PDF Summary:Drive, by Daniel H. Pink

Are you feeling unmotivated in your job and life? Are you finding your current goals unsatisfying to keep working toward? In Drive, Daniel H. Pink argues that your work structure is to blame. Historically, employers have motivated employees through financial rewards and kept workers on a tight leash. These principles worked well when people were primarily working on assembly lines, but today’s creative work demands more. An effective model of motivation should be based around intrinsic motivation, which relies on three factors: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

In our guide, we’ll discuss the conventional model of motivation and why it doesn’t work. Then we’ll explore the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and look closely at the components of intrinsic motivation. Finally, we’ll provide tips on how to increase intrinsic motivation for yourself, your organization, and your children.

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We’ll refer to those who are primarily intrinsically motivated as Type I and those who are extrinsically motivated as Type X. Pink outlines some key differences between Type I’s and Type X’s:

1. Type I’s outperform Type X’s in the long term. While extrinsic rewards can fuel work in the short term, they tend to exhaust as workers habituate to the reward. In contrast, intrinsic motivation can be self-sustaining and renewable over long periods.
2. Type I behavior comes from both nature and nurture. Type I seems to be the natural state of most people (imagine the curiosity of a child), but Type X is forced on us by the way we run our homes, our schools, and our workplaces. However, with education and the right environment, Pink says extrinsically motivated Type X’s can become intrinsically motivated Type I’s.
3. Type I’s still care about money and recognition. You can’t expect Type I’s to work for free—as mentioned earlier, they require a baseline compensation to remove money as a consideration. But after a certain point, compensation is less a driver for Type I’s and more a form of recognition or feedback about performance.
4. Type I’s have greater physical and mental health. Studies show that people who prefer autonomy and intrinsic motivation have higher psychological health and better relationships than Type X people.

In the next section, we’ll explore the three components of intrinsic motivation.

Drivers of Intrinsic Motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose

As we’ve seen, the traditional reward/punishment system is limited in motivating today’s workers. To improve motivation, Pink says we need to replace extrinsic motivation with intrinsic motivation. Since intrinsic motivation comes from the drive for autonomy, mastery, and purpose, increasing intrinsic motivation requires understanding these three factors. Let’s look at each more closely, as well as how you can increase each one in your workplace.

Autonomy

Autonomy is acting with internal choice. With autonomy, you have the ability to influence the work that you do and how you do it. It’s not the same as independence—autonomy does not mean doing it alone and refusing the help of others, but rather acting through internal choice and not being driven by external pressure.

Why is autonomy uncommon in many of today’s work environments? Historically, “management” has assumed the worst of people. They believe workers will shirk their responsibilities if they’re not monitored and micromanaged. But Pink argues that humans are naturally wired to be self-driven. Infants and children are naturally curious, internally driven to explore the world without receiving rewards. But over time, our intrinsic motivation is stifled by rigid, paternalistic environments: home, school, and work.

To develop an intrinsically motivating environment, you need to allow people to rekindle their autonomy. Counterintuitively, people who are given more freedom may be even more accountable for their work, not less. For best results, Pink says people need to have autonomy over four major dimensions of their work: task, time, technique, and team.

Autonomy Over Tasks

In typical work environments, the entirety of what you work on is decided for you. Instead, Pink says people should enjoy some autonomy in choosing what they work on. When employees have the freedom to work on projects outside the scope of what they’re assigned, their creativity can be unleashed, leading to greater innovation. Additionally, companies that give their employees this type of freedom signal trust in their employees to do good things and stay efficient.

Autonomy Over Time

Many work environments require facetime at the office during specific hours. Checking in late or leaving early are signs of negligence. Some workers are now expected to be available by text, email, or Slack around the clock. This tether crowds out personal time, reduces satisfaction, and increases turnover. Pink says the antidote is a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), where the focus is on the work itself rather than when people do it. Workers still need to meet goals and deadlines, but as long as they achieve their goals, they can work whenever and wherever they want.

Autonomy Over Technique

Even when workers don’t have full autonomy over what they do, they can still enjoy autonomy over how they do it. Work doesn’t need to be micromanaged—given goals to hit, people can figure out the best way to achieve them. For example, Zappos gives support staff freedom on how to serve the customer, doesn’t require scripts, and doesn’t monitor calls. This has led to some support calls lasting hours, with a very satisfied customer on the other end. Similarly, JetBlue hires remote support staff and allows them to answer customer calls from home. This enables the company to draw from a broader pool of talent, like parents, retirees, and people with disabilities.

Autonomy Over Team

In most companies, you don’t get to choose your coworkers, which leads to frustration when people don’t get along. Some companies are experimenting with allowing people to choose their team: At Whole Foods, candidates work 30-day trials with a team, and the current employees decide whether to hire the person. And at Facebook, new engineers spend about six weeks in a training boot camp. Then they interview with different teams and decide which to join.

Mastery

Pink explains that people naturally want to get better at skills and get recognized for their competency. This is mastery. Mastery drives people to be more productive and more satisfied with their work. One study showed that in an engineering workplace, the desire for intellectual challenge was the best predictor of productivity. People who were extrinsically motivated worked just as hard, but they accomplished less, as defined by the number of patents filed. And a survey of employees found that the greatest motivator is “making progress in one’s work.”

In your organization or life, you can promote mastery by providing challenges that are neither too difficult nor too simple, establishing clear goals, providing fast feedback, and adding more challenges when things begin to get too easy. When challenged at the right level, people enter a state of flow—where the challenge is just right, the goal is just out of reach, and the task is so engaging that doing it is its own reward. People rate flow as the most satisfying life experience, even more so than leisure activities.

Pink cites three psychological components of mastery. 1) Mastery requires a growth mindset—a belief that your intelligence and abilities are not fixed and that you have the potential to get better at whatever you want to. 2) Mastery requires you to overcome failure and setbacks. You have to take incremental steps forward, day in and day out. 3) You can never fully reach mastery. The next goal is always just out of reach, and you must learn to enjoy the journey.

Purpose

Autonomy is the how of the work, and mastery is the what. The third pillar of intrinsic motivation is purpose, or the why of the work. Pink says people want to know that what they’re doing has value. In particular, people are wired to want to help others. In the absence of an outward-looking purpose, people can become anxious or depressed. And if they blindly pursue profit goals at the expense of meaningful relationships and purpose, they may regret their emptiness when it’s too late to change course.

To promote purpose in the workplace, Pink recommends centering management goals around ideals like honor, truth, justice, and beauty rather than buzzwords like “value” and “differentiation.” Additionally, always explain why something needs to be done to prevent work from feeling purposeless.

You can also combine purpose with autonomy: Donate some company profits to charity, since spending money on others seems to increase our well-being, and give employees autonomy over deciding where they want to send their share of the donation pool. Also consider giving workers time to work on socially meaningful projects during work hours.

Tips to Increase Intrinsic Motivation

Pink provides a number of specific tips on promoting intrinsically motivated behavior. We’ve grouped them into three categories:

1. How to increase your own personal motivation
2. How to increase motivation in your organization
3. How to increase motivation with your children

Motivating Yourself

To increase your own intrinsic motivation, ask yourself:

1) What’s the one thing you want to accomplish or be known for? You may need to reorganize your life to focus on this.

2) How did you get better today? In pursuit of the answer to question #1, you’ll encounter a lot of small tasks and setbacks. To keep yourself motivated, ask yourself at the end of the day: “Are you better today than you were yesterday?”

In addition to these questions, Pink suggests you consider taking a sabbatical to increase your intrinsic motivation. Many people work hard for 40 years, spending the final 25 years in retirement. But why not take retirement five years later than you otherwise would, and sprinkle five years of sabbatical time throughout your career? Taking a year off might give you valuable time for personal exploration and unstick you from the rat race.

Finally, engage in deliberate practice. Pink says the best way to improve is to apply effort toward improving performance. Don’t just blindly do the same thing. To apply deliberate practice, 1) set a stretch goal to make sure you’re challenging yourself; 2) understand your weaknesses, and direct your effort there; 3) apply your full concentration and effort; 4) get feedback right away; and 5) repeat.

Motivating Your Organization

Here are Pink’s suggested strategies to improve autonomy, mastery, and purpose in your organization.

Tip #1: Allow employees to spend 20% of their time on self-chosen projects. Giving employees time to work on any project they want increases their sense of autonomy. The only requirement is that the project should further the goals of the organization somehow.

Tip #2: Conduct anonymous surveys about autonomy and purpose. Ask questions like “How much autonomy do you have over your tasks at work?” and “What is our organization’s purpose?”

Tip #3: Involve employees in goal-setting. This will give them ownership over goals and make them feel more driven toward accomplishing them.

Tip #4: Design for the majority of people who are good, not the minority who are bad. Many companies set policies to minimize bad employees taking advantage of the system. But if you’re hiring well, the majority of people should be behaving well, and the rest you should probably terminate. So design policies to assume trust by default. People will reciprocate the respect and trust they receive.

Tip #5: Pay fairly, both internally and externally. Since monetary compensation is merely a baseline reward, it just needs to be high enough that people stop obsessing about how little they’re getting paid. Internally, make sure pay differences are publicly justifiable—based on seniority or complexity of work. Externally, calibrate your compensation with local and industry averages. Pay more than average if you can—this will increase retention and could be worth the extra cost in productivity (since employees won’t constantly be thinking about whether they can get paid more elsewhere).

Motivating Your Children

Pink also provides tips for parents and teachers on how to increase children’s intrinsic motivation:

Tip #1: Offer students autonomy over how and when to work.

Tip #2: Promote mastery by giving a novel, engaging task, rather than just expecting regurgitation of something already covered.

Tip #3: Help convey the purpose of the assignment and of the course itself. If they’re learning history, ask them to apply it to the news. If they’re learning Spanish, take them to a local organization where they can practice it.

Tip #4: Give Kids Variants of Adult Employee Practices. For example, have them set performance and learning goals for themselves.

Tip #5: Give feedback often, and make it specific.

Tip #6: Praise effort and strategy, not intelligence. This will inspire the growth mindset and encourage them to push through future difficulties.

Tip #7: Don’t combine allowances with chores. Tying chores to rewards sends a message that chores are undesirable and turns helping the family into a transaction. By requiring chores without pay, you build principles like teamwork and diligence.