coming, so does the desire. The paid group dropped the puzzle the instant the dollars dried up.
Bear with this for one more step, because it's the whole game. Approval works exactly like those dollars. Every time you do something good and the real fuel is the applause, you're quietly teaching your own brain to re-file the activity. Writing for the love of it becomes writing for the likes. Being kind because you value kindness becomes being kind to be seen as kind. And the kicker is the same as Deci's: when the audience goes quiet, the motivation collapses, because it was never really yours. You traded an inner fire for an external thermostat — and now you're cold whenever someone else turns the dial down.
If someone stopped you right here and asked why chasing approval leaves people feeling emptier the more they get it — what would you say? Because the applause doesn't feed the need. It crowds out the thing that would.
SDT actually lays this out as a spectrum, and it's a useful map. Deci and Ryan describe a continuum running from completely controlled by the outside world to fully self-directed. Down at one end sits external regulation — pure carrot and stick, doing things only for rewards or to avoid punishment. One small step up is a stage they call introjected regulation, and this one is the approval-seeker's home address. Introjected motivation is, in their words, partly internalized — it includes things like avoiding shame, seeking approval, and protecting the ego. It feels internal, because the pressure is now coming from inside your own head. But it isn't really yours. It's the crowd's voice that you've swallowed whole and mistaken for your own.
Further up the spectrum is where it changes. There's a stage called identified regulation, where you act on values you've consciously decided matter to you, and beyond that, fully autonomous motivation, where the action just flows from who you are. The journey this whole course is describing is, in SDT's terms, a slow walk up that continuum — from doing things because someone might clap, to doing things because they're yours.
Now, there's a tempting wrong turn here, and it's worth naming because a lot of pop psychology drives straight into it. The advice you'll often hear is: stop caring what anyone thinks, become an island, validate yourself and need no one. And SDT says, flatly, no. This is where the framework is sharper than the slogans. Autonomy is one of the three needs — but relatedness is right there beside it, equally real, equally non-negotiable. Deci and Ryan never argued that connection is the problem. They argued that the wrong kind of connection — connection to a mask, approval as a substitute for belonging — is the problem.
There's a contested edge here worth being honest about. Some critics, particularly cross-cultural psychologists, have pushed back on SDT, arguing that autonomy is a Western, individualist value that doesn't travel — that in more collectivist cultures, harmony and approval-seeking are healthy, not pathological. Deci and Ryan's response, and the response I find more convincing, draws a careful line: autonomy doesn't mean independence or doing everything alone. It means volition — that what you do feels like it genuinely comes from you, even when what comes from you is deep devotion to your family or community. A person can autonomously choose connection. The opposite of autonomy isn't togetherness. It's feeling controlled. And on that definition, the need for volition does seem to show up everywhere researchers look.
So the goal was never to stop needing people. The goal is to stop outsourcing your worth to them — to get your relatedness from real connection instead of borrowed approval, your competence from real mastery instead of applause, and your autonomy from the simple, radical act of choosing for yourself.
Strip it down and a few things are doing the real work here. You don't need approval — you need autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and approval is just a need-substitute that fills two of those holes badly and leaves the third empty. External rewards don't add to inner motivation; they crowd it out, which is why the more applause you chase, the less the thing means to you. And autonomy never required loneliness — it only ever required that your life feel like yours.
So the shift the rest of this course is built around is small to say and slow to live: stop doing things for the applause, and start doing them because they're yours. But choosing for yourself only works if you believe your choices actually move things — that the steering wheel is in your hands and not in someone else's. And that belief, it turns out, is its own measurable trait, one you can shift.