New Model about Motivation
In his 2009 book, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink walks us through a bit of history of both the field of economics and psychology. His focus becomes the developments over time in the study of motivation. It is truly fascinating to see how our understanding of motivation has developed and truly sad that our systems – workplaces, schools, government – are still structured on very antiquated ideas of how people like to work, learn, contribute and thrive.
Although he used lots of real-world examples one of his very first ones opened my eyes very wide! It was the comparison of and subsequent success of Microsoft Encarta and Wikipedia….. the first support by a mega-corporation with hundreds of the smartest people on the project and the latter a collaborative project with no paid staff or management that was driven by the spontaneous and sustained collaboration of millions of people. The former sitting in an archive somewhere and the latter used around the world bazillion of times every day! (Be honest – is there ever a day you do not use Wikipedia?)
At the end of all the theory, Pink offers a toolkit of ideas and activities to assist in re-framing motivation and putting the research into practice. One of the first recommendations he makes is asking yourself two important questions:
1. What is my sentence?
2. Was I a little better today than yesterday?
The first question is designed to get clear on what your focus and priorities are. It is a little like developing your personal mission statement or tag line that helps ground you and point to your north star. The second question is structured to help you mark progress towards your goals and help keep your motivation high.
I have written many times about my strategies to set my annual challenges, choosing a word of the year, developing my personal mission statement or crafting my vision board in order to find my path and have clear motivation. Pink’s questions will get added to my personal planning toolkit.