Drive is an AMAZING book but this video is an even COOLER way of presenting it. Enjoy.
I LOVED this book. Malcolm Gladwell endorsed it for Pete’s sake. What else do you need to know?
In a nutshell, here are the THREE MAIN THINGS that motivate us.
Autonomy – The need to create our own direction
Mastery– Improving ourselves
Purpose– Contributing to something bigger than ourselves
Money, money, money
Pink says first of all, people need to be paid a decent amount of money to make a living. Once money is off the table, it’s very interesting to see what makes us jump out of bed and feel alive every morning.
A couple of very cool experiments.
In one experiment, people were asked to solve a problem. When people were offered cash to solve the problem faster, they screwed up. At the very least, they did worse than the group not being paid. Why? Because all the people in the group could think about was the money. The money and not the problem became the focus.
Once people’s basic needs are met, autonomy becomes more important than money. The need to create our own direction is the driving force.
David and Goliath
There have numerous studies showing successful Fortune 500 groups are sometimes more successful when they let their employees choose what they want to work on.
For example, Pink sites the case of a very successful software company that paid it’s staff to come up with a library of the company information on disc- which was eventually going to be sold as a digital encyclopedia.
In contrast, another company formed an encyclopedia based on information that experts and hobbyists donated in the name of creating something that everyone could access for free.
Wikipedia which contains more than 17 million donated articles eventually forced Microsoft to abandon it’s MSN Encarta disc and on-line encyclopedia. All in the name of educating the world for free.
