Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

On the second day, during which Group A participants were paid for each successful configuration and Group B participants were not, the unpaid group behaved mostly as they had during the first free-choice period. But the paid group suddenly got really interested in Soma puzzles. On average, the people in Group A spent more than five minutes messing with the puzzle, perhaps getting a head start on that third challenge or gearing up for the chance to earn some beer money when Deci returned. This makes intuitive sense, right? It’s consistent with what we believe about motivation: Reward me and I’ll work harder.

In an echo of what Harlow discovered two decades earlier, Deci revealed that human motivation seemed to operate by laws that ran counter to what most scientists and citizens believed. From the office to the playing field, we knew what got people going. Rewards—especially cold, hard cash—intensified interest and enhanced performance. What Deci found, and then confirmed in two additional studies he conducted shortly thereafter, was almost the opposite. “When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity,” he wrote.5 Rewards can deliver a short-term boost—just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off—and, worse, can reduce a person’s longer-term motivation to continue the project.

The problem is that most businesses haven’t caught up to this new understanding of what motivates us. Too many organizations—not just companies, but governments and nonprofits as well—still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. They continue to pursue practices such as short-term incentive plans and pay-for-performance schemes in the face of mounting evidence that such measures usually don’t work and often do harm. Worse, these practices have infiltrated our schools, where we ply our future workforce with iPods, cash, and pizza coupons to “incentivize” them to learn. Something has gone wrong.

Drive has three parts. Part One will look at the flaws in our reward-and-punishment system and propose a new way to think about motivation. Chapter 1 will examine how the prevailing view of motivation is becoming incompatible with many aspects of contemporary business and life. Chapter 2 will reveal the seven reasons why carrot-and-stick extrinsic motivators often produce the opposite of what they set out to achieve. (Following that is a short addendum, Chapter 2a, that shows the special circumstances when carrots and sticks actually can be effective.) Chapter 3 will introduce what I call “Type I” behavior, a way of thinking and an approach to business grounded in the real science of human motivation and powered by our third drive—our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Play a game with me and I’ll try to illustrate the point. Suppose somebody gives me ten dollars and tells me to share it—some, all, or none—with you. If you accept my offer, we both get to keep the money. If you reject it, neither of us gets anything. If I offered you six dollars (keeping four for myself), would you take it? Almost certainly. If I offered you five, you’d probably take that, too. But what if I offered you two dollars? Would you take it? In an experiment replicated around the world, most people rejected offers of two dollars and below.7 That makes no sense in terms of wealth maximization. If you take my offer of two dollars, you’re two dollars richer. If you reject it, you get nothing. Your cognitive calculator knows two is greater than zero—but because you’re a human being, your notions of fair play or your desire for revenge or your simple irritation overrides it.

We hang on to bad investments longer than we should, because we feel far sharper pain from losing money than we do from gaining the exact same amount.

Routine, not-so-interesting jobs require direction; nonroutine, more interesting work depends on self-direction. One business leader, who didn’t want to be identified, said it plainly. When he conducts job interviews, he tells prospective employees: “If you need me to motivate you, I probably don’t want to hire you.”

The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table.

Two weeks later, back in the classroom, teachers set out paper and markers during the preschool’s free play period while the researchers secretly observed the students. Children previously in the “unexpected-award” and “no-award” groups drew just as much, and with the same relish, as they had before the experiment. But children in the first group—the ones who’d expected and then received an award—showed much less interest and spent much less time drawing. 2 The Sawyer Effect had taken hold. Even two weeks later, those alluring prizes—so common in classrooms and cubicles—had turned play into work. To be clear, it wasn’t necessarily the rewards themselves that dampened the children’s interest. Remember: When children didn’t expect a reward, receiving one had little impact on their intrinsic motivation. Only contingent rewards—if you do this, then you’ll get that—had the negative effect.

“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.”

For a quick test of problem-solving prowess, few exercises are more useful than the “candle problem.” Devised by psychologist Karl Duncker in the 1930s, the candle problem is used in a wide variety of experiments in behavioral science. Follow along and see how you do. You sit at a table next to a wooden wall and the experimenter gives you the materials shown below: a candle, some tacks, and a book of matches. The candle problem presented. Your job is to fix the candle to the wall so that the wax doesn’t drip on the table. Think for a moment about how you’d solve the problem. Many people begin by trying to tack the candle to the wall. But that doesn’t work. Some light a match, melt the side of the candle, and try to adhere it to the wall. That doesn’t work either. But after five or ten minutes, most people stumble onto the solution, which you can see below.

The key is to overcome what’s called “functional fixedness.”

How much faster did the incentivized group come up with a solution? On average, it took them nearly three and a half minutes longer.7 Yes, three and a half minutes longer. (Whenever I’ve relayed these results to a group of businesspeople, the reaction is almost always a loud, pained, involuntary gasp.) In direct contravention to the core tenets of Motivation 2.0, an incentive designed to clarify thinking and sharpen creativity ended up clouding thinking and dulling creativity. Why? Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus. 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.

Of the first group, 52 percent of the women decided to go ahead and donate blood. They were altruistic citizens apparently, willing to do a good deed for their fellow Swedes even in the absence of compensation. And the second group? Motivation 2.0 would suggest that this group might be a bit more motivated to donate. They’d shown up, which indicated intrinsic motivation. Getting a few kronor on top might give that impulse a boost. But—as you might have guessed by now—that’s not what happened. In this group, only 30 percent of the women decided to give blood. Instead of increasing the number of blood donors, offering to pay people decreased the number by nearly half. Meanwhile, the third group—which had the option of donating the fee directly to charity—responded much the same as the first group. Fifty-three percent became blood donors.

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.

The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road.

Up pops another bug in Motivation 2.0. One reason most parents showed up on time is that they had a relationship with the teachers—who, after all, were caring for their precious sons and daughters—and wanted to treat them fairly. Parents had an intrinsic desire to be scrupulous about punctuality. But the threat of a fine—like the promise of the kronor in the blood experiment—edged aside that third drive. The fine shifted the parents’ decision from a partly moral obligation (be fair to my kids’ teachers) to a pure transaction (I can buy extra time). There wasn’t room for both. The punishment didn’t promote good behavior; it crowded it out.

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.

For routine tasks, which aren’t very interesting and don’t demand much creative thinking, rewards can provide a small motivational booster shot without the harmful side effects. In some ways, that’s just common sense. As Edward Deci, Richard Ryan, and Richard Koestner explain, “Rewards do not undermine people’s intrinsic motivation for dull tasks because there is little or no intrinsic motivation to be undermined.”

Let’s put this insight about rewards and routines into practice. Suppose you’re a manager at a small nonprofit organization. Your design team created a terrific poster promoting your group’s next big event. And now you need to send the poster to twenty thousand members of your organization. Since the costs of outsourcing the job to a professional mailing firm are too steep for your budget, you decide to do the work in-house. Trouble is, the posters came back from the printer much later than you expected and they need to get in the mail this weekend. What’s the best way to enlist your staff of ten, and maybe a few others, in a massive weekend poster mailing session? The task is the very definition of routine: The people participating must roll up the posters, slide them into the mailing tubes, cap those tubes, and apply a mailing label and the proper postage. Four steps—none of them notably interesting. One managerial option is coercion. If you’re the boss, you could force people to spend their Saturday and Sunday on this mind-numbing project. They might comply, but the damage to their morale and long-term commitment could be substantial. Another option is to ask for volunteers. But face it: Most people can think of far better ways to spend a weekend. So in this case, an “if-then” reward might be effective. For instance, you could promise a big office-wide party if everybody pitches in on the project. You could offer a gift certificate to everyone who participates. Or you c...

The essential requirement: Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete.

In other words, where “if-then” rewards are a mistake, shift to “now that” rewards—as in “Now that you’ve finished the poster and it turned out so well, I’d like to celebrate by taking you out to lunch.”

At this point, by limiting rewards for nonroutine, creative work to the unexpected, “now that” variety, you’re in less dangerous waters. But you’ll do even better if you follow two more guidelines. First, consider nontangible rewards. Praise and positive feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies. In fact, in Deci’s original experiments, and in his subsequent analysis of other studies, he found that “positive feedback can have an enhancing effect on intrinsic motivation.”6 So if the folks on the design team turn out a show-stopping poster, maybe just walk into their offices and say, “Wow. You really did an amazing job on that poster. It’s going to have a huge impact on getting people to come to this event. Thank you.” It sounds small and simple, but it can have an enormous effect.

Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.

The Motivation 3.0 operating system—the upgrade that’s needed to meet the new realities of how we organize, think about, and do what we do—depends on what I call Type I behavior. Type I behavior is fueled more by intrinsic desires than extrinsic ones. It concerns itself less with the external rewards to which an activity leads and more with the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself. At the center of Type X behavior is the second drive. At the center of Type I behavior is the third drive.

However, once compensation meets that level, money plays a different role for Type I’s than for Type X’s. Type I’s don’t turn down raises or refuse to cash paychecks. But one reason fair and adequate pay is so essential is that it takes people’s focus off money, which allows them to concentrate on the work itself. By contrast, for many Type X’s, money is the table. It’s why they do what they do. Recognition is similar. Type I’s like being recognized for their accomplishments—because recognition is a form of feedback.

Ultimately, Type I behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Type I behavior is self-directed. It is devoted to becoming better and better at something that matters. And it connects that quest for excellence to a larger purpose. Some might dismiss notions like these as gooey and idealistic, but the science says otherwise. The science confirms that this sort of behavior is essential to being human—and that now, in a rapidly changing economy, it is also critical for professional, personal, and organizational success of any kind. So we have a choice. We can cling to a view of human motivation that is grounded more in old habits than in modern science. Or we can listen to the research, drag our business and personal practices into the twenty-first century, and craft a new operating system to help ourselves, our companies, and our world work a little better. It won’t be easy. It won’t happen overnight. So let’s get started.

That’s why, a little past noon on a rainy Friday in Charlottesville, only a third of CEO Jeff Gunther’s employees have shown up for work. But Gunther—entrepreneur, manager, capitalist—is neither worried nor annoyed. In fact, he’s as calm and focused as a monk. Maybe that’s because he didn’t roll into the office himself until about an hour ago. Or maybe that’s because he knows his crew isn’t shirking. They’re working—just on their own terms. At the beginning of the year, Gunther launched an experiment in autonomy at Meddius, one of a trio of companies he runs. He turned the company, which creates computer software and hardware to help hospitals integrate their information systems, into a ROWE—a results-only work environment.

“Some people (outside of the company) thought I was crazy,” he says. “They wondered, ‘How can you know what your employees are doing if they’re not here?’ ” But in his view, the team was accomplishing more under this new arrangement. One reason: They were focused on the work itself rather than on whether someone would call them a slacker for leaving at three P.M. to watch a daughter’s soccer game. And since the bulk of his staff consists of software developers, designers, and others doing high-level creative work, that was essential. “For them, it’s all about craftsmanship. And they need a lot of autonomy.”

“More companies will migrate to this as more business owners my age come up. My dad’s generation views human beings as human resources. They’re the two-by-fours you need to build your house,” he says. “For me, it’s a partnership between me and the employees. They’re not resources. They’re partners.” And partners, like all of us, need to direct their own lives.

This offbeat off-day gave birth to several ideas for new products and plenty of repairs and patches on existing ones. So Cannon-Brookes decided to make the practice a permanent part of the Atlassian culture. Now, once a quarter, the company sets aside an entire day when its engineers can work on any software problem they want—only this time, “to get them out of the day to day,” it must be something that’s not part of their regular job. At two P.M. on a Thursday, the day begins. Engineers, including Cannon-Brookes himself, crash out new code or an elegant hack—any way they want, with anyone they want. Many work through the night. Then, at four P.M. on Friday, they show the results to the rest of the company in a wild-and-woolly all-hands meeting stocked with ample quantities of cold beer and chocolate cake. Atlassian calls these twenty-four-hour bursts of freedom and creativity “FedEx Days”—because people have to deliver something overnight. And deliver Atlassians have. Over the years, this odd little exercise has produced an array of software fixes that might otherwise never have emerged. Says one engineer, “Some of the coolest stuff we have in our product today has come from FedEx Days.” This isn’t a pay-for-performance plan, grounded in the mechanistic assumptions of Motivation 2.0. It’s an autonomy plan, nicely tuned to the alternate strains of Motivation 3.0. “We’ve always taken the position that money is only something you can lose on,” Cannon-Brookes told me. “If you...

Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T’s: their task, their time, their technique, and their team.

This practice has a sturdy tradition and a well-known modern expression. Its pioneer was the American company 3M. In the 1930s and 1940s, 3M’s president and chairman was William McKnight, a fellow who was as unassuming in his manner as he was visionary in his thinking. McKnight believed in a simple, and at the time, subversive, credo: “Hire good people, and leave them alone.” Well before it was fashionable for managers to flap on about “empowerment,” he made a more vigorous case for autonomy. “Those men and women to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way,” he wrote in 1948.7 McKnight even encouraged employees to engage in what he called “experimental doodling.”

These walled gardens of autonomy soon became fertile fields for a harvest of innovations—including Post-it notes. Scientist Art Fry came up with his idea for the ubiquitous stickie not in one of his regular assignments, but during his 15 percent time. Today, Post-its are a monumental business: 3M offers more than six hundred Post-it products in more than one hundred countries. (And their cultural impact might be even greater. Consider: But for McKnight’s early push for autonomy, we’d be living in a world without any small yellow squares stuck to our computer monitors. A chilling thought indeed.) According to 3M’s former head of research and development, most of the inventions that the company relies on even today emerged from those periods of bootlegging and experimental doodling.8

By Cannon-Brookes’s back-of-the-blog calculations, seventy engineers, spending 20 percent of their time over just a six-month period, amounted to an investment of $1 million. The company’s chief financial officer was aghast. Some project managers—despite Atlassian’s forward-thinking ways, the company still uses the m-word—weren’t happy, because it meant ceding some of their control over employees. When a few wanted to track employees’ time to make sure they didn’t abuse the privilege, Cannon-Brookes said no. “That was too controlling. I wanted to back our engineers and take it on faith that they’ll do good things.” Besides, he says, “People are way more efficient about 20 percent time than regular work time. They say, ‘I’m not going to [expletive]ing do anything like read newsfeeds or do Facebook.’

Without sovereignty over our time, it’s nearly impossible to have autonomy over our lives. A few Type I organizations have begun to recognize this truth about the human condition and to realign their practices. More, no doubt, will follow. “In the past, work was defined primarily by putting in time, and secondarily on getting results. We need to flip that model,” Ressler told me. “No matter what kind of business you’re in, it’s time to throw away the tardy slips, time clocks, and outdated industrial-age thinking.”

If that weren’t trying enough, call center reps have little decision latitude and their jobs are often the very definition of routine. When a call comes in, they listen to the caller—and then, in most cases, tap a few buttons on their computer to retrieve a script. Then they follow that script, sometimes word for word, in the hope of getting the caller off the line as quickly as possible. It can be deadening work, made drearier still because managers in many call centers, in an effort to boost productivity, listen in on reps’ conversations and monitor how long each call lasts. Little wonder, then, that call centers in the United States and the UK have annual turnover rates that average about 35 percent, double the rate for other jobs. In some call centers the annual turnover rate exceeds 100 percent, meaning that, on average, none of the people working there today will be there a year from now.

The people who remain receive decent pay, and just as important, they have autonomy over technique. When a call comes in, here’s their job: Serve the customer. No scripts. No monitoring. No timing of calls either. If a call takes one minute, great; if it takes one hour, no problem.

For example, at the organic grocery chain Whole Foods, the people who are nominally in charge of each department don’t do the hiring. That task falls to a department’s employees. After a job candidate has worked a thirty-day trial period on a team, the prospective teammates vote on whether to hire that person full-time.

Csikszentmihalyi, who by then was teaching at the University of Chicago and running his own psychology lab, clipped on a pager and asked his graduate students to beep him randomly several times each day. Whenever the pager sounded, he recorded what he was doing and how he was feeling. “It was so much fun,” he recalled in his office at the Claremont Graduate University in southern California, where he now teaches. “You got such a detailed picture of how people lived.” On the basis of this test run, he developed a methodology called the Experience Sampling Method. Csikszentmihalyi would page people eight times a day at random intervals and ask them to write in a booklet their answers to several short questions about what they were doing, who they were with, and how they’d describe their state of mind. Put the findings together for seven days and you had a flip book, a mini-movie, of someone’s week. Assemble the individual findings and you had an entire library of human experiences.

Indeed, the two self-theories take very different views of effort. To incremental theorists, exertion is positive. Since incremental theorists believe that ability is malleable, they see working harder as a way to get better. By contrast, says Dweck, “the entity theory . . . is a system that requires a diet of easy successes.” In this schema, if you have to work hard, it means you’re not very good. People therefore choose easy targets that, when hit, affirm their existing abilities but do little to expand them. In a sense, entity theorists want to look like masters without expending the effort to attain mastery.

Finally, the two types of thinking trigger contrasting responses to adversity—one that Dweck calls “helpless,” the other, “mastery-oriented.” In a study of American fifth- and sixth-graders, Dweck gave students eight conceptual problems they could solve, followed by four they could not (because the questions were too advanced for children that age). Students who subscribed to the idea that brainpower is fixed gave up quickly on the tough problems and blamed their (lack of) intelligence for their difficulties. Students with a more expansive mindset kept working in spite of the difficulty and deployed far more inventive strategies to find a solution. What did these students blame for their inability to conquer the toughest problems? “The answer, which surprised us, was that they didn’t blame anything,” Dweck says. The young people recognized that setbacks were inevitable on the road to mastery and that they could even be guideposts for the journey.

Was it physical strength and athleticism? Intellect? Leadership ability? Well-roundedness? None of the above. The best predictor of success, the researchers found, was the prospective cadets’ ratings on a noncognitive, nonphysical trait known as “grit”—defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”10 The experience of these army officers-in-training confirms the second law of mastery: Mastery is a pain.

As they explained, “Whereas the importance of working harder is easily apprehended, the importance of working longer without switching objectives may be less perceptible . . . in every field, grit may be as essential as talent to high accomplishment.”14

Another doctor, one who lacks a Ph.D. but has a plaque in the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, put it similarly. “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.”

For Cézanne, one critic wrote, the ultimate synthesis of a design was never revealed in a flash; rather he approached it with infinite precautions, stalking it, as it were, now from one point of view, now from another.... For him the synthesis was an asymptote toward which he was for ever approaching without ever quite reaching it. 17 This is the nature of mastery: Mastery is an asymptote. You can approach it. You can home in on it. You can get really, really, really close to it. But like Cézanne, you can never touch it. Mastery is impossible to realize fully. Great athletes often say that they can—that they must—become better. They say it when they’re amateurs. They say it after their best outing or at the end of their finest season. They’re pursuing mastery. That’s well-known. What’s less well-known is that they understand that they’ll never get it. It will always hover beyond their grasp. The mastery asymptote is a source of frustration. Why reach for something you can never fully attain? But it’s also a source of allure. Why not reach for it? The joy is in the pursuit more than the realization. In the end, mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.

But the relief quickly dissipates—because almost as soon as the sigh fades, people enter the third stage. Upon comprehending that they could have another twenty-five years, sixty-year-old boomers look back twenty-five years—to when they were thirty-five—and a sudden thought clonks them on the side of the head. “Wow. That sure happened fast,” they say. “Will the next twenty-five years race by like that? If so, when am I going to do something that matters? When am I going to live my best life? When am I going to make a difference in the world?” Those questions, which swirl through conversations taking place at boomer kitchen tables around the world, may sound touchy-feely. But they’re now occurring at a rate that is unprecedented in human civilization. Consider: Boomers are the largest demographic cohort in most western countries, as well as in places like Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the United States alone has about 78 million boomers—which means that, on average, each year more than four million Americans hit this soulsearching, life-pondering birthday.2 That’s more than 11,000 people each day, more than 450 every hour. In other words, in America alone, one hundred boomers turn sixty every thirteen minutes. Every thirteen minutes another hundred people—members of the wealthiest and best-educated generation the world has ever known—begin reckoning with their mortality and asking deep questions about meaning, significance, and what...

Words matter. And if you listen carefully, you might begin to hear a slightly different—slightly more purpose-oriented—dialect. Gary Hamel, whom I mentioned above, says, “The goals of management are usually described in words like ‘efficiency,’ ‘advantage,’ ‘value,’ ‘superiority,’ ‘focus,’ and ‘differentiation.’ Important as these objectives are, they lack the power to rouse human hearts.” Business leaders, he says, “must find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals, such as honor, truth, love, justice, and beauty.”8 Humanize what people say and you may well humanize what they do.

That’s the thinking behind the simple and effective way Robert B. Reich, former U.S. labor secretary, gauges the health of an organization. He calls it the “pronoun test.” When he visits a workplace, he’ll ask the people employed there some questions about the company. He listens to the substance of their response, of course. But most of all, he listens for the pronouns they use. Do the workers refer to the company as “they”? Or do they describe it in terms of “we”? “They” companies and “we” companies, he says, are very different places.