What a Holocaust survivor, a jazz musician, and the Wright Brothers can teach us about motivation
- Michael Amenta
- Nov 24, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 15
Purpose isn't a byproduct of success. It's a precondition for it.
The Don Draper leadership model has a simple theory for employee motivation: money.
It's a clean, transactional philosophy for those who don't want to think too hard about their people's needs, and most management studies fail to support it.
One of the most resonant counter-arguments, however, comes from another context entirely. Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, documented a simple but radical alternative in Man's Search for Meaning: that meaning is a precondition for survival. In Dachau, those without a strong sense of purpose withered quickly under the same conditions where those who felt a sense of mission endured.
As Frankl noted, even in the most inhuman conditions there remained '...an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph; or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate.' Nietzsche identified the same principle a century earlier: 'If you have your why for life, you can get by with almost any how.'
If meaning could provide motivation strong enough to sustain bodies through deadly conditions, it's worth asking what it might unlock in environments that are merely difficult.
Thriving on meaning
The Wright Brothers had no government funding, no institutional backing, and no formal engineering credentials. Samuel Langley, on the other hand, had all three with a War Department contract and a team of trained engineers. But the brothers got to flight first because building a flying machine was the organizing purpose of their lives. Langley was doing a job; the brothers were on a mission.
The same performance dynamic appears in modern organizations. B Corps, which must pass rigorous third-party impact assessments, have grown to over 10,000 companies that have collectively outperformed the average performance-first organization. And Public Benefit Corporations, which are legally bound to balance profit with their declared mission, have also grown to more than 10,000 and count among them many of the fastest-rising upstarts today, such as Anthropic.
Provide meaning first
Organizational practice starts with selection. Hire for values and mission alignment, but with maximum diversity of background to get a rich confluence of ideas and skills. From there, Wynton Marsalis provides a model for leadership from decades of teaching jazz:
The first thing I have my students do is write a mission statement... And based on that mission statement I teach them. The fundamental thing I want to accomplish is that I want them to rise above the cycle of punishment and reward... You must actualize it. If you want to learn something, I can’t stop you. If you don’t want to learn something, I can’t teach you.
Autonomy isn't a concession to workers; it's the mechanism for team prosperity. Individual contributors have direct knowledge of the problem, the customer, and the work that no manager or executive with second-hand information can fully replicate. As observed by Jane Jacobs in The Life and Death of American Cities: 'A fool can put on his own clothes better than a wise man can do it for him.'
Instead, a leader's job is to edit — by ensuring decisions are grounded in evidence, market knowledge, and experience — without smothering their teammates' connection to the mission. Calibrate how much space each person needs — some thrive when pushed, others when delicately pulled — while holding a consistent standard for quality. Focus on implicit incentives via audacious, positively framed goals that are aligned to the mission. (Explicit incentives work against creative goals, even though they help with menial tasks.) When someone is stuck, go Socratic. Ask questions that help them draw their own conclusions rather than imposing answers. Then, give real discretion over budget, resources, and roadmap.
To embrace this practice, it's necessary to believe that your teammates can compete with the best in your field. Remember that most successful people have experienced profound levels of rejection before recognition (Abraham Lincoln, among many others). Could it be that your teammates who demonstrate a growth mindset have enormous potential and only need adequate resources and a clear, aligned mandate?
Build authenticity and trust
Meaning and autonomy require a foundation of trust that comes from teammates believing their leader genuinely wants what's best for them. Google's large study on team effectiveness, Project Aristotle, confirmed that teams engage and perform best when individuals feel their wellbeing is a collective concern. (St. Paul expressed this principle with precision: 'we are all members of one another, and when the health of one member suffers, the health of the whole body is lowered.')
Earn trust through dedication — get your hands dirty when things get hard. Accept legitimate complaints about the organization rather than deflecting them. Be unambiguously on the side of your teammates.
This principle can extend further than most leaders are comfortable taking it. If a teammate's goal is to leave for a better opportunity, help them get there. Support them to do their best work, advocate for them, and applaud them when they land somewhere new. The colleague who leaves well becomes an ally, a reference, and maybe a future collaborator.
Seize unforeseen potential
People endure and excel when they feel their efforts connect to something larger than the immediate task, and when they have genuine ownership over how they contribute to it.
The concentration camp is an extreme case of the power of meaning, but the principle is universal. The leader's job is not to motivate; it's to create the conditions where motivation is inevitable because meaning is visible, autonomy is real, and trust is earned. Do that, and the ceiling on what your team can achieve stops being yours to set.