Summary: "Forget everything you thought you knew about how to motivate people—at work, at school, at home. It's wrong. As Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others) explains in his paradigm-shattering book Drive, the secret to high performance and satisfaction in today's world is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of our lives. He demonstrates that while the old-fashioned carrot-and-stick approach worked successfully in the 20th century, it's precisely the wrong way to motivate people for today's challenges. In Drive, he reveals the three elements of true motivation:
*Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives
*Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters
*Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
Along the way, he takes us to companies that are enlisting new approaches to motivation and introduces us to the scientists and entrepreneurs who are pointing a bold way forward.
Drive is bursting with big ideas—the rare book that will change how you think and transform how you live."
Review: I'm so proud of myself for actually finishing this book!
I actually started it a couple years ago when the company I was working for started an informal "lunchtime book club" thing... but I left before we had our discussion about this one, and I never went back and finished reading it. Until now.
Fascinating stuff. I've always worried about myself a little, because I have a hard time motivating myself to do things. Some of this I credit to the theory Pink talks about from Dr. Carol Dweck, who says that sometimes smart people don't try hard because instead of seeing problems as opportunities to grow, they see them as tests of smartness. If intelligence is a quality you're born with in a finite amount, then when you see a problem you can't solve, it becomes a sign that you don't have enough intelligence to solve it. However, if intelligence is seen as a quality that can be enhanced through hard work, then tests merely become opportunities to learn.
This book really helps me see myself in a motivation paradigm beyond "if I do this I can have this reward," which is a relief because I've never felt that I respond strongly to that motivational style.
Reading this book is also what helped motivate me to start up my book blog again. As I read, I thought about how I'd kind of abandoned the blog when my life had some big changes, and how I always wished I could go back and start it up again. And now I have! :)
Goodreads Shelves: i-feel-so-smart-now, nook-book, read, thought-provoking
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