> high output individuals usually have intrinsic motivations

I agree a lot that intrinsic motivation is key, changes everything, and I think this is a widescale struggle. But while the motivation is intrinsic, the survival rate of intrinsic motivation is deeply governed by the organization. Many many decent-size and/or moderately-mature organizations create resistance, ongoingly tax motivation, sap our will & sense that we can influence things, can change things, can take control.

Preserving your team's sense of agency is paramount, but almost always fucked over. The rest of the org (that isn't doing the actual labor) constantly worries, constantly wants to make sure things are going ok, frets & wants to do things when the waterfall product-roadmap isn't going as they hoped or expected. If things are happening off the roadmap, outside of the top-down plan, well, you betcha there's gonna be a lot of meetings & discussions. The company's extrinsic desires are what matters: you, the human resource, are there to crank out the expected work at a predictable rate. Got it? Good. Now stay intrinsically motivated & go tackle the work we've given you!

Very few organizations give their employees real license to do good things, to tackle the work well & encompass broad wins. Doing obviously good & great things might impact the roadmap! Oh no!

In short, there's too many "decision makers," too much management deciding, and too many people checking in & trying to help make sure everyone is spending their times wisely, that "there's not something we can do to speed this up". There's a lot of would-be highly productive people in most orgs, except the org itself is medium/low-performance, eats away & erodes at the sense of autonomy & mastery & purpose (not a huge Daniel Pink fan but this continues to be a good set of dimensions) that are integral to maintaining high output.

Often in many orgs, there's an informal social agreement that some vaunted select people can just do whatever & we'll trust them, but everyone else gets the regular employee treatment. You have to slay the backlog for a couple quarters, non-stop, do only product work, and then you're off the hook.

External factors confound confound confound the intrinsic motivation that we need desperately to keep fueled & stoked. There's so few people who can sympathize or go with us as we do good things, as we set ourselves & the product up for future success, beyond just getting the mundane features cranked out. There's constant skepticism about the 10x hacker, who gets great accolades & is celebrated in the org, but leaves behind them a wake of messy & terrible systems: this too speaks to the visible versus invisible pieces of our job, about what the extrinsic motivators look like and what intrinsically drives a hacker.

Software is massive, & tending to this realm & keeping it technically healthy is largely invisible labor that the organization often lacks competence to see or assess. We're rated superficially, based off the tip of the iceberg that is visible, and come to feel we're living in our own shadows of greatness, unseen, hidden. Yes, the Hacker can continue to find good tasks, good work, to define their own success & enjoy chomping through tasks with abandon. But I see, so often, the distance & dissonance grows, and doing good deeds rarely seems to get easier over time in most orgs. I think there is huge potential in many many people to be high performing, to engage avidly & actively, but the organization & it's quest for certainty, it's drive for reliable consistent output- it's desire to understand while clearly never understanding- quell the ability to work well, to create high-performance.