Quotes About Motivation

For routine tasks, which aren't very interesting and don't demand much creative thinking, rewards can provide a small motivational booster shot without the harmful side effects.

Type I behavior has an incremental theory of intelligence, prizes learning goals over performance goals, and welcomes effort as a way to improve at something that matters.

Sawyer Effect: A weird behavioral alchemy inspired by the scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in which Tom and friends whitewash Aunt Polly's fence. This effect has two aspects. The negative: Rewards can turn play into work. The positive: Focusing on mastery can turn work into play.

According to a cluster of recent behavioral science studies, autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school and in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological well-being.3

Now, once a quarter, the company sets aside an entire day when its engineers can work on any software problem they want—only this time, "to get them out of the day to day," it must be something that's not part of their regular job.

The less evidence of extrinsic motivation during art school, the more success in professional art both several years after graduation and nearly twenty years later.

Despite its greater sophistication and higher aspirations, Motivation 2.0 still wasn't exactly ennobling. It suggested that, in the end, human beings aren't much different from livestock—that the way to get us moving in the right direction is by dangling a crunchier carrot or wielding a sharper stick. But what this operating system lacked in enlightenment, it made up for in effectiveness. It worked well—extremely well. Until it didn't. As

Daniel H. Pink

But "as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance."2

For work that requires more than just climbing, rung by rung, up a ladder of instructions, rewards are more perilous. The best way to avoid the seven deadly flaws of extrinsic motivators is to avoid them altogether or to downplay them significantly and instead emphasize the elements of deeper motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose

The essential requirement: Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete.

In other words, where "if-then" rewards are a mistake, shift to "now that" rewards—as in "Now that you've finished the poster and it turned out so well, I'd like to celebrate by taking you out to lunch.

Amabile and others have found that extrinsic rewards can be effective for algorithmic tasks—those that depend on following an existing formula to its logical conclusion. But for more right-brain undertakings—those that demand flexible problem-solving, inventiveness, or conceptual understanding—contingent rewards can be dangerous.

First, consider nontangible rewards. Praise and positive feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies.

HAVE A FEDEX DAY

Intrinsic motivation is of great importance for all economic activities. It is inconceivable that people are motivated solely or even mainly by external incentives.

Policy makers and business leaders take note: money matters. But often the best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table—so that people can focus on the work rather than on the cash.

In several studies, Dweck found that giving children a performance goal (say, getting a high mark on a test) was effective for relatively straightforward problems but often inhibited children's ability to apply the concepts to new situations.

This is one of the central findings on regret: it can deepen persistence, which almost always elevates performance.

Instead, they spent considerable time accomplishing almost nothing—until they experienced a surge of activity that always came at "the temporal midpoint" of a project.14

Type I's like being recognized for their accomplishments—because recognition is a form of feedback. But for them, unlike for Type X's, recognition is not a goal in itself.

Deci found that those oriented toward control and extrinsic rewards showed greater public self-consciousness, acted more defensively, and were more likely to exhibit the Type A behavior pattern.5

Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation BY EDWARD L. DECI WITH RICHARD FLASTE

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success BY CAROL DWECK