Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Drive is a 2009 non-fiction book by Daniel Pink, an American economist with experience working under Vice President Al Gore and Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. In Drive, Pink looks at research by psychologists, management theorists, and other professionals to examine the question of what really motivates people. While the common consensus in the business world is that people are largely driven by a desire for extrinsic rewards (e.g., money) and a fear of extrinsic punishment (e.g., fines), Pink argues instead that people are primarily motivated by an intrinsic desire to seek out challenging, creative, and engaging tasks, a desire which he refers to as the “third drive.” This study guide uses the Amazon Kindle e-book version of Drive.

Summary

In Part 1, Pink lays out the case that external rewards and punishments are not the most effective way to motivate people, and in fact can have harmful effects on long-term motivation. He cites real-life scenarios in which people willingly dedicate their time and energy to a task that offers no monetary compensation because, for those people, the task itself is its own reward. When an external reward is offered, the task is transformed into a chore, and the intrinsic motivation the person may have had to do it dissipates. While extrinsic rewards can be effective for creating short-term bursts of productivity, over the long term they tend to destroy intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic rewards can also be useful for motivating people to do certain repetitive tasks that require no creative thinking, such as factory work. However, Pink makes the case that such rewards are particularly ill-suited for motivating people to do more creative, “right-brain” tasks. This is unfortunate, because he believes that in the future, more and more jobs will require workers with the ability to think “outside-the-box,” and that trying to stick to a system of “carrots and sticks” to motivate people is only going to result in decreased worker engagement and productivity.

Extrinsic rewards are not only ineffective long-term motivators, according to Pink, but they can result in negative and even anti-social behavior. When someone’s only goal is an external reward like money, they become more willing to cut corners and behave unethically to achieve that goal. However, when people are motivated intrinsically, then the work becomes the reward in and of itself, and unethical behavior decreases.

In Part 2, Pink explores the three key elements that allow intrinsic motivation to flourish: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. These three universal human desires have been ignored by our current system of work and education. People crave autonomy over their lives; they want to make their own choices about what kind of work they do, when they do it, how they do it, and who they do it with. However, businesses and schools have traditionally been unwilling to grant such autonomy because of a misguided assumption that people are by default lazy and unproductive. Pink argues that granting people more autonomy actually makes them more productive, and that workers will stay with a company that offers them greater autonomy over one that offers them a bigger paycheck.

Mastery—the desire to take on challenges and improve oneself gradually over time—is the second driving factor in intrinsic motivation. Pink says that too many businesses and schools have failed to recognize the importance of offering opportunities for mastery. Instead of giving workers jobs that are too easy, leading to boredom, or jobs that are too far beyond their skill level, leading to frustration, Pink emphasizes the importance of offering people “Goldilocks tasks” that are neither too difficult nor too easy. These tasks are optimal for allowing people to slip into the mental state of “flow,” when they are so deeply focused on a task that time seems to melt away. People inherently crave these moments of flow, but too many jobs fail to provide these experiences.

Finally, the third driving factor in intrinsic motivation is purpose: the desire to be a part of something bigger than oneself. Pink argues that many businesses in the past have seen purpose as “decorative”—something that is nice to have, but not essential. He makes the case that a sense of purpose is a deep-seated human need, and that without it, motivation quickly drains away. Purpose, he argues, is the only true key to a satisfying life.

In the third section of Drive, Pink takes these ideas and offers various tips for how to implement them in your life, whether you are an employer, an employee, a teacher, a parent, or simply an individual who wants to feel more motivated in your life.