Motivation is one of those unintuitive things. The obvious ways of motivating people, e.g. reward the behaviour your want may or may not work depending on the task at hand. Dan Pink sheds some light on the surprising truth of what motivates us in his book Drive.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the discovery that carrot and stick methods of motivation do not work. I’d known this for some time, as the motivation to progress certain projects of mine always started high but waned as the project matured, but there were projects for which the motivation was always fresh, and now I know why. Intrinsic motivators e.g. Personal interest, quest for mastery are more effective motivators an extrinsic ones, e.g. I’ll give you more money of you work harder.
There is a strong scientific and behavioural basis for all of this, studies have been undertaken all over the world to test performance and motivation with the carrot on stick model. They rewarded people small sums of money for their performance at different tasks. If the task was a manual one, the size of the reward motivated people to perform better, however if the task require any cognition at all, the largest rewards produced the worst results. This study has been replicated again and again all overt the world, and this phenomena appears to be a behavioural thing, innate to humans rather than anything cultural.
The book also details ideas for motivating yourself, your organisation or your children. I for one am going to apply this to my child, and also to myself. The knowledge is so valuable because it is presented in a way that allows you to run with it. Reading this, I could see ways to use the knowledge to motivate myself and my son.
5/5 – valuable information, more valuable if you find ways to implement these ideas