Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

An idea practiced by Google (Alphabet) and other workplaces, allowing employees to use 20% of their working time to focus on a project of their choosing, either on their own or in teams. As a result of this autonomy, workers often come up with creative, innovative, and even world-changing projects, such as Atlassian’s Sticky Notes and Alphabet’s Gmail.

Pioneered by the company Atlassian, mentioned in Chapter 4, FedEx Days involve giving employees a full 24-hours in which they can work on any project they want, even if it’s unrelated to their usual job, and present what they worked on the next day. The goal of these days is to promote greater autonomy among workers. They are nicknamed FedEx Days because you “have to deliver something overnight” (91).

A term popularized by Hungarian American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “flow” refers to a mental state in which a person is totally absorbed in a task, to the point that their sense of time and self begins to melt away. At work, flow states are achievable only through what Pink calls “Goldilocks tasks,” which are just difficult enough to stretch a person’s skills without discouraging them. Experiencing moments of flow during everyday life is essential to a person’s overall mental well-being and is an important part of the long-term process of mastery.