How to increase student motivation

I have long been perplexed about how many people seem to lack a specific motivation or goal for their lives (at any given point anyway). Questions on this site often address the issue of student-motivation and there is a lot of research on the topic generally and in the classroom situation. But I have not seen a lot of conclusions about how to increase motivation, aside from general engagement with the students, and I have not read anything conclusive about why students who are old enough could lack direction or goals.

Because I cannot fathom being without a direction in life (and mine has changed many times), perhaps I can effectively inquire in to how this could happen and what to do about it. Some ideas I have had about the lack of goals are:

• learning is too easy, questions answered immediately
• too many possibilities for what to study
• results too far off, as schooling lengthens and work recedes to the far future
• many tempting distractions, like social media and video games
• social pressure against study, academics and work
• discouragement about the future of work and self-determination

I am sure that many other reasons can be proposed. But what would cut through all of these excuses and impell students to decide on a goal for their education? People are motivated either intrinsically by a desire to learn the subject, or extrinsically by a goal that they study to achieve. Negative motivations seem not to have much effect because they are abstract and people don't give them much thought. Also, extrinsic motivations often ultimately fail, as the many 'successful' people who become miserable can attest.

Clearly, the study subject has to be interesting to the student, or they have to be able to visualize a future that learning the subject will help them achieve. There has to be something they want. Now the list above starts to mean something: people have long argued that students should be undistracted and largely work alone so that they can focus. An extreme example would be a monastery. Can we achieve focus while still allowing students to live in the 21st century? Only if they have a goal that is sufficiently compelling to overcome the obstacles they face.

If we rule out extrinsic motivations, the question reduces to: how can we get students interested in a subject that is taught at their school? We could teach more subjects, and more "up to date ones", but schools are already tight on budgets which prevent hiring teachers, even to teach popular and legally mandated courses such as CS. (This is why 1984 WAS like 1984: there were not enough seats, so the entrance requirements went up and up.)

Can nearly any subject be made interesting? Yes! I would like to propose a third method:

Be an interesting person, and be genuinely interested in the students, as it says in "How to Win Friends and Influence People".

When I was in school, I found myself working quite hard on courses that I thought I would never care about, because I cared about the teacher, because she cared about me. Is this something that we can standardize for computer science education, and not end up with disaffected groups?