Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

Whatever your place in the birth order, consider what it’s like to be the third child in a family. You don’t get a say in choosing the people around you. They’re there when you arrive. Worse, one or two of them might not be so glad to see you. And getting rid of even just one of them is usually impossible.

THE ART OF AUTONOMY

encouraging autonomy doesn’t mean discouraging accountability.

Mastery

the second element of Type I behavior: mastery—the desire to get better and better at something that matters.

The highest, most satisfying experiences in people’s lives were when they were in flow. And this previously unacknowledged mental state, which seemed so inscrutable and transcendent, was actually fairly easy to unpack. In flow, goals are clear.

Most important, in flow, the relationship between what a person had to do and what he could do was perfect. The challenge wasn’t too easy. Nor was it too difficult. It was a notch or two beyond his current abilities, which stretched the body and mind in a way that made the effort itself the most delicious reward. That balance produced a degree of focus and satisfaction that easily surpassed other, more quotidian, experiences. In flow, people lived so deeply in the moment, and felt so utterly in control, that their sense of time, place, and even self melted away. They were autonomous, of course. But more than that, they were engaged. They were, as the poet W. H. Auden wrote, “forgetting themselves in a function.”

After that, Falk moved to Green Cargo, an enormous logistics and shipping company in Sweden. There, he developed a method of training managers in how flow worked. Then he required them to meet with staff once a month to get a sense of whether people were overwhelmed or underwhelmed with their work—and to adjust assignments to help them find flow. After two years of managerial revamping, state-owned Green Cargo became profitable for the first time in 125 years—and executives cite its newfound flowcentricity as a key reason.

Chen calls his game flOw. And it’s been a huge hit. People have played the free online version of the game more than three million times. (You can find it at http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/cloud/flowing/). The paid version, designed for the PlayStation game console, has generated more than 350,000 downloads and collected a shelf full of awards.

THE THREE LAWS OF MASTERY

Mastery Is a Mindset

For instance, consider goals. Dweck says they come in two varieties—performance goals and learning goals. Getting an A in French class is a performance goal. Being able to speak French is a learning goal. “Both goals are entirely normal and pretty much universal,” Dweck says, “and both can fuel achievement.”8 But only one leads to mastery. In several studies, Dweck found that giving children a performance goal (say, getting a high mark on a test) was effective for relatively straightforward problems but often inhibited children’s ability to apply the concepts to new situations.

Type X behavior often holds an entity theory of intelligence, prefers performance goals to learning goals, and disdains effort as a sign of weakness. Type I behavior has an incremental theory of intelligence, prizes learning goals over performance goals, and welcomes effort as a way to improve at something that matters. Begin with one mindset, and mastery is impossible. Begin with the other, and it can be inevitable.

Mastery Is a Pain

Mastery hurts. Sometimes—many times—it’s not much fun.

in every field, grit may be as essential as talent to high accomplishment.”14

“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.”16

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.

In the end, mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.

Purpose

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?”

THE PURPOSE MOTIVE

“Purpose provides activation energy for living,” psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi told me in an interview.

We see the first stirrings of this new purpose motive in three realms of organizational life—goals, words, and policies.

Goals

The aims of these Motivation 3.0 companies are not to chase profit while trying to stay ethical and law-abiding. Their goal is to pursue purpose—and to use profit as the catalyst rather than the objective.

Words

From the first sentence, the oath rings with the sounds of Motivation 3.0: “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,” it begins. And on it goes for nearly five hundred words. “I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate,” the oath-takers pledge. “I will strive to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide.”

A brief reminder of the purpose of their work doubled their performance.

Policies

THE GOOD LIFE

“One cannot lead a life that is truly excellent without feeling that one belongs to something greater and more permanent than oneself.” MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

Failing to understand this conundrum—that satisfaction depends not merely on having goals, but on having the right goals—can lead sensible people down self-destructive paths. If people chase profit goals, reach those goals, and still don’t feel any better about their lives, one response is to increase the size and scope of the goals—to seek more money or greater outside validation. And that can “drive them down a road of further unhappiness thinking it’s the road to happiness,” Ryan said.

A healthy society—and healthy business organizations—begins with purpose and considers profit a way to move toward that end or a happy by-product of its attainment.

The Type I Toolkit

P.S. I’d love to hear your suggestions for what to include in future editions of the Type I Toolkit. Send your ideas directly to me at dhp@danpink.com.

Type I for Individuals: Nine Strategies for Awakening Your Motivation

GIVE YOURSELF A “FLOW TEST”

Set a reminder on your computer or mobile phone to go off at forty random times in a week. Each time your device beeps, write down what you’re doing, how you’re feeling, and whether you’re in “flow.”

FIRST, ASK A BIG QUESTION . .

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.

As you contemplate your purpose, begin with the big question: What’s your sentence?

THEN KEEP ASKING A SMALL QUESTION

So before you go to sleep each night, ask yourself the small question: Was I a little better today than yesterday?

TAKE A SAGMEISTER

every seven years, Sagmeister closes his graphic design shop, tells his clients he won’t be back for a year, and goes off on a 365-day sabbatical.

GET UNSTUCK BY GOING OBLIQUE

If you’re working on a project and find yourself stymied, pull an Oblique card from the deck. These brain bombs are a great way to keep your mind open despite constraints you can’t control. You can buy the deck at www.enoshop.co.uk/ or follow one of the Twitter accounts inspired by the strategies, such as: http://twitter.com/oblique_chirps.

JUST SAY NO—WITH A LIST