Drive
The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Author: Daniel H. Pink
Personal Score: 6.7/10
Goodreads Score: 3.94/5
Get it here on Amazon.
🎨Impressions
- Daniel Pink sets out to create a new framework of organizational and personal motivation that reflects humanity better than the outdated and sometimes toxic incentive-based structure that precedes it. By borrowing from a variety of research around motivation, it does feel like Pink has accomplished this. This is a fantastic starter guide to a new and exciting style of motivation. The book itself could be at least a third shorter, it holds a lot of fluff and a lengthy appendix filled with chapters that probably could have remained as blog posts but I appreciate the information.
🚀This Book in 3 Bullets
- There is a new operating system for motivation emerging that more accurately represents the complex nature of human beings. This new system favors intrinsic (Ie. pride in work, personal progress, self-direction) rewards over extrinsic (Ie. bonuses, promotions, punishments).
- This new motivation distinguishes two types of potential behavior (Pink names Type I and X, (I = Intrinsic/X = External)) where Type X is used for hierarchical tasks (step by step logical, non creative, tasks) and Type I should be used for heuristic and creative work (where the solutions are open-ended and require deeper levels of thought). Type I behavior is the foundation of the new motivation system.
- This new motivation framework can be supported through three fundamental areas (either personally or interpersonally):
Autonomy - Having control over your work (like timeframes, tasks, teams, and techniques)
Mastery - Promoting individual progress and deeper involvement.
Purpose - Developing and encouraging a deeply rooted purpose behind the work project.
📜Book Summaries & Key Lessons
- There have been two major updates to our understanding of human motivation. Pink compares them to software updates within our operating system.
Motivation 1.0 - Has been the most prominent and it's the Sexual Drive that makes us want to be appealing to mates. This is one of our fundamental drives.
Motivation 2.0 - Coined the carrot and stick method, Gained popularity a couple of thousand years ago as societies and culture developed, leaders created external rewards (and punishments) to motivate people to complete work.
Motivation 2.1 - A psychologist applied Maslow's hierarchy of needs to refine the system of incentives to be specific to the outcomes business organizations wanted. Commissions, bonuses, and share incentives were created to extrapolate the carrot and sticks method.
- Pink wants to step up our software to accurately reflect the complex nature of human motivation and introduce motivation 3.0. Now it's very clear that human behavior is not a result of external motivation only, we have intrinsic purposeful drivers that are stronger than extrinsic motivators. We want to be self-directed, work on challenging problems, and feel like our work makes a difference.
- The business industry has used motivation 2.1 since the 30s, however, new companies have disrupted this model and proven repeatedly that there must be a better way. Companies like Wikipedia, Lennox, Mozilla, and more have shown that open source is viable, and people will work for free if the more complex components of motivation are met. Proving that external motivation alone isn't good enough. Beyond this, studies have shown that external motivation demotivates individuals over the long term, especially when those external rewards are reduced! It's time for a change.
- There are two types of tasks:
Algorithm - Tasks that follow a clear and well-defined recipe of instructions to one end goal.
Heuristic - Tasks that are open-ended and require our creative problem solving, trial, and errors to eliminate unrewarding work and seek out successful pathways.
- Rewards narrow our focus, which is good for tasks that have a clear path to completion (algorithmic tasks), but bad for tasks that require problem-solving and creativity.
Chapter 2 - Why Carrots & Sticks Don't Work
- Carrots and Sticks: The Seven Deadly Flaws
- They can extinguish intrinsic motivation - Studies have shown that even people who have enjoyed and completed things for free, will become turned off and take part in an activity less if they are paid or rewarded to do it
- They can diminish performance - They sometimes show a boost in performance in the short term, but largely fall short in the long term.
- They can crush creativity - By causing you to be more narrow-minded, they're terrible for creativity.
- They can crowd out good behavior - This type of incentives can create strategies focused on bad behavior targets, removing good behaviors.
- They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior - Incentives encourage a sole focus on that goal despite consequences.
- They can become addictive - Consistent external rewards become the new normal and individuals will soon feel entitled to them, then greater ones must be imposed to meet the same productivity.
- They can foster short-term thinking - External incentives and yearly bonuses can create a focus around short term financial goals to achieve them and this might contradict longer term financial goals.
Chapter 2A - . . . and the Special Circumstances When They Do
- Situations, where carrots and sticks are required, are inevitable. It's a fundamental piece in our economic engine so stick to these guidelines while you use this method.
For routine tasks:
- Ensure that baseline compensation is adequate and fair. Everything in motivations starts with fairness and openness, if you can't pay adequately, your employees or team should know why?
- During routine tasks, carrots and stick rewards can provide a small motivational booster shot in the short term. Especially if you combine it with the following:
Offer a rationale for why the task is necessary.
Acknowledge that the task is boring.
Allow people to complete the task their own way.
For creative tasks:
- Favor now that ("Now that you've done such a great job, here's this reward...") rewards over if, then ("If you do this, then I will give you..."): It's vital that any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete. Keep in mind that if this becomes predictable, it will become expected.
- Showing appreciation, combined with Now, That rewards (not predictable) is a powerful combination for motivating a team. Give praise when the job is done and specific feedback about the parts that were done really well. Provide useful information, don't use praise to manipulate, do it genuinely and honestly for maximum effectiveness.
Chapter 3 - Type I and Type X
- Type X behavior is fueled more by extrinsic desires than intrinsic ones. Type I behavior is fueled more by intrinsic desires than extrinsic ones. It’s more concerned with the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself. Type X is wanting to be rich, Type I is wanting to be excellent in your craft. A byproduct of being excellent and making an impact is you could end up making a lot of money.
- Here are a few more differences:
Type I behavior is made, not born.
Type I’s almost always outperform Type X’s in the long run.
Type I behavior does not disdain money or recognition.
Type I behavior is an endless resource.
Type I behavior promotes greater physical and mental well-being.
Chapter 4 - Autonomous
- A new form of work environment is promoting self-directed employees as human capital. Offering, employees the ability to choose when and how work gets done. In creative projects, this work style is extremely effective.
- Although the strategy isn't embraced by all companies yet, the examples of companies that succeeded with a self-directed workforce speak for themselves. Google, Atlasia (software company), and Zappos have all taken on this strategy with some companies embracing a strategy in which employees work on whatever they want for 20% of total work time.
- 3M might have been the first company to embrace this style of work which produced the Post-It note.
- This is achieved across four aspects:
Task: Control over what they choose to work on within the scope of their role. What work they do and the projects they work on.
Time: Control of their working schedule within the scope of full-time hours. When they work and when they stop.
Team: Control over who they work with and how they approach teamwork within the scope of effective teamwork.
Technique: Control over how the work gets done. Embracing each employees unique skillset in getting the job done their own way.
Chapter 5 - Mastery
- When individuals become involved in their work and feel like they're gaining credible competency within it, a deep intrinsic motivation ensues.
- Flow - A state of optimal experience; a state of joy, creativity and total involvement in which problems seem to disappear and there is an exhilarating feeling of self-transcendence and control. A term coined and researched by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
- Flow state should be the target state when progressing in your craft, not a lucky by-product. It will improve the rate at which you master it.
3 Laws for Mastery
- Mastery is a Mindset: Carol Dweck has spent years studying motivation in children and adults and revealed that your attitude about your self and ability to learn and grow highly impact your capability to grow. She labels how you see yourself as your Self Theory where people generally fall into one of two styles:
- Growth Mindset (Incremental learner) - Believing that you have the ability to improve over time. This type of Self Theory makes an individual open to feedback, learning and also adds excitement to the process of failure. They see intelligence like weight, it can be trained and improved.
- Fixed Mindset (Entity learner) - Believing that your abilities are static and unchanging. This type of Self Theory makes an individual closed off to feedback and challenges because they don't want to prove unworthy of a task. They see intelligence as height so they don't want to feel short compared to someone tall.
- Mastery is Pain: An individual needs perseverance of effort combined with the passion for a particular long-term goal or end state. AKA. Grit. A study of over 10,000 graduates at the West Point Cadet Beast Barracks program (12-weeks) found that the successful graduates had a strong common denominator in their ability to suffer through grueling circumstances to see their vision through.
- Mastery is Asymptote: In analytic geometry, an asymptote of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero but will never touch. (see blue curves closing in on red and green line). The idea is that mastery is the horizon you see in front of you... You can pursue it but you'll never catch it. However the fun (and fulfillment) is not in arriving at Mastery, it is in pursuit of it.
Chapter 6 - Purpose
- Healthy society and healthy business corporations begins with a purpose.
- The most deeply motivated entrepreneurs, inventors, and activists all lead with a strong purpose. Having the end, in mind and living their days to achieve that end goal.
- "Motivation 2.0 centered on profit maximization. Motivation 3.0 doesn’t reject profits, but it places equal emphasis on purpose maximization."
- Pink goes on to say "purpose provides activation energy for living." Activation energy is known in chemistry as the least required energy to spark a chemical reaction and Pink is saying here that purpose is the first fundamental resource needed to progress in life. A direction that fuels your inner engine.
Final Notes; Toolkits, Exercises, & Resources
Achieving Type I for Individuals & Organizations
- Commit to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Test - Set an alarm to go off at 40 random times throughout the week. Each time it goes off, write down what you are doing, how you're feeling, and whether you're in a flow state. Record your observations and reflect on which activities produced the most flow, which ones take you out of flow, what time frames seemed to have more flow states, and use the information to align your schedule moving forward. A majority of the volunteers experienced a higher awareness for flow while committing to this so it can help others too!
- Write out one sentence that embodies your life's mission and goal. Great men and their missions can be boiled down to one sentence. Abraham Lincoln: “He preserved the union and freed the slaves.” Franklin Roosevelt: “He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.” What is your big sentence? Write it down and each day ask yourself, did I get one step closer to my sentence?
- Remember the 5 steps to mastery:
Deliberate practice has one objective: to improve performance.
Repeat, repeat, repeat. A professional basketball player doesn't practice with 10 free throws after each game, they practice with 500.
Seek constant, critical feedback.
Focus ruthlessly on where you need help.
Prepare for the process to be mentally and physically exhausting.
- **Rules of thumb offers an straightforward exercise**: Get a few blank 3×5 cards. On one of the cards, write your answer to this question: “What gets you up in the morning?” and on the other back side, write your answer to another question: “What keeps you up at night?” Pair your response to a single sentence. And if you don’t like the answers, toss the card and try again until you’ve crafted something you can live with.
- Take a Sagmeister. Instead of leaving retirement for when you're older. take 5 of those years and spread them out throughout your life in 365-day sabbaticals.
- Have a Fed-Ex Day - Set aside 10 - 20% of your employee's workday (or work in general) to purely exploring new ideas and concepts for the business. This practice has been fantastic for employers and created products you love today like Post-It notes.
- The Zen of Compensation - The best way to deal with money is to remove money from the picture by 1) paying fair and adequate wages and even 2) compensating higher than the average and if you have to use performance metrics 3) make sure they're wide-ranging, highly relevant, and difficult to game.
9 Tips for Parents:
- Apply the three-part Type I Test to homework - Ask these questions 1) Am I offering students any autonomy over how and when to complete this homework? 2) Does this assignment promote mastery by offering something novel and engaging activity and 3) Do students understand the purpose of this assignment in the greater context? The idea here is to reframe homework into homelearning.
- Have a Fed-Ex Day - Where kids come up with projects themselves and get to creatively explore their own interests.
- Try a DIY report card - Ask students to list their leaning goals and then ask them to grade themselves on those goals.
- Give kids allowances and chores BUT DON'T COMBINE THEM - Combinign will turn chores into work but you want your children to see them as a part of being a family.
- Offer praise correctly - Don't praise outcomes, intelligence and ability. Praise work effort, strategy, and ethic. Be specific in your praise and keep it private.
- Help kids see the big picture - Why is this subject important in the greater context? How is it relevant?
- Check out these five schools using the 3.0 motivation strategies - Big Picture Learning, Sudbury Valley School, The Tinkering School, (Gever Tulley’s talk), Puget Sound Community School, Motessori Schools.
- Take a class from Unschoolers - These are families that don't use a regular curriculum. They simply let their kids go as deep and thorough into topics that interest them as they wish. You don't have to Unschool your kids, but use the philosophy to encourage mastery! Resource here.
- Turn students into teachers - Have students take turns teaching what they learn, to other classmates.
The Motivation 3.0 Sixteen Book Reading List:
- Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James Carse
- Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin
- Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci with Richard Flaste
- Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
- Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
- Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet by Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon
- Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
- Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
- The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal by David Halberstam
- Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn
- Once a Runner by John Parker, Jr
- The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
- Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler
- The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter Senge
Six Motivation 3.0 Gurus:
- Douglas McGregor
- Peter Drucker
- Jim Collins
- Cali Ressler & Jody Thompson
- Gary Hamel
🎴Top Quotes
- "The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind - creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers." P. 14
- "The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind-computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands.The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind-creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers.These people-artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers-will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys." P. 14
- "Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity." P. 29
- " 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. Indeed, most of the scandals and misbehavior that have seemed endemic to modern life involve shortcuts." P. 51
- "Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one's sights and pushing toward the horizon." P. 58
- "Today it’s economically crucial and personally rewarding to create something that is also beautiful, whimsical, or emotionally engaging." P. 62
- "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." P. 71
- "Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement." P. 108
- "Asking "Why?" can lead to understanding. Asking "Why not?" can lead to breakthroughs." P. 130
- “Motivation 1.0 presumed that humans were biological creatures, struggling to obtain our basic needs for food, security and sex. Motivation 2.0 presumed that humans also responded to rewards and punishments. That worked fine for routine tasks but 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. Motivation 3.0, the upgrade we now need, presumes that humans also have a drive to learn, to create, and to better the world.”
- "Motivation 2.0 centered on profit maximization. Motivation 3.0 doesn’t reject profits, but it places equal emphasis on purpose maximization."