Drive
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
There is a third drive - of intrinsic motivation - beyond our biological drive and the drive to seek rewards and avoid punishments.
The world has not yet realised the power of this third drive and the world is designed for reward/punishment model.
When reward and punishments encounter the third drive they actually decrease motivation and performance.
🎨 Impressions
This was an interesting, easy to read book. The start uncovering the third drive was thought-provoking but the rest of the book was fairly standard and not very revolutionary.
How I Discovered It
I wanted to read some Daniel Pink books, this is a popular book of his.
Who Should Read It?
If you want to boost and better understand your motivations, then this book will show you the power of your third drive and why you need to shift towards maximising this.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
The monkeys solved the puzzle simply because they found it gratifying to solve puzzles. They enjoyed it. The joy of the task was its own reward.
We leave lucrative jobs to take low-paying ones that provide a clearer sense of purpose.
Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity.
📒 Summary + Notes
Discovering Intrinsic Motivation
In 1949, eight monkeys were gathered for a two week experiment. The researchers put the monkeys in a cage and gave them a simple, mechanical puzzle. Easy for humans to solve, but a lot harder for monkeys.
The puzzles were placed in the cages, to observe how they reacted, but almost immediately they started solving them - without being prompted or urged too. They were focused, determined and appeared to be enjoying it.
Nobody had taught the monkeys how to solve the puzzle - but 2/3 of the time they cracked the puzzle in under 60 seconds. Nobody rewarded them with food of affection either.
Previously to this, scientists thought there were two motivations. A biological one which came from innate human and animal desires from within, and a second drive where people acted as a result of rewards and punishments.
Harlow, the researcher, concluded that this experiment showed a third, new drive. He said “the performance of the task provided intrinsic reward.” The monkeys solved the puzzles simply because they enjoyed it. The joy of the task was its own reward.
The experiment was performed again, this time raisons were given therefore lifting off the second drive of rewards. It was the belief that offering rewards would result in the monkeys to perform the puzzle task better. Yet, they found that the monkeys made more errors and solved the problems less frequently.
It appeared this newly found third drive: intrinsic motivation, was in fact as basic and strong as the other two.
The problem is that too many organisations still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined and rooted more in folklore than science. They continue to pursue practices such as short term incentive plans and pay-for-performance schemes in the face of mounting evidence that such measures usually don't work and often harm.
Motivation Operating System 2.0 and 3.0
Motivation 2.0 arose as people realised that although biological drives mattered it didn't fully account for who we are. We also had this second drive - to avoid pain and punishment and seek rewards.
This Motivation 2.0 system has endured for a long time, and has become deeply embedded in out lives that most of us scarcely recognise that it exists. We bedrock assumption that the way to improve performance, increase productivity and encourage excellence is to reward the good and punish the bad.
Why Rewards Don't Work
When reward and punishments encounter our third drive, traditional if-then rewards can give us less of what we want. They are the bugs in our current operating system.
They can extinguish intrinsic motivation
They can diminish performance
They can crush creativity
They can crowd out good behaviour
They can encourage cheating, shortcuts and unethical behaviour
They can become addictive
They can foster short-term thinking
The Special Circumstances When They Do
Rewards and punishments can be effective for rule-based, routine tasks as there is little intrinsic motivation to undermine.
Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete
Where if-then rewards are a mistake shift to 'now-that' rewards
Type 1 and Type X
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.
Type X behaviour is suited to Motivation 2.0 - behaviour fuelled by external desires and less concerned with the inherent satisfaction of an activity and more with the external rewards to which an activity leads.
Motivation 3.0 requires Type 1 behaviour. Focused more on the inherent satisfaction of a task.
The Three Elements Needed:
1. Autonomy
Our default setting is to be autonomous and self-directed. Outdated notions of management often conspire to change that default setting and turns us from Type 1 to Type X. To encourage Type 1 behaviour and the high performance it enables, requires autonomy.
People need autonomy over task (what they do); time (when they do it); team (who they do it with) and technique (how they do it).
2. Mastery
Motivation 3.0 demands engagement and only engagement can produce mastery - becoming better at something that matters. And the pursuit of mastery is an important but often dormant part of our third drive.
Mastery begins with 'flow' or optimal experiences when the challenges we face are matched to our abilities.
Therefore 'goldilocks tasks' that are not too hard, not too easy are important.
Mastery is a mindset. It requires the capacity to see your abilities as not finite, but infinitely improvable.
Mastery is a pain. it demands effort, grit and deliberate practice.
Mastery is asymptote. It is impossible to fully realise which makes it simultaneously frustrating and alluring.
3. Purpose
Humans by their nature, seek purpose. Seek a cause greater than themselves. Purpose maximisation instead of profit maximisation as an aspiration is becoming a guiding principle.
This new purpose motive is expressing itself by: goals that use profit to reach purpose; words that emphasise more than self-interest; policies that allow people to pursue purpose on their own terms.
Summary
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.
