I first came across this video on Tobias Buckell’s blog. It’s a short animation of a talk about what gives us motivation, according to psychological studies. The speaker is Dan Pink, author of the book Drive. If you’re interested in which drives us more, money or satisfaction, take a few minutes to watch this.
(EDIT: That totally broke out of my template, and I can’t seem to make the screen smaller. So I took out the embedded video. But click the link!)
There’s a longer version of his talk on Ted.com. (And enough cool talks on Ted.com to keep you from your work for hours.)
I wondered how sound the actual science was, so I asked my resident expert, my brother Chuck, who happens to be a distinguished professor of psychology. The answer? “Go to selfdeterminationtheory.org. Deci and Ryan have been studying these things for…40 years.” Sound, in other words, but hardly new.
New or not, though, it’s something people all walks of life would do well to think about.
Tobias Buckell
Oh, thanks for the shout out and the link to self determination theory was interesting…
tobias
Jeffrey A. Carver
Most welcome. Though I must say, I squandered about two hours of writing time watching ted.com talks after I saw that one on your blog. Thanks a bunch. 🙂
Anonymous
Actually this makes perfect sense to me and I can relate. I have a job where a rather large percentage of what I earn is based on commission. I find I do my best work when management just leaves me alone and lets me do my job. When management decides it time to "crack the whip" it makes me resentful and not as effective doing my job and my commission suffers. When they offer "extra incentives" via contests or whatever I find it annoying because I find it kind of insulting that they seem to think that somehow magically it's going to allow me to perform even better so I can get the "extra reward". No, sorry, big fail there, because I'm already trying my best all the time, my livelihood depends on it. I know what my job is, I know how to do it fairly well and when i'm left alone it does provide me with enough to pay my bills most the time and a sense of satisfaction. So yeah that was pretty cool, I posted it on my facebook page, my manager is one of my "friends". I can only hope she watches it and is smart enough to "get it", but I have my doubts!
– Marco