Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

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.

Goldilocks tasks are those that promote engagement and create opportunities to achieve “flow.” The key to an effective Goldilocks task is that it is “not too hot, and not too cold” (116), but just right. In other words, the task is not so easy that the person doing it will get bored and become disengaged, but it’s also not so difficult that the person will become frustrated and give up.

“If-then” rewards are a key part of the “Motivation 2.0” operating system, which is based on the assumption that external rewards will motivate people to work harder and better. An “If-then” reward is when you promise someone ahead of time, “If you do this, then you will get that.” Research has shown that, contrary to popular belief, if-then rewards can boost short-term productivity but ultimately hurt long-term productivity by killing intrinsic interest in an activity. In contrast, “Now-that” rewards are given unexpectedly after a task is already completed: “Now that you’ve done this, you get that.” Unlike if-then rewards, now-that rewards show no harmful effects on productivity or engagement.

Pink compares existing social and business structures to computer operating systems. “Motivation 1.0” was the first primitive system, built off the assumption that humans are mainly driven by biological urges (food, sex, etc.), “Motivation 2.0” is a more modern system designed from the assumption that what mainly motivates people is external rewards and punishments. Pink argues that Motivation 2.0 is outdated and even harmful in today’s world, so he urges that we must upgrade to a new operating system, “Motivation 3.0,” which recognizes that the creative and challenging tasks that dominate the modern economy are best accomplished through intrinsic motivation.

Referencing the famous scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in which Tom tricks his friends into whitewashing a fence by convincing them that it’s a fun and engaging task, the “Sawyer Effect” refers to the way that external rewards can turn something fun and interesting into drudge work. As an example, paying a child to do household chores signals to them that the chores are undesirable work, and as a result the child will never willingly do chores unless they get paid. However, work can also be transformed into play when the focus is shifted to mastery or purpose over external rewards.

First pioneered by Best Buy, the idea of a ROWE is that employees are not held to any strict schedule. They may come into the office whenever they wish, or not at all, just so long as they get their work done. Under the Motivation 2.0 operating system, managers would expect such a strategy to produce a lazy and unproductive workforce. In reality, the effect is that worker productivity increases and workers develop a deeper loyalty to the company because they value the autonomy they’ve been given.