The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Rating
3/5
Date Started
8/14/2023
Date Completed
8/18/2023
Five Powerful Quotes from the Book
Quote 1
“In 1999 (Edward) Deci and two colleagues reanalyzed nearly three decades of studies on the subject to confirm the findings. ‘Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation,’ they determined. ‘When institutions – families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example – focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people’s behavior,’ they do considerable long-term damage.
“Try to encourage a kid to learn math by paying her for each workbook page she completes – and she’ll almost certainly become more diligent in the short term and lose interest in math in the long term. Take an industrial designer who loves his work and try to get him to do better by making his pay contingent on a hit product – and he’ll almost certainly work like a maniac in the short term, but become less interested in his job in the long term. As one leading behavioral science textbook puts it, ‘People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation toward the activity.’ …
“Give your kids an allowance and some chores – but don’t combine them. Here’s why an allowance is good for kids: Having a little of their own money, and deciding how to save or spend it, offers a measure of autonomy and teaches them to be responsible with cash.
“Here’s why household chores are good for kids: Chores show kids that families are built on mutual obligations and that family members need to help each other.
“Here’s why combining allowances with chores is not good for kids. By linking money to the completion of chores, parents turn an allowance into an ‘if-then’ reward. This sends kids a clear (and clearly wrongheaded) message: In the absence of a payment, no self-respecting child would willingly set the table, empty the garbage, or make her own bed. It converts a moral and familial obligation into just another commercial transaction – and teaches that the only reason to do a less-than-desirable task for your family is in exchange for payment. This is a case where combining two good things gives you less, not more. So keep allowance and chores separate, and you just might get that trash can emptied. Even better, your kids will begin to learn the difference between principles and payoffs.”
Pithy Summary
Quote 2
“‘Those artists who pursued their painting and sculpture more for the pleasure of the activity itself than for extrinsic rewards have produced art that has been socially recognized as superior,’ the study said. ‘It is those who are least motivated to pursue extrinsic rewards who eventually receive them.’ …
“Think for a moment about the great artists of the last hundred years and how they worked – people like Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock. Unlike for the rest of us, Motivation 2.0 was never their operating system. Nobody told them: You must paint this sort of picture. You must begin painting precisely at eight-thirty A.M. You must paint with the people we select to work with you. And you must paint this way. The very idea is ludicrous.
“But you know what? It’s ludicrous for you, too. Whether you’re fixing sinks, ringing up groceries, selling cars, or writing a lesson plan, you and I need autonomy just as deeply as a great painter.
“However, encouraging autonomy doesn’t mean discouraging accountability. Whatever operating system is in place, people must be accountable for their work. But there are different ways to achieve this end, each built on different assumptions about who we are deep down. Motivation 2.0 assumed that if people had freedom, they would shirk – and that autonomy was a way to bypass accountability. Motivation 3.0 begins with a different assumption. It presumes that people want to be accountable – and that making sure they have control over their task, their time, their technique, and their team is the most effective pathway to that destination…
“‘We’ve always taken the position that money is only something you can lose on,’ (Mike) Cannon-Brookes (CEO of Atlassian) told me. ‘If you don’t pay enough, you can lose people. But beyond that, money is not a motivator. What matters are these other features.’ And what a few future-facing businesses are discovering is that one of these essential features is autonomy – in particular, autonomy over four aspects of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and whom they do it with. As Atlassian’s experience shows, Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T’s: their task, their time, their technique, and their team.”
Pithy Summary
Quote 3
“The Russian economist Anton Suvorov has constructed an elaborate econometric model to demonstrate this effect, configured around what’s called ‘principal-agent theory.’ Think of the principal as the motivator – the employer, the teacher, the parent. Think of the agent as the motivatee – the employee, the student, the child. A principal essentially tries to get the agent to do what the principal wants, while the agent balances his own interests with whatever the principal is offering…
“By offering a reward, a principal signals to the agent that the task is undesirable. (If the task were desirable, the agent wouldn’t need a prod.) But that initial signal, and the reward that goes with it, forces the principal onto a path that’s difficult to leave. Offer too small a reward and the agent won’t comply. But offer a reward that’s enticing enough to get the agent to act the first time, and the principal ‘is doomed to give it again in the second.’ There’s no going back. Pay your son to take out the trash – and you’ve pretty much guaranteed the kid will never do it again for free. What’s more, once the initial money buzz tapers off, you’ll likely have to increase the payment to continue compliance.
“As Suvorov explains, ‘Rewards are addictive in that once offered, a contingent reward makes an agent expect it whenever a similar task is faced, which in turn compels the principal to use rewards over and over again.’ And before long, the existing reward may no longer suffice. It will quickly feel less like a bonus and more like the status quo – which then forces the principal to offer larger rewards to achieve the same effect.’ …
“What makes this response interesting for our purposes is that the same basic physiological process – this particular brain chemical surging to this particular part of the brain – is what happens in addiction. The mechanism of most addictive drugs is to send a fusillade of dopamine to the nucleus accumbens. The feeling delights, then dissipates, then demands another dose. In other words, if we watch how people’s brains respond, promising them monetary rewards and giving them cocaine, nicotine, or amphetamines look disturbingly similar. This could be one reason that paying people to stop smoking often works in the short run. It replaces one (dangerous) addiction with another (more benign) one.”
Pithy Summary
Quote 4
“In 1962, Clare Boothe Luce, one of the first women to serve in the U.S. Congress, offered some advice to President John F. Kennedy. ‘A great man,’ she told him, ‘is a sentence.’ Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was: ‘He preserved the union and freed the slaves.’ Franklin Roosevelt’s was: ‘He lifted us out of a Great Depression and helped us win a world war.’ Luce feared that Kennedy’s attention was so splintered among different priorities that his sentence risked becoming a muddled paragraph.
“You don’t have to be a president – of the United States or of your local gardening club – to learn from this tale. One way to orient your life toward greater purpose is to think about your sentence. Maybe it’s: ‘He raised four kids who became happy and healthy adults.’ Or ‘She invented a device that made people’s lives easier.’ Or ‘He cared for every person who walked into his office regardless of whether that person could pay.’ Or ‘She taught two generations of children how to read.’
“As you contemplate your purpose, begin with the big question: What’s your sentence?”
Pithy Summary
Quote 5
“The more prominent salary, perks, and benefits are in someone’s work life, the more they can inhibit creativity and unravel performance… The better strategy is to get compensation right – and then get it out of sight. Effective organizations compensate people in amounts and in ways that allow individuals to mostly forget about compensation and instead focus on the work itself. Here are three key techniques.
“1. Ensure internal and external fairness. The most important aspect of any compensation package is fairness. And here, fairness comes in two varieties – internal and external. Internal fairness means paying people commensurate with their colleagues. External fairness means paying people in line with others doing similar work in similar organizations…
“2. Pay more than average. The pay-more-than-average approach can offer an elegant way to bypass ‘if-then’ rewards, eliminate concerns about unfairness, and help take the issue of money off the table. It’s another way to allow people to focus on the work itself. Indeed, other economists have shown that providing an employee a high level of base pay does more to boost performance and organizational commitment than an attractive bonus structure… Paying great people a little more than the market demands, (George) Akerlof and (Janet) Yellen found, could attract better talent, reduce turnover, and boost productivity and morale…
“3. If you use performance metrics, make them wide-ranging, relevant, and hard to game. Imagine you’re a product manager and your pay depends largely on reaching a particular sales goal for the next quarter. If you’re smart, or if you’ve got a family to feed, you’re going to try mightily to hit that number. You probably won’t concern yourself with the quarter after that, or the health of the company, or whether the firm is investing enough in research and development. And if you’re nervous, you might cut corners to reach your quarterly goal. Now imagine you’re a product manager and your pay is determined by these factors: your sales for the next quarter, your sales in the current year, the company’s revenue and profit in the next two years, levels of satisfaction among your customers, ideas for new products, and evaluations of your co-workers. If you’re smart, you’ll probably try to sell your product, serve your customers, help your teammates, and, well, do good work. When metrics are varied, they’re harder to finagle.”
Pithy Summary
About the Book
Date Published
12/29/2009
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us – Audiobook | Ebook | Hardcover – “Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink. In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
“Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of life. He examines the three elements of true motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.”
About the Author
Daniel H. Pink – “
Additional Resources
Tags
Business | Economics | Management | Nonfiction