Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Through the examples of Harlow and Deci’s experiments, Pink establishes several important ideas that he will further unpack throughout the rest of the book. Harlow’s monkey experiment demonstrates the baseline theory of Drive: Humans, like monkeys, are not simple machines who only work for external rewards, but rather are creative and curious creatures who will happily take on a challenge without any external prodding if the challenge is interesting and engaging enough. Pink uses this example to highlight The Importance of Intrinsic Motivation. When a task is sufficiently engaging, the pleasure of the task itself is often a better motivator than any external reward. While this may seem intuitive, it goes against the core assumption underlying contemporary management practices: that in order to be productive, workers must be bribed with rewards, threatened with punishment, and constantly monitored. Harlow’s monkey experiment is the first of many examples Pink will use throughout Drive to disprove this theory.

The second experiment, by Edward Deci, takes Harlow’s conclusions a step further, showing that extrinsic motivations can actually be detrimental to productivity. The students who had been paid to solve puzzles lost all motivation to do so once the pay incentive was removed. Meanwhile, the group that had never been offered any reward continued to show interest in the puzzle blocks merely out of a sense of curiosity and playfulness. This experiment establishes that not only are rewards unnecessary as motivation for creative and challenging tasks, but they can paradoxically backfire by diminishing inherent interest in an activity. A monetary reward turns play into work—a phenomenon that Pink identifies as the “Sawyer Effect” in Chapter 2—so that when the reward is taken away, intrinsic motivation goes with it.

These two experiments help Pink lay the groundwork for his overall arguments in Drive: not only that human motivation is more complex than we’ve been led to believe, but that we can actually increase both business productivity and overall human happiness if we are willing to dramatically rethink the psychology of motivation. In Pink’s view, our current system is set up to discourage intrinsic motivation, the innate desire for novelty and challenge that drives people to participate in activities that offer no external rewards. As he laments, “too many organizations […] still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science” (9). If we wish to move into a more successful future, he argues that we must rethink what truly motivates people and adjust our work and school environments accordingly.

In Chapter 1, Pink introduces one of the core concepts of Drive: what he calls “Motivation 2.0” and “Motivation 3.0.” These two “operating systems” are the underlying basis of how we organize not only our businesses, but governments, organizations, nonprofits, and schools. Motivation 2.0, Pink argues, is the system that has been in place since the Industrial Revolution and is still in place today. It made sense for an economy dominated by repetitive manufacturing jobs that required little creative thinking, but it was never conducive to human happiness, and it is inadequate to meet the demands of a new economy centered on creativity and innovation. Motivation 2.0 “suggests that human beings are not much different than livestock—that the way to get us moving in the right direction is dangling a crunchier carrot wielding a sharper stick” (17), and as a result it has become “incompatible with many aspects of contemporary business” (19).

What’s needed now, Pink argues, is an “operating system” that responds to The Need for Creativity In the Modern World. He calls that system “Motivation 3.0.” Motivation 3.0 assumes that workers are not simple robots responding to external stimuli, but creative beings with intrinsic interests and desires. Robotic jobs are being outsourced more and more to literal robots—a trend that will only continue—and the jobs left for humans will all be the type that Pink calls “heuristic,” such as creating new software or designing an ad campaign. When it comes to jobs like this, a carrots-and-sticks approach to motivation can backfire by turning play into work, as we saw with Deci’s experiment in the Introduction. When this happens, people inevitably become disengaged with the project, and productivity suffers. However, when natural, intrinsic motivations are allowed to thrive, workers not only produce better work but also tend to live happier lives.

In general, Pink wants us to acknowledge that regardless of traditional theories of management, people are not machines, nor are they inherently lazy and unproductive, and treating them as such will only cause them to lose whatever interest they had in their work. He also points out that economists have traditionally assumed that people will always act rationally in their own best interests, which is the underlying theory behind a “carrots and sticks” approach to management. Why, for example, would someone create a new computer program in their free time if they were not going to make a profit from it? Rationally, that wouldn’t make sense. However, the example of Wikipedia at the beginning of this chapter, among other examples, proves that people will spend their time on a creative project without any kind of profit incentive, even though this seems irrational. Pink points out that people act against their own rational self-interest all the time, doing things for “lunk-headed, backward-looking reasons” (25), which is something most people (even economists) would agree is true. He says that if we’re willing to accept this as true, then we should be willing to entertain the idea that people will also willingly do good work for its own sake, without needing to be motivated by profit or praise.