58 pages • 1 hour read
Daniel H. PinkDrive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Fiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Daniel Pink
Daniel Pink was born July 23, 1964, and grew up in Columbus, Ohio. He attended Northwestern University and Yale Law School, after which he began pursuing a career in politics, with a focus on economic policy. He served under the former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich (whom he quotes in Chapter 6) between 1993 and 1995, and he worked as a speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore from 1995 to 1997. His experiences give him unique insight into the need for businesses to adapt to a changing economic world, and his skills as a speechwriter make his writing style striking and memorable.
Pink has written many books, mostly non-fiction books focused on issues similar to those addressed in Drive. He writes about business strategies and management philosophies, the nature of human creativity, and the driving factors behind human behavior. His insights often go against conventional wisdom. In The Power of Regret, for example, he argues that regret—an emotion usually viewed as negative—can actually help people live better lives. This contrarian perspective is also found in Drive, in which he argues against the conventional wisdom that people are most strongly motivated by external rewards and punishments. Pink also tends to look toward the future in his books. In A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, he argues that society is trending toward an economic system where most jobs will require creative “right-brain” thinking, a point that he also refers to many times throughout Drive.
Edward Deci
One of the most important and frequently referenced researchers throughout Drive, Edward Deci became a Professor of Psychology at the University of Rochester after dropping out of the business school. His theories about human motivation and the power of intrinsic drives are an enormous influence on the arguments Pink lays out in this book.
Deci is one of two researchers mentioned in the Introduction to Drive. His experiment with the puzzle blocks, described in the introduction, is a striking demonstration of the problems of “Motivation 2.0.” Deci’s findings in this experiment and many other studies prove that, contrary to the assumptions underlying Motivation 2.0, external rewards can hurt long-term productivity (though they may give a short-term boost) and kill intrinsic interest in an activity.
Together with researcher Richard Ryan, Deci formulated “Self-Determination Theory” or SDT. This theory argues that all humans have three innate psychological needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. These needs map onto the 3 Elements of Type I Behavior that Pink lays out in Part 2 of Drive: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Deci and Ryan argued that when these three needs are not met, a person’s happiness and motivation will take a dramatic downturn, regardless of any external rewards or punishments offered. This theory is essentially the basis of Pink’s “Motivation 3.0,” the idea that businesses and schools must redesign themselves to allow intrinsic motivation to flourish, rather than relying on “carrots and sticks” to coerce people to work.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Another of the most influential and often referenced researchers in Drive, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a Hungarian American psychologist who first identified the concept of “flow,” a mental state in which a person is fully absorbed in an activity to the point that their sense of time and self seems to melt away. As a young child during World War II, Csikszentmihalyi was forced to flee his native Hungary, an experience Pink recounts at the beginning of Chapter 5. Csikszentmihalyi recalls thinking at the time that “grown-ups had really no idea how to live” (108), and Pink theorizes that this readiness to question conventional wisdom may have later inspired some of Csikszentmihalyi’s theories regarding human creativity and play.
Csikszentmihalyi became famous for identifying what he called autotelic experiences—activities people undertake for the experience itself rather than for any extrinsic reward—and he observed that such activities were most conducive to the state he called “flow.” He later conducted experiments showing that this state of “flow” was not only a pleasant mental state, but one that is necessary to good mental health. After subjects were deprived of flow experiences for only a few days, they reported experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression, and Csikszentmihalyi was forced to end the experiment.
Flow is an important ingredient in the process of mastery, the journey to get better and better at a certain skill. It tends to occur when people are working on an activity that challenges their current skills enough to be engaging, but not so much that they will give up in frustration. Mastery itself is one of the three essential elements of intrinsic motivation. Pink laments that as children, we are constantly seeking out flow states, but as adults that urge is often stifled; Csikszentmihalyi argues that society makes us believe it’s childish to pursue the things we enjoy. In Csikszentmihalyi’s view, there’s no reason why adulthood should be miserable; play, exploration, and enjoyable challenges are essential needs for every human regardless of their age.
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