Nobody paid me to run the Devil o' the Highlands: on design, not motivation

Part of Stories that stick.

Nobody paid me

Nobody paid me to run the Devil o' the Highlands.

Sixty-nine kilometres through the Scottish Highlands. It rained.

Nobody gave me a certificate for turning up. No one tracked my satisfaction score at the end. There was no completion badge waiting in an inbox, no feedback form, no line manager asking how I'd found it.

And yet I trained for months.

What actually kept me going

I've thought quite a lot about why. It would be easy to say I was simply motivated, that I wanted it badly enough. But motivation is a slippery thing to build on. It comes and goes. On a dark weekday morning, it is rarely the thing that gets you out of the door.

What I'd actually done was build something into my week that made starting easy, and stopping slightly embarrassing.

That is the part I keep coming back to. Starting was easy because the decision had already been made: it was part of how my week worked, not something I had to talk myself into each time. Stopping was slightly embarrassing because it would have meant breaking something I'd set up and committed to. Neither of those things relies on feeling inspired. They rely on how the week was put together.

Same person, same brain

Now compare that with what we ask of people after a few days of paid corporate training.

They are paid to be there. They often get a certificate. Someone usually tracks their satisfaction score at the end. By most of the measures we use, it looks like a success.

Same person. Same brain. Much less behaviour change.

I don't think the difference is motivation. I think it's design.

If the same person can sustain months of effort for something nobody pays them to do, then the problem with a lot of training isn't the people in the room. It is what happens, or doesn't happen, around the training: whether anything in their week makes applying it easy, and whether anything makes quietly dropping it feel like a step backwards.

Out there, in the rain

The race itself was a different test.

Out there, the pressure kept mounting. Rain. Slippery ground. Everything outside me made it harder to keep pushing — those external factors that make you want to stop, to leave the plan behind.

Anyone who has done something long and hard will recognise that feeling. It rarely arrives as one big moment of crisis. It builds. Conditions turn against you, and the plan you made in comfort starts to look optional. The quiet voice suggesting you ease off, or stop altogether, gets a little more persuasive with every slippery step.

That is the moment all the training was for. Not the good days, when everything goes to plan, but the conditions that push you to abandon it.

What I bring back to work

That's exactly what I bring back to work.

We teach people skills. We design the sessions, run the practice, check that the understanding is there. In a calm room, most people can show you they know what to do.

But work has its own rain and slippery ground. Deadlines tighten. Stakes rise. Someone senior wants a shortcut. The external factors pile up, and the new way of doing things starts to look like a luxury.

So the question I can't shake is this: do those skills hold when conditions push people to quit?

I don't have a neat answer. But I'm fairly sure it won't be found in a certificate or a satisfaction score. It will be found in whether we've designed for the moment the pressure arrives.

Over to you

We teach people skills. But do those skills hold when conditions push people to quit? I'd love to know.