Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

A sense of autonomy has a powerful effect on individual performance and attitude.

autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school and in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological well-being.

The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.

lack of individual discretion at work as the main explanation for declining productivity and job satisfaction in the UK.

That’s true even of the kinder, gentler Motivation 2.1 approach that whispers sweetly about things like “empowerment” and “flexibility.”

Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T’s: their

task, their time, their technique, and their team.

William McKnight, a fellow who was as unassuming in his manner as he was visionary in his thinking.

“Hire good people, and leave them alone.”

The freedom to pick my boundaries.”

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.

“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.”

First, many psychologists and economists have found that the correlation between money and happiness is weak—that past a certain (and quite modest) level, a larger pile of cash doesn’t bring people a higher level of satisfaction. But a few social scientists have begun adding a bit more nuance to this observation. According to Lara Aknin and Elizabeth Dunn, sociologists at the University of British Columbia, and Michael Norton, a psychologist at the Harvard Business School, how people spend their money may be at least as important as how much money they earn. In particular, spending money on other people (buying flowers for your spouse rather than a bauble for yourself) or on a cause (donating to a religious institution rather than going for an expensive haircut) can actually increase our subjective well-being.

“pro-social” spending into corporate policy.

even when we do get what we want, it’s not always what we need. “People

It’s in our nature to seek purpose. But that nature is now being revealed and expressed on a scale that is demographically unprecedented and, until recently, scarcely imaginable. The consequences could rejuvenate our businesses and remake our world.

One way to orient your life toward greater purpose is to think about your sentence.

Here’s something you can do to keep yourself motivated. At the end of each day, ask yourself whether you were better today than you were yesterday. Did you do more? Did you do it well? Or to get specific, did you learn your ten vocabulary words, make your eight sales calls, eat your five servings of fruits and vegetables, write your four pages? You don’t have to be flawless each day. Instead, look for small measures of improvement such as how long you practiced your saxophone or whether you held off on checking email until you finished that report you needed to write. Reminding yourself that you don’t need to be a master by day three is the best way of ensuring you will be one by day three thousand. So before you go to sleep each night, ask yourself the small question: Was I a little better today than yesterday?

Sagmeister,”

Each card contains a single, often inscrutable, question or statement to push you out of a mental rut.

Involve people in goal-setting. If you’d rather set your own goals than have them foisted upon you, why should the people you’re working for believe otherwise? A considerable body of research shows that individuals are far more engaged when they’re pursuing goals they had a hand in creating. So bring employees into the process. They could surprise you: People often have higher aims than the ones you assign them.

Trouble is, most of our workforce policies are designed for the 15 percent.

But what if we flipped our thinking—and designed our workplace policies for the 85 percent rather than the 15 percent? In his book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, New York University professor Clay Shirky argues that when we design systems that assume bad faith from the participants, and whose main purpose is to guard against nasty behavior, we often foster the very behavior we’re trying to deter. People will push and push the limits of formal rules, search for every available loophole, and look for ways to game the system when defenders aren’t watching. By contrast, a web of rules that assumes good faith—as most autonomy-centered policies do—can actually encourage

Begin with a diverse team. As

Make your group a “no competition” zone. Pitting coworkers against one another in the

Try a little task-shifting.

Animate with purpose, don’t motivate with rewards

through strategic subversion by people frustrated with the status quo.

PAY MORE THAN AVERAGE

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.

Higher wages could actually reduce a company’s costs.

The pay-more-than-average approach can offer an elegant way to bypass “if-then” rewards, eliminate concerns about unfairness, and help ...

providing an employee a high level of base pay does more to boost performance and organizational commitment than an attractive bonus structure.

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 much 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.

When metrics are varied, they’re harder to finagle. In addition, the gain for reaching the metrics shouldn’t be too large.

This wasn’t because they were unethical; it was because they were rational humans responding logically to a particular incentive

we are compelled to make our salespeople’s work more interesting, to set better goals and encourage teamwork.”

and fair base salaries; multiple, long-term, hard-to-game metrics; and a congenial work environment—apply here, too. Besides, if the only reason somebody is selling your product is to snag a commission, perhaps you’ve hired the wrong salesperson.

Autonomy, mastery, and purpose are integral to the human condition, so it’s no surprise that a number of writers—from psychologists to journalists to novelists—have explored these three elements and probed what they mean for our lives. This list of books, arranged alphabetically by author, isn’t exhaustive—but it’s a good starting point for anyone interested in cultivating a Type I life.