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September 25 - October 3, 2017
“When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity,”
“that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive
In short, we are irrational—and predictably so, says economist Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational,
If someone’s baseline rewards aren’t adequate or equitable, her focus will be on the unfairness of her situation and the anxiety of her circumstance.
“that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”
“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
That’s helpful when there’s a clear path to a solution. They help us stare ahead and race faster. But “if-then” motivators are terrible for challenges like the candle problem. As this experiment shows, the rewards narrowed people’s focus and blinkered the wide view that might have allowed them to see new uses for old objects.
Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on—can sometimes have dangerous side effects.
Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.
Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one’s sights and pushing toward the horizon.
Without a healthy baseline, motivation of any sort is difficult and often impossible.
It argues that we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
(which argued that helplessness was learned, rather than innate, behavior)
If you believed in the “mediocrity of the masses,” as he put it, then mediocrity became the ceiling on what you could achieve.
For Type I’s, the main motivator is the freedom, challenge, and purpose of the undertaking itself; any other gains are welcome, but mainly as a bonus.
Type I behavior, which is built around intrinsic motivation, draws on resources that are easily replenished and inflict little damage.
Type I behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
“The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote.”
This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.
“If you don’t pay enough, you can lose people. But beyond that, money is not a motivator.
Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T’s: their task, their time, their technique, and their team.
encouraging autonomy doesn’t mean discouraging 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 a pathway to that destination.
You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye- on-the- object look.
Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.
“The desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it’s in the arts, sciences, or business.”
“Even in low-autonomy jobs,” Wrzesniewski and Dutton write, “employees can create new domains for
Mastery is a mindset. “Figure out for yourself what you want to be really good at, know that you’ll never really satisfy yourself that you’ve made it, and accept that that’s okay.”
“Being a professional,” Julius Erving once said, “is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.
The first two legs of the Type I tripod, autonomy and mastery, are essential. But for proper balance we need a third leg—purpose, which provides a context for its two mates.
“Purpose provides activation energy for living,”
“As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can create alone,”
“I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate,”
“The goals of management are usually described in words like ‘efficiency,’ ‘advantage,’ ‘value,’ ‘superiority,’ ‘focus,’ and ‘differentiation.’
Business leaders, he says, “must find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals, such as honor, truth, love, justice, and
“The value of a life can be measured by one’s ability to affect the destiny of one less advantaged. Since death is
an absolute certainty for everyone, the important variable is the quality of life one leads between the times of birth and death.”
The science shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to live a life of purpose.
the richest experiences in our lives aren’t when we’re clamoring for validation from others, but when we’re listening to our own voice—doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause larger than ourselves.
Set a reminder on your computer or mobile phone to go off at forty random times in a week.
Paying great people a little more than the market demands, Akerlof and Yellen found, could attract better talent, reduce turnover, and boost productivity and morale.
We’re bribing students into compliance instead of challenging them into engagement. We can do better. And we should. If we want to raise Type I kids, at school and at home, we need to help them move toward autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
GIVE YOUR KIDS AN ALLOWANCE AND SOME CHORES—BUT DON’T COMBINE THEM
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.
The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life; Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention; and the classic Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing
I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I’m guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that’s worth more to most of us than money.”
Carrots & sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery & purpose.
When it comes to motivation, there’s a gap between what science knows and what business does. Our current business operating system—which is built around external, carrot-and-stick motivators—doesn’t work and often does harm. We need an upgrade. And the science shows the way. This new approach has three essential elements: (1) Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives; (2) Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
Mastery is a mindset: It requires the capacity to see your abilities not as finite, but as infinitely improvable. Mastery is a pain: It demands effort, grit, and deliberate practice. And mastery is an asymptote: It’s impossible to fully realize, which makes it simultaneously frustrating and alluring.
