76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important

I guess. But if we're taking stabs at conclusions, you could also say something like:

"Only 76% of high performance employees feel they are compensated adequately [enough to no longer be motivated by money]."

Suddenly we're writing an article about how a quarter of high performers feeling like they're getting a raw deal, instead of writing about transcendental work.

This study is suspect. First, using self-identification as high-performance is already troublesome. Second, the author never defines what an HPE is, and the most concrete specification is from this article they backlink to:

  >For example, in a software or tech company they would be:
  > Software Engineers
  > Data Scientists
  > Visual Designers
  > Structural & 3-D Prototype Designers
  > Narrative Developers

This certainly doesn't agree with what almost anybody else uses to define high-performance employees.

Third, the question they use to resolve this is from their survey:

  >Are you motivated more by mastery of skill/craft, or motivated more by earning money?
  > Mastery of skill or craft
  > Money
  > Other

I don't think we can draw any conclusion from the fact that 76% of the people who answered this public google form chose 'mastery'.

Yes. Whenever you're collecting feedback from a person (or group of people), their own self-image and ego is by far the most important factor in their responses.

It would not even be considered a lie by most. There's just not necessarily any relationship between their self-conception and reality. People are terrible at assessing their own motives (and from this arises marketing, whose goal is to program the target to believe they desire a specific product/brand).

Most people do not see themselves as greedy, and I would guess the respondents to this survey are not in dire financial straits, so they wouldn't make an exceptional circumstance override for themselves (assuming they're the type who'd take such a survey seriously enough to consider that in the first place).

The question, essentially, can be interpreted as "Do you consider yourself noble or non-noble?" Of course, most people consider themselves noble.

This same ego-driven self-narrative is the reason that someone can take a lot of hollabaloo, dress it up in gaudy language, throw in some charts and equations to support the pre-conception, and get people to believe it's insightful and credible.

> Alternative headline: "76% of HPEs are paid well enough to not be motivated by money"

At least in my case, it's more that I'm willing to accept investment in human capital (my skill set growing) in lieu of cash. I do expect that investment to pay off in future returns of some sort (job security, future salary).

It's not that I don't care about salary anymore.

Why would high performing employees with office jobs be "lower class"? As others mentioned once you hit a certain income threshold and job security, then you can start prioritizing the parts of the job you enjoy. This is who the article is talking about.

This means keeping a $60k job instead of sacrificing your happiness for $90-100k.

That's hardly quasi-religious phenomena. It's a luxury of skilled people living in a western society.

If anything it's the result of the push back against capitalism, such as the type of comment you just made. We're all told since we're kids to do what we love. And to since the late 1980s this anti-consumerism Fight Club-style mantra has been pushed hard to the point it's basically mainstream now, which is why marketing is so hard these days, even kids see through ads and demand authenticity.

The primary issue of inequality is largely the result of the fact that ~90% of recent job growth since the 2008 recession has been temporary/contract jobs, with little job security. These aren't the type of people who are valuing 'mastery' over money'. Middle class job growth is largely dead. And big incumbents dominate markets and global economic systems push wealth to a few. Entrepreneurship has also declined recently. There's plenty of reasons.

I don't suspect it's some cultural, original sin, type of thing that we should all feel guilty about.