[Book 48] Drive by Daniel Pink

Drive explores the forces that motivate people. Traditionally, we’ve viewed extrinsic rewards (money, status, etc.) and the avoidance of punishment as the primary sources of motivation. Daniel, however, reveals that intrinsic motivation, such as enjoyment of the work itself, the sense of achievement by helping others, and personal growth can be far more powerful and enduring.

We intuitively understand that we’re at our best when deeply engrossed in an interesting and challenging task that pushes us to our cognitive limits. It’s the opportunity to solve problems and grow from these experiences that drives us, not external incentives. While extrinsic rewards can help elevate average work to good, exceptional work requires that inner drive.

There are several benefits to fostering intrinsic motivation over relying on external rewards. For instance, granting people autonomy or fostering a sense of purpose only requires thoughtfulness, which has no impact to the budget. Success is far more likely when we select a highly motivated and genuinely interested job candidate than a more proven one who might ideally prefer something else but can command a higher salary. Moreover, extrinsic rewards tend to narrow our focus to short term success, whereas intrinsic motivation lends itself to much longer term thinking.

Lastly, while it has its limits, extrinsic rewards are still an important baseline. Competitive pay, including incentive compensation, is essential for attracting and retaining top talent. Once these needs are met, focusing on intrinsic motivators will keep employees engaged and productive.

This book has helped me elevate my team’s and business partners’ performance by better aligning the assigned work with their inherent interests.

You should read this book if you…

• want to understand what motivates exceptional work
• need to grow your talent with a limited budget
• seek clarity for what drives your own performance

Additional Information

Year Published: 2009
Book Ranking (from 1-10): 8 – Very Good – In depth insights on a specific topic
Ease of Read (from 1-5): 3 – Average

Key Highlights

1. Motivation 2.0 still wasn’t exactly ennobling. It suggested that, in the end, human beings aren’t much different from livestock—that the way to get us moving in the right direction is by dangling a crunchier carrot or wielding a sharper stick. But what this operating system lacked in enlightenment, it made up for in effectiveness. It worked well—extremely well. Until it didn’t
2. Kahneman and others in the field of behavioral economics agreed with my professor that economics was the study of human economic behavior. They just believed that we’d placed too much emphasis on the economic and not enough on the human
3. Partly because work has become more creative and less routine, it has also become more enjoyable. That, too, scrambles Motivation 2.0’s assumptions. This operating system rests on the belief that work is not inherently enjoyable—which is precisely why we must coax people with external rewards and threaten them with outside punishment
4. The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table
5. 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
6. Adding a monetary incentive didn’t lead to more of the desired behavior. It led to less. The reason: It tainted an altruistic act and “crowded out” the intrinsic desire to do something good
7. So while a few advocates would have you believe in the basic evil of extrinsic incentives, that’s just not empirically true. What is true is that mixing rewards with inherently interesting, creative, or noble tasks—deploying them without understanding the peculiar science of motivation—is a very dangerous game. When used in these situations, “if-then” rewards usually do more harm than good. By neglecting the ingredients of genuine motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—they limit what each of us can achieve
8. 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
9. Type X behavior is fueled more by extrinsic desires than intrinsic ones. It concerns itself less with the inherent satisfaction of an activity and more with the external rewards to which that activity leads. Type I behavior is fueled more by intrinsic desires than extrinsic ones. It concerns itself less with the external rewards to which an activity leads and more with the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself
10. Ultimately, Type I behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Type I behavior is self-directed. It is devoted to becoming better and better at something that matters. And it connects that quest for excellence to a larger purpose
11. Management isn’t about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices,” he told me. It’s about creating conditions for people to do their best work
12. I’m convinced it’s the latter—that our basic nature is to be curious and self-directed. And I say that not because I’m a dewy-eyed idealist, but because I’ve been around young children and because my wife and I have three kids of our own. Have you ever seen a six-month-old or a three-year-old who’s not curious and self-directed? I haven’t. That’s how we are out of the box. If, at age fourteen or forty-three, we’re passive and inert, that’s not because it’s our nature. It’s because something flipped our default setting
13. Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T’s: their task, their time, their technique, and their team
14. Being pessimistic is almost always a recipe for low levels of what psychologists call “subjective well-being.” It’s also a detriment in most professions. But as Martin Seligman has written, “There is one glaring exception: pessimists do better at law
15. With a learning goal, students don’t have to feel that they’re already good at something in order to hang in and keep trying. After all, their goal is to learn, not to prove they’re smart
16. And one of Csikszentmihalyi’s more surprising findings is that people are much more likely to reach that flow state at work than in leisure. Work can often have the structure of other autotelic experiences: clear goals, immediate feedback, challenges well matched to our abilities