Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

Chapter 1. The Rise and Fall of Motivation 2.0 Societies, like computers, have operating systems—a set of mostly invisible instructions and protocols on which everything runs. The first human operating system—call it Motivation 1.0—was all about survival. Its successor, Motivation 2.0, was built around external rewards and punishments. That worked fine for routine twentieth-century tasks. But in the twenty-first century, Motivation 2.0 is proving incompatible with how we organize what we do, how we think about what we do, and how we do what we do. We need an upgrade. Chapter 2. Seven Reasons Carrots and Sticks (Often) Don’t Work . . . When carrots and sticks encounter our third drive, strange things begin to happen. Traditional “if-then” rewards can give us less of what we want: They can extinguish intrinsic motivation, diminish performance, crush creativity, and crowd out good behavior. They can also give us more of what we don’t want: They can encourage unethical behavior, create addictions, and foster short-term thinking. These are the bugs in our current operating system. Chapter 2a. . . . and the Special Circumstances When They Do Carrots and sticks aren’t all bad. They can be effective for rule-based routine tasks—because there’s little intrinsic motivation to undermine and not much creativity to crush. And they can be more effective still if those giving such rewards offer a rationale for why the task is necessary, acknowledge that it’s boring, and allow people auto...