Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

This chapter is focused on mastery, the second element of Type I Behavior. Pink begins with the story of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian American psychologist who developed the concept of “flow,” and his experience fleeing from Hungary during World War II as a young boy. While witnessing the violence of the war, 10-year-old Csikszentmihalyi concluded that “grown-ups had really no idea how to live” (108). Later as an adult, he still held onto the idea that there must be a better way to organize society.

Mastery, the desire to get better and better at a certain task, is an important part of what makes work enjoyable. But according to Pink, the current system is not very interested in encouraging mastery. Motivation 2.0 is good at getting people to do dull, routine tasks, but it’s not good at pushing people to greatness. Mastery requires a worker to be engaged in their task, but most workers report an overall lack of engagement when they are at work; this is a problem that Motivation 2.0 is ill-equipped to address.

After coming to America and becoming a psychologist, Csikszentmihalyi began studying the subjects of creativity and play. He identified certain activities as “autotelic,” from the Greek “auto,” meaning “self,” and “telos,” meaning “goal.” Essentially, he observed that people treated activities such as painting or rock-climbing as goals in themselves and became so deeply absorbed in these activities that they would lose track of time. To test this effect, Csikszentmihalyi developed an experiment where he would page people at random intervals throughout the day and ask them to write down what they were doing and how they were feeling. Through this experiment, he found that people reported the greatest satisfaction while engaged in these autotelic activities. For the feeling of total absorption in an activity, he coined the term “flow.” In flow, a person is so intensely focused on what they’re doing that time seems to pass quickly around them; they are fully caught up in the challenge of the task and are not driven by any external goal but only by the goal of mastery.

According to Csikszentmihalyi, the most important element in achieving flow state is a balance between the person’s skill level and the difficulty of the challenge: the ideal task is not so easy that the person gets bored, but not so difficult that they become frustrated and give up. Pink calls these “Goldilocks tasks” because they are “not too hot and not too cold, neither overly difficult nor overly simple” (116). Companies that wish to increase opportunities for employees to achieve flow must focus on assigning Goldilocks tasks—ones that are matched to the skill level of the employee. The Sawyer Effect mentioned in Chapter 2 can also be used to create more opportunities for flow, by turning work into play. Many companies have recognized the importance of creating environments conducive to flow and encouraging employees not only to get their work done but to pursue mastery. This creates more engaged workers, and therefore increases overall productivity and worker satisfaction.

While flow happens in a moment, mastery is something that must happen over a long stretch of time, so Pink emphasizes the importance of understanding the “three laws of mastery.” The first law is that “mastery is a mindset,” meaning that what people believe they can master determines what they will achieve. For instance, some people see intelligence as something a person either has or doesn’t have, and you can’t increase or decrease the amount you’re born with. However, other people see intelligence as akin to physical fitness—something that anyone can increase if they try hard enough. The second view leads people to pursue mastery, while the first view does not. Either of these views can be deliberately encouraged depending on how a task is framed. Students, for example, can be given “performance goals” (get an A in the class) or “learning goals” (learn the subject). Performance goals are good for short-term results, but not good at helping students master the subject and apply it to new situations. Learning goals, on the other hand, encourage mastery over the subject. When students are given problems beyond their ability to solve, those with a more fixed idea of intelligence tend to give up and blame their own lack of intelligence for the failure. Meanwhile, students with an incremental view of intelligence tend to keep on trying to solve the problem in creative ways and don’t feel discouraged about their failure, seeing it only as a necessary step on the road to learning. In the first mindset, putting a lot of effort into a task is seen as a sign of personal weakness, while in the second mindset it is seen as part of the process of mastery.

The second law of mastery, according to Pink, is that “mastery is a pain” (122). Researchers found that the West Point students who were least likely to drop out of the program were the ones who demonstrated the most “grit,” or “perseverance and passion for long-term goals” (122). The most successful athletes are typically the ones who put the most effort into mundane, difficult tasks that help to develop their skills over time. The process of mastery is hard and often unpleasant; it requires effort over a long period in order to succeed. But this isn’t a problem, according to Pink; it’s actually what makes mastery so rewarding in the end.

The third law of mastery is that “mastery is an asymptote” (125), a term from algebra that refers to a straight line that a curve approaches but never touches. Pink brings up the artist Paul Cezanne, who was always working toward his greatest work but never fully achieved it. Mastery, Pink argues, is something that you can continuously approach, but you can never fully achieve. While this can be frustrating, it’s also alluring, because the real joy comes from pursuing mastery rather than attaining it.

Csikszentmihalyi conducted another experiment in which he asked people to temporarily deprive themselves of certain tasks that allowed them to enter flow state. The result was increased symptoms of anxiety, stress, and depression, to the point that he had to discontinue the experiment. What this shows, Pink argues, is that flow state and mastery are necessary to the human soul, and lacking them can damage our mental health. Csikszentmihalyi criticizes the societal attitude that work should not be enjoyable, arguing that work and play are not really that separated after all. Children, as Pink observes, spend most of their time in a state of flow, but as they grow up, they seek out those experiences less and less. Csikszentmihalyi says this is because we become ashamed of being childish, and Pink agrees, adding that maybe we need to build a new social system that allows us to continue our childlike pursuit of flow into adulthood.

The third element of Type I Behavior is purpose. Pink opens this chapter by discussing the sudden crisis that many members of the Baby-Boomer generation go through upon reaching their 60th birthday. When will they do something meaningful with their lives? This crisis of self-reflection, Pink says, is now happening on a scale never seen in history before, and he believes it will lead to a “thunderstorm of purpose” (131).

The most highly motivated people are those who have a strong sense of purpose, or a feeling that they are part of something bigger than themselves. Csikszentmihalyi says he believes that evolution may have selected for people who sought to do things beyond themselves, which is why purpose is such a strong motivating factor for so many people. Motivation 2.0 doesn’t really see purpose as necessary or important, but rather just a nice bonus on top of the real goal of wealth maximization. However, possibly thanks to the aging Baby Boomers, Pink believes that more and more people are now beginning to rethink this viewpoint.

According to Pink, volunteerism has risen sharply in recent years, right alongside a steady decline in workers’ engagement with their paid jobs. His conclusion is that volunteer work must be filling some need in peoples’ lives that paid work isn’t. Not only older people but also younger people are beginning to rethink work, to focus less on profit and more on a sense of purpose. TOMS shoes, for example, blurs the line between business and charity by donating one pair of shoes for each pair that it sells. Motivation 2.0 is not designed to deal with an organization like this, but Motivation 3.0 can handle it just fine. Many other new types of corporations and organizations are beginning to follow a similar path, and more and more people are also joining worker co-ops that are not focused purely on profit-seeking but on bettering their communities and the world.

After the 2008 economic crisis, several students from Harvard Business School got together and wrote “The MBA Oath,” a code of conduct similar to the Hippocratic Oath, in which managers vow to serve the greater good and bring value to the community, to protect the interests of society as well as shareholders, and to work toward a more sustainable future. Many business students and institutions today have taken this oath, which reflects the ongoing shift toward a more purpose-focused approach to business. Former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich measures employees’ sense of purpose at their company by listening to the pronouns they use: do they refer to the company as “they” or “we”? “We” companies tend to give employees a greater sense of purpose. Pink says that reminding people of why they are doing what they’re doing is another important aspect of purpose. He cites an experiment in which call center workers were given stories to read about how their fundraising efforts had helped people. After reading the stories, these workers doubled the amount of donations they earned compared to other groups.

According to Pink, when ethics are prescribed by policies, the focus shifts to simply checking off boxes on a checklist rather than doing the right thing for the sake of it. The sense of purpose has been removed. Pink suggests that instead of prescribing a list of pro-social rules to follow, ethics should be encouraged through autonomous choices. Beyond a certain amount, making more money doesn’t provide people more satisfaction, but researchers have found that how people choose to spend their money (on themselves versus on other people) can make a huge difference in overall life satisfaction. Therefore, instead of rewarding workers with bonuses, a company can provide workers a greater sense of purpose by giving them a portion of money to donate to a charity of their choice, thus giving them a sense of autonomy over how they are giving back to their community.

At the University of Rochester, Edward Deci, Richard Ryan, and another of their colleagues conducted an experiment to see how students’ lives developed after graduation. Some students had “extrinsic aspirations,” such as becoming rich or famous, while others had “intrinsic aspirations,” such as helping others, improving society, learning, and growing. The researchers followed up with these students about two years later and found that the second group—those with purpose-oriented goals—were much more satisfied with their lives overall, whereas members of the first group, with profit-oriented goals, tended to be less satisfied and to have more anxiety and depression, even if they were achieving their goals.

From this study, Deci et al. concluded that it’s not only important to have goals, but to have the right goals. Profit-motivated goals, while good and useful in certain circumstances, can cause unhappiness in the long term. And when people find that they’ve achieved their profit goals and are still not satisfied, they may just try to pursue even larger and more ambitious profit-goals, thus driving themselves into deeper unhappiness. The only remedy is to recognize the importance of purpose-goals for providing happiness and satisfaction, not only to individual people but also to corporations.

Pink concludes this section of the book by looking optimistically toward the future. He argues that science has clearly proven the need for society to switch to a new operating system focused more on our third drive. On some level, he says, we already know this. We know human beings are not machines, and we can look to children to see that people are naturally driven to be creative and productive and to seek out flow states, without the need for any external rewards or punishments. Recognizing this is not only essential for businesses, he argues, but for humanity as a whole.