Quotes About Motivation

ultimately, open source depends on intrinsic motivation with the same ferocity that older business models rely on extrinsic motivation

One who is interested in developing and enhancing intrinsic motivation in children, employees, students, etc., should not concentrate on external-control systems such as monetary rewards

The starting point, of course, is to ensure that the baseline rewards - wages, salaries, benefits, and so on - are adequate and fair. Without a healthy baseline, motivation of any sort is difficult and often impossible.

Remember your Abraham Maslow and your Viktor Frankl. Bet your business on it.

Routine, not-so-interesting jobs require direction; nonroutine, more interesting work depends on self-direction.

Forty-eight hours without flow plunged people into a state eerily similar to a serious psychiatric disorder. The experiment suggests that flow, the deep sense of engagement that Motivation 3.0 calls for, isn't a nicety. It's a necessity. We need it to survive. It is the oxygen of the soul.

They're working hard and persisting through difficulties because of their internal desire to control their lives, learn about their world, and accomplish something that endures.

Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation," they determined. "When institutions—families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example—focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people's behavior," they do considerable long-term damage.3

People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person's motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person's intrinsic motivation toward the activity."4

The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. But once we've cleared the table, carrots and sticks can achieve precisely the opposite of their intended aims.

One of the most enduring scenes in American literature offers an important lesson in human motivation. In Chapter 2 of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom faces the dreary task of whitewashing Aunt Polly's 810-square-foot fence. He's not

By offering a reward, a principal signals to the agent that the task is undesirable.

Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation

And by diminishing intrinsic motivation, they can send performance, creativity, and even upstanding behavior toppling like dominoes. Let's call this the Sawyer Effect.a A sampling of intriguing experiments around the world reveals the four realms where this effect

The better strategy is to get compensation right—and then get it out of sight. Effective organizations compensate people in amounts and in ways that allow individuals to mostly forget about compensation and instead focus on the work itself.

Physicians sell patients on a remedy. Lawyers sell juries on a verdict. Teachers sell students on the value of paying attention in class. Entrepreneurs woo funders, writers sweet-talk producers, coaches cajole players. Whatever our profession, we deliver presentations to fellow employees and make pitches to new clients. We try to convince the boss to loosen up a few dollars from the budget or the human resources department to add more vacation days.

As Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman has explained: Say you take people who are motivated to behave nicely, then give them a fairly weak set of ethical standards to meet. Now, instead of asking them to "do it because it's the right thing to do," you've essentially given them an alternate set of standards—do this so you can check off all these boxes.

When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity

before long, the existing reward may no longer suffice. It will quickly feel less like a bonus and more like the status quo—which then forces the principal to offer larger rewards to achieve the same effect.20

Ferlazzo makes a distinction between "irritation" and "agitation." Irritation, he says, is "challenging people to do something that we want them to do." By contrast, "agitation is challenging them to do something that they want to do.

traditional businesses are profit maximizers, which square perfectly with Motivation 2.0. These new entities are purpose maximizers—which are unsuited to this older operating system because they flout its very principles.

Two days. Forty-eight hours without flow plunged people into a state eerily similar to a serious psychiatric disorder. The experiment suggests that flow, the deep sense of engagement that Motivation 3.0 calls for, isn't a nicety. It's a necessity. We need it to survive. It is the oxygen of the soul.

The lesson: Clarity on how to think without clarity on how to act can leave people unmoved.

Alas, the social science shows something different and more nuanced. We human beings talk to ourselves all the time—so much, in fact, that it's possible to categorize our self-talk. Some of it is positive, as in "I'm strong," "I've got this," or "I will be the world's greatest salesman." Some