Drive by Daniel H. Pink-Notes

Drive explores what has motivated humans throughout history and explains how we shifted from mere survival to the carrot and stick approach that’s still practiced today – and why it’s outdated.

In Drive, Daniel Pink, studied lawyer turned economist and government employee, takes us through the history of human motivation. Al Gore’s former speechwriter explains how we’ve gone from being mostly intrinsically motivated (to survive) to jumping through hoops for carrots, while trying to avoid the sticks being dangled over our heads by bosses and employers.

Dan argues that it’s time to go back, give workers autonomy, a purpose, and the freedom to master their craft, so we can go back to being as intrinsically motivated as we were as kids – an approach he calls motivation 3.0.

If you feel like you’re chasing rewards, which somehow don’t end up making you happier, these 3 lessons will give some insight into what it’s really about:

The carrot and stick approach is dead.

Extrinsic motivation destroys intrinsic motivation.

Strive for the flow state in everything you do.

Want to find the motivation of your childhood again? I know I do, let’s go!

Lesson 1: Both the carrot and the stick are dead – why extrinsic motivators don’t work.

When the industrial age started, external rewards where all you needed to motivate workers. There was so much money to make, and such a great life to be lived, if only you had a little extra cash to pay for new conveniences, like TV, a radio, or pre-cooked dinners.

But as we’re shifting from the industrial age to the information age, slapping on a bonus for fast delivery doesn’t work any more – most people simply don’t care.

Expenses to cover our basic needs, like rent and food, have never been cheaper, what we really value now is time. But that’s not the only problem with external rewards and punishments.

If a car mechanic is promised a 50% salary bonus when he completes 200 repairs in 3 months, guess what he does? He tells more of his customers that their car needs repairs. The money becomes the driving force, and will lead him to do repairs where none are needed, and maybe even do a sloppy job, just to meet the quota. Instead of leading to better and faster work, this creates dissatisfied customers and stressed workers.

Even more intriguing, for tasks that require creative thinking, adding financial incentives puts so much pressure on workers, that they become incapable of performing the task. For example when given the task to fix a candle on the wall with a few tools, participants who were told to be given money for a fast solution performed a lot worse than those who weren’t offered any money.

The more money is on the line, the worse it gets. Participants of a study tasked with hitting targets with tennis balls completely cracked under the pressure of potentially earning 5 months worth of pay.

Lesson 2: Over time, extrinsic rewards destroy our inner drive.

But wait a minute…aren’t almost ALL jobs nowadays somewhat creative? Exactly! Of course this applies to developed countries more than to emerging ones, but eventually, we’ll all end up with jobs that require us to only work with information, people and creatively solve problems.

Daniel Pink says that to succeed at this kind of work, what we really need is intrinsic motivation. You know, doing something for the sheer enjoyment of doing it. Either because we’re passionate about it, have a ton of fun, or are just plain curious, like we were as kids.

I remember one day finding my baby sister propped up on the countertop, about to take her first sip – of the dishwashing soap. After wrestling it from her I couldn’t help but notice how curious the green fluid looked, and couldn’t blame her for trying.

But if you’re like most adults, those days are long gone, because you gradually lost your intrinsic motivation, as the world taught you to rely on extrinsic motivation over and over again.

When kids are being asked to draw, once just to have fun, and once for a small reward, you tweak their reward system, and will find that the first group is happy to draw just for fun later as well, while the second refuses to draw without the incentive. We live in an “if-you-do-this-then-you-get-that” world, and it’s ruining our motivation.

Lesson 3: Find a way to get into the zone at work, and you’ll be a lot happier.

No wonder then, that 70% of Americans either hate or don’t feel fulfilled at their job. But what to do about it?

This is where motivation 3.0, as Dan calls it, comes in. We must relight our inner desire to strive for perfection. If we’re given a task that challenges our skills, without being overwhelming or boring, and are then allowed to autonomously work on it, we love to give our best.

Imagine playing a video game for hours, or noticing that time flies while you paint, read, or plan your honeymoon. This state is called flow, and while it can’t last forever, it is important that you periodically end up in it while working.

Keep that in mind while looking for the next job, talking to your boss about work, or figuring out the next task. Don’t settle for a boss who doesn’t understand this or a job who doesn’t require you to live up to your potential. Promise me that until you’re excited to go to work, because you can’t wait to perfect what you’re working on, you’ll keep looking.

My personal take-aways

In a short detour during writing this, I also watched Dan’s great TED talk about the subject. As I’m currently going through my own career finding process, motivation is becoming a huge question mark for me, and I want answers. If you happen to work in a carrot and stick model, and find yourself not happy with where you are, then I highly recommend

Drive by Daniel H. Pink

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Drive Summary

The Book in Three Sentences

Much of what we know about motivation is wrong.

Tasks are either: (1) Algorithmic—you pretty much do the same thing over and over in a certain way, or (2) Heuristic—you have to come up with something new every time because there are no set instructions to follow.

The carrot and stick approach to motivation is flawed.

The Five Big Ideas

Researchers have found that extrinsic rewards can be effective for algorithmic tasks—those that depend on following an existing formula to its logical conclusion. But for more right-brain undertakings—those that demand flexible problem-solving, inventiveness, or conceptual understanding—contingent rewards can be dangerous.

Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others can sometimes have dangerous side effects.

We have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

Research shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to live a life of purpose.

The new approach to motivation has three essential elements: (1) Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives; (2) Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

Drive Summary

“When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity.”—Edward Deci

“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. Why? ‘If-then’ rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy.”

“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.”—Jonmarshall Reeve

“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.”

“[Teresa] Amabile and others have found that extrinsic rewards can be effective for algorithmic tasks—those that depend on following an existing formula to its logical conclusion. But for more right-brain undertakings—those that demand flexible problem-solving, inventiveness, or conceptual understanding—contingent rewards can be dangerous.”

“Instead of increasing the number of blood donors, offering to pay people decreased the number by nearly half.”

“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.”

“Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.”

“Get people fired up with the prospect of rewards, and instead of making better decisions, as Motivation 2.0 hopes, they can actually make worse ones.”

The Seven Deadly Flaws of Carrots and Sticks

They can extinguish intrinsic motivation

They can diminish performance

They can crush creativity

They can crowd out good behavior

They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.

They can become addictive

They can foster short-term thinking

“The Sawyer Effect: practices that can either turn play into work or turn work into play.”

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

“First, consider nontangible rewards.”

“Praise and positive feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies.”

“Second, provide useful information.”

“Give people meaningful information about their work.”

“In brief, for creative, right- brain, heuristic tasks, you’re on shaky ground offering ‘if- then’ rewards. You’re better off using ‘now that’ rewards. And you’re best off if your ‘now that’ rewards provide praise, feedback, and useful information.”

“[Self-determination theory] argues that we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness.”

“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.”

“In the midst of play, many people enjoyed what Csikszentmihalyi called ‘autotelic experiences’—from the Greek auto (self) and telos (goal or purpose). In an autotelic experience, the goal is self-fulfilling; the activity is its own reward.”

“The highest, most satisfying experiences in people’s lives were when they were in flow.”

“In flow, goals are clear. You have to reach the top of the mountain, hit the ball across the net, or mold the clay just right. Feedback is immediate. The mountaintop gets closer or farther, the ball sails in or out of bounds, the pot you’re throwing comes out smooth or uneven.”

“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.’”

“The science shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to live a life of purpose.”

“At the end of each day, ask yourself whether you were better today than you were yesterday.”

“One of the best ways to know whether you’ve mastered something is to try to teach it.”

Other Books by Dan Pink

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Persuading, Convincing, and Influencing Others by Daniel H Pink