Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

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3 Sentence Summary

Drive is about understanding human psychology and the forces of motivation in the 21st-century economy. Daniel Pink argues that most businesses have failed to upgrade their ineffective “carrot-and-stick” motivators. Instead, the work poised to take off in tomorrow’s economy—characterized by non-routine and creative activities—can only flourish when people are given autonomy to pursue mastery with a clear purpose of contributing to something larger than ourselves.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Traditional if-then rewards can work for rule-based routine tasks, but they’re ineffective and counter-productive for non-routine, creative knowledge work.
2. Intrinsic motivation relies on autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
3. High performance requires personal autonomy over task, time, team, and technique.
4. Mastery is engaging in deliberate practice with a worthy pursuit.
5. A clear purpose for a cause greater than yourself is a powerful source of renewable motivation.

Drive Summary

A New Operating System

1) The Rise and Fall of Motivation 2.0

• Our current operating system has become far less compatible with how we organize what we do; how we think about what we do; and how we do what we do.
• The success of open source software demonstrates a new business model for the 21st century. It depends on intrinsic motivation.
• Algorithmic tasks can be followed with a set of established instructions. It’s repeatable. Like a cashier.
• Heuristic tasks require experimentation with possibilities until you devise a novel solution.
• Routine work can be outsourced or automated.
• Artistic, empathic, non-routine work generally cannot.
• External rewards and punishments—both carrots and sticks—can work nicely for algorithmic tasks. But they can be devastating for heuristic ones.

Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity.

Teresa Amabile

• As organizations flatten, companies need people who are self-motivated.
• People are not only extrinsically motivated profit maximizers, but also intrinsically motivated purpose maximizers.
• For a growing number of people, work is often creative, interesting, and self-directed rather than unrelentingly routine, boring, and other-directed.

2) Seven Reasons Carrots and Sticks (Often) Don’t Work…

• Motivation 2.0 has two simple ideas: Rewarding an activity will get you more of it. Punishing an activity will get you less of it.
• Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do.
• Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Intrinsic Motivation

• Contingent rewards—if you do this, then you’ll get that—can transform an interesting task into a drudge by diminishing intrinsic motivation. It requires people to forfeit 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.

High Performance

• In an experiment that paid people different amounts to perform the same task, those that were paid the highest performed the worst.
• You cannot assume that introducing or raising incentives always improve performance.

Creativity

• Incentives designed to clarify thinking and sharpen creativity end up clouding our thinking and dulling creativity.
• Why? Because rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus.
• Intrinsic motivation—the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing—is essential for high levels of creativity.

Good Behavior

• Monetary rewards can taint an altruistic act and “crowd out” the desire to intrinsic desire to do something good.

Unethical Behavior

• Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy.
• Goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized tests, etc—can sometimes have dangerous side effects
• Enron sets lofty revenue goals, and the race to meet them by any means possible catalyzes the company’s collapse.
• 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.

Goals may cause systemic 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.

Addiction

• Rewards are addictive in that once offered we expect them again and again whenever a similar task is completed. Before long, the existing reward may no longer suffice. The bonus quickly begins to feel like the status-quo.
• The addictive nature of rewards can also distort decision-making.
• The reward stimuli found at casinos may lead to an increase in the likelihood of individuals switching from risk-averse to risk-seeking behavior.

Short-Term Thinking

• Extrinsic motivators can reduce the depth of our thinking.
• They can focus our sights on only what’s immediately before us rather than what’s off in the distance.
• Several researchers have found that companies that spend the most time offering guidance on quarterly earnings deliver significantly lower long-term growth rates than companies that offer guidance less frequently.
• The very presence of goals may lead employees to focus myopically on short-term gains and to lose sight of the potential devastating long-term effects on the organization.
• In environments where extrinsic rewards are most salient, many people work only to the point that triggers the reward—and no further.

2a) …and the Special Circumstances When They Do

• For routine tasks, which aren’t very interesting and don’t demand much creative thinking, rewards can provide a small motivational booster shot without the harmful side effects.
• Rewards do not undermine people’s intrinsic motivation for dull tasks because there is little or no intrinsic motivation to be undermined.

Increase Motivation for Routine Tasks By:

1. Offer a rationale for why the task is necessary. Make something not inherently interesting more meaningful, and therefore more engaging, by tying it to a larger purpose.
2. Acknowledge that the task is boring. Show empathy and help people understand why if-then rewards are appropriate.
3. Allow people to complete the task in their own way. Think autonomy, not control. State the outcome, give suggestions, but give them freedom over how they do their job.

The Conditions of a Genuinely Motivating Environment for Creative Work

1. Baseline rewards are sufficient. People must be compensated fairly and in line with what others of their caliber are paid at similar organizations.
2. Congeniality among the team.
3. Individual autonomy.
4. Opportunity to pursue mastery.
5. Daily tasks must align with a larger purpose.

If all these elements are in place, the best strategy is to provide a sense of urgency and significance—and then get out of the talent’s way.

Now-That Rewards

• Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete.
• The highest levels of creativity were produced by subjects who received a reward as a kind of bonus.
• Consider using non-tangible rewards like praise and positive feedback.
• Provide useful information about what they did well.

3) Type I and Type X

• Self determination theory argues that we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy.
• Type X behavior is fueled more by extrinsic desires than intrinsic ones.
• Motivation 3.0 OS depends on Type I behavior which is fueled more by intrinsic desires than external ones.

If we want to strengthen our organizations, get beyond our decade of underachievement, and address the inchoate sense that something’s gone wrong in our businesses, our lives, and our world, we need to move from Type X to Type I.

Type I

• Type I behavior is made, not born. Anybody can adapt Type I behavior.
• Type I’s almost always outperform Type X’s in the long run. Successful people persist through difficulties because of their internal desire to control their lives, learn about their world, and accomplish something that endures.
• Type I behavior does not disdain money or recognition. But neither is the ultimate goal.
• Type I behavior is a renewable resource.
• Type I behavior promotes greater physical and mental well-being.

The Three Elements

4) Autonomy

• ROWE = Results only work environment
• Autonomy is not the same as independence. It means acting with choice—which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others.
• Autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school and in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological well-being.
• Management isn’t the solution; it’s the problem.
• This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.
• Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T’s: their task, their time, their technique, and their team.
• Encouraging autonomy does not mean discouraging accountability. Whatever operating system is in place, people must be accountable for their work.
• We’re born to be players, not pawns.

Task

• Let people do their job in their own way.
• Sanctioned side-projects isn’t always easy to execute in the day-to-day responsibilities of running the company. But they’re becoming urgent in an economy that demands non-routine, creative, conceptual abilities.

Time

• The billable hour is a relic of Motivation 2.0. It makes some sense for routine tasks because there’s a tight connection between how much time goes in and how much work comes out.
• But for non-routine tasks, the link between how much time somebody spends and what somebody produces is irregular and unpredictable. Many law firms are moving to a flat rate.
• Without sovereignty over our time, it’s nearly impossible to have autonomy over our lives.

Technique

• Zappos doesn’t monitor its customer services employees’ call times or require them to use scripts. The reps handle calls the way they want. Their job is to serve the customer well; how they do it is up to them.

Team

• At Whole Foods, the department employees vote whether or not to keep a prospective new employee full time.
• At W.L. Gore and Associates, anybody who wants to rise in the ranks and lead a team must assemble people willing to work with them.
• People working in self-organized teams are more satisfied than those workin in inherited teams.

5) Mastery

• Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.
• Only engagement can produce mastery.

Flow

• Goals are clear.
• Feedback is immediate.
• The relationship between what a person has to do and can do is perfect. The challenge wasn’t too difficult, nor too easy. It’s just a notch or two above their current capabilities, which stretches the body and mind in a way that makes the effort itself the most rewarding.

Mastery Is a Mindset

• What people believe shapes what they achieve.
• People can hold two different views on their own intelligence. That it’s fixed. Or that it’s something they can increase with effort.
• Learning goals are better that performance goals in the pursuit of mastery.

Mastery Is a Pain

• The path to mastery is difficult. You’ll need grit to achieve it.
• Mastery often involves working and working and showing little improvement.
• Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life.
• Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.

Mastery Is an Asymptote

• You can approach it, but it is impossible to fully realize.
• Mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.

6) Purpose

• The most deeply motivated people hitch their desires to a cause larger than themselves.

As an emotional catalyst, wealth maximization lacks the power to fully mobilize human energies.

Gary Hamel

• Motivation 3.0 doesn’t reject profits, but it places equal emphasis on purpose maximization.

Goals

• TOMS is a for-profit company with giving at its core.
• Their business model transforms its customers into benefactors.
• “For benefit” corporations, B corporations, and low-profit limited-liability corporations all recast the goals of the traditional business enterprise.
• The aims of Motivation 3.0 companies is to pursue purpose and to use profit as the catalyst rather than the objective.

Words

• You can judge the health of an organization by the vocabulary of the employees. What pronouns do they use? Do they describe the company as “they” or “we”?
• “The MBA Oath” is a Hippocratic oath for business grads in which they pledge their fealty to causes above and beyond the bottom line.

Policies

• Corporate ethics policies transforms “do it because it’s the right thing to do” into “do this to check off the box.” It reduces intrinsic motivation to do the right thing into extrinsic motivation to make sure that the company doesn’t get sued.
• In a study on money and happiness, how people spend their money may be at least as important as how much money they earn.
• Companies can improve their employees’ emotional well-being by shifting some of their budget for charitable giving so that individual employees are given sums to donate.
• Physicians that were allowed to spend one day a week on the aspect of their job that was most meaningful to them—whether patient care, research, or community service—experienced half the burnout rate of those who did not (20% time with purpose).

One cannot lead a life that is truly excellent without feeling that one belongs to something greater and more permanent than oneself.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The Type I Toolkit

7) Type I for Individuals: 9 Strategies for Awakening Your Motivation

Exercises to bring more autonomy, mastery, and purpose into our work and life.

Give Yourself A “Flow Test”

Set a reminder on your phone to go off at 40 random times in a week. Each time, write down what you’re doing, how you’re feeling, and whether you’r in “flow.” Record your observations, look for patterns, and consider the following questions:

1. Which moments produced feelings of “flow”? Where were you? What were you working on? Who were you with?
2. Are certain times of day more flow-friendly than others? How could you restructure your day based on these findings?
3. How might you increase the number of optimal experiences and reduce the moments when you felt disengaged or distracted?
4. If you’re having doubts about your job or career, what does this exercise tell you about your true source of intrinsic motivation?

First, Ask A Big Question

• A great man is one sentence. Don’t let your attention be splintered among different priorities that your sentence becomes a muddled paragraph.
• One way to orient your life toward greater purpose is to think about your sentence.

…Then Keep Asking A Small Questions

• At the end of each day, ask yourself whether you were better today than you were yesterday.
• Look for small measures of improvement.

Take a Sabbatical

• A year-off sounds risky. It requires planning and saving some money. But it could also be an unforgettable year of personal exploration.

Give Yourself A Performance Review

• Write down your goals, and then review your progress on a monthly/quarterly basis.

Get Unstuck By Going Oblique

• Oblique Strategies cards ask a question or pose a statement designed to push you out of your mental rut.

Move Five Steps Closer to Mastery

• Deliberate practice has one objective: to improve performance. It’s about setting new goals and straining yourself to reach a bit higher each time.
• Repetition matters. Do more reps than anyone else.
• Seek constant, critical feedback.
• Focus ruthlessly on where you need help.
• Prepare for the process to be mentally and physically exhausting. That’s why so fe people commit to it, but that’s why it works.

3 Index Cards

Write the question and answer to the following:

• What gets you up in the morning?
• What keeps you up at night?

If you don’t like one or both of your answers, then ask:

• What are you going to do about it?

Create Your Own Motivational Poster

• Pick words and images the resonate with you.

8) Type I for Organizations: 9 Ways to Improve Your Company, Office, or Group

Try 20% Time With Training Wheels

• Start with 10% time for six months.
• Scale up slowly as people start to act on their great ideas and convert some of their downtime into more productive time.

Encourage Peer-to-Peer “Now That” Rewards

• At Kimley-Horn and Associates, anyone in the company can reward a $50 bonus to any of their colleagues.

Conduct An Autonomy Audit

Ask everyone these four questions with a numerical 1-10 scale:

1. How much autonomy do you have over your tasks at work—your main responsibilities and what you do in a given day?
2. How much autonomy do you have over your time at work—for instance, when you arrive, when you leave, and how you allocate your hours each day?
3. How much autonomy do you have over your team at work—that is, to what extent are you able to choose the people with whom you typically collaborate?
4. How much autonomy do you have over your technique at work—how you actually perform the main responsibilities of your job?

Take 3 Steps Toward Giving Up Control

• Type X bosses relish control. Type I bosses relinquish control.
• Involve people in goal-setting.
• Use non-controlling language. Substitute “think about” or “consider” for “must” or “should.”
• Hold office hours. Let them come to you.

Play “Whose Purpose Is It Anyway?”

• Ask everyone to write down their answer to the question: “What is our company’s purpose?”
• If people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, how can you expect them to be motivated to do it?

Use the Pronoun Test

• Do employees refer to their company as “they” or “we”?
• “We” suggest that people feel part of something significant and meaningful.

Design for Intrinsic Motivation

• Create an environment that makes people feel good about participating.
• Give user autonomy.
• Keep the system as open as possible.

Promote Goldilocks for Groups

• Begin with a diverse team. You want people who can cross-fertilize each other’s ideas.
• Make your group a “no competition” zone. Go for collaboration.
• Try a little task-shifting. Cross training makes your team more resilient—and less bored.
• Animate with purpose, don’t motivate with rewards. Nothing bonds a team like a shared mission.

Turn Your Next Off-Site Into A FedEx Day

• Set aside an entire day where employees can work on anything they choose, however they want, with whomever they’d like.
• One rule: People must deliver something by the next day.

9) The Zen of Compensation: Paying People the Type I Way

• Effective organizations compensate people in amounts and in ways that allow individuals to mostly forget about compensation and instead focus on the work itself.
• Most important is fairness: internal and external.
  • Internal fairness = Paying people commensurate with their colleagues.
  • External fairness = Paying people in line with others doing similar work in similar organizations.
• Pay people a little bit more than the market demands. You’ll attract better talent, reduce turnover, and boost productivity and morale.
• Higher wages could actually reduce a company’s costs.
• If you use performance metrics, make them wide-ranging, relevant and hard to game.

10) Type I for Parents and Educators

Apply The Three-Part Type I Test for Homework

• Am I offering students any autonomy over how and when to do this work?
• Does this assignment promote mastery by offering a novel, engaging task?
• Do my students understand the purpose of this assignment?

Have A FedEx Day

• Set aside an entire school day and ask kids to come up with a problem to solve or a project to tackle

Try DIY Report Cards

• Good grades become a reward for compliance—but don’t have much to do with learning. Meanwhile, students whose grades don’t measure up often see themselves as failures and give up trying to learn.
• Experiment with DIY report cards. Ask students to list their top learning goals, then, at the end of the semester, ask them to create their own report card and a brief review of their progress.

Give Your Kids An Allowance and Some Chores—But Don’t Combine Them

• An allowance teaches kids to be responsible with money.
• Chores show kids that families are built on mutual obligations and that family members help each other.
• But combining allowance with chores turns familial obligation into just another commercial transaction.
• Teach your kids the difference between principles and payoffs.

Offer Praise… The Right Way

• Praise effort and strategy, not intelligence.
• Make praise specific.
• Praise in private.
• Offer praise only when there’s a good reason for it.

Help Kids See the Big Picture

Whatever they’re studying, be sure the can answer the following:

• Why am I learning this?
• How is it relevant to the world I live in now?

Turn Students Into Teachers

• Assign students to a different aspect of a broader topic you’re studying and then have them take turns teaching what they’ve learned to their classmates.
• A classroom of teachers is a classroom of learners.

11) The Type I Fitness Plan: 4 Tips for Getting (and Staying) Motivated to Exercise

1. Set your own goals. Don’t accept a cookie-cutter exercise plan. Create on that’s tailored to your needs and fitness level.
2. Ditch the treadmill. Find a form of fitness you enjoy—that produces those intoxicating moments of flow.
3. Keep mastery in mind. Getting better at something provides a great source of renewable energy.
4. Reward yourself the right way. Avoid if-then bribes. But treat yourself spontaneously now-that you’ve completed your workouts for the week.

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