Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
Drive, by Daniel Pink, is (as its title suggests) a book about what motivates people. Since I’ve read books that mention this book (Better by Mistake) and books that this book uses in its bibliography (Stumbling on Happiness, Outliers) I kept my expectations modest. If I buy a cookbook and get two really usable recipes out of it, I consider it money well spent. Likewise, if I read a non fiction book and there are two facts or quotes I remember, I consider it worth reading. This book had those two things, so it hit my modest goal for “worth reading.”
The first part of the book talks about rewards, and how they can help (or hinder) people’s motivation to do things. It talks about carrots and sticks and how the theory of management has changed over time. It discusses the “Sawyer effect” (from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer whitewashing scene) where re-defining an activity as leisure can make it more interesting than if it is described as work. These are all ideas I’ve seen elsewhere, but they were presented in a nicely clear and logical way. I felt the writing was strong, lucid, and engaging.
The first gem that I took away from this book is on page 69, where he includes a simple flow chart as to when rewards will actually motivate people, and when they won’t. If I were a manager or a CEO, I’d print this out and put it up on the wall of my office for quick reference. For example, if you give someone an “if-then” reward (if you do x, then you will get y) for something they already like, you will ruin their intrinsic motivation. Also, they will no longer do it without a reward. Yet, sometimes (as when there isn’t any intrinsic motivation for the action) rewards help. I admit, this is mostly useful for managers. I’ve already started bribing my kids with extra money for some chores, so that ship has already sailed.
The middle section of the book talks about autonomy, and how much better (and more creatively) people work if they feel as though they are in charge of their own project and have control over how it’s done. He references avant garde thinkers at companies who use a “results only work environment” (ROWE) in which it doesn’t matter if or when they show up to work, who they work with, or what they do, as long as they produce results. These ideas seemed intriguing, but not easily replicable, even if I were a CEO (which I’m not.) He does offer some insights for people in my managerial position (parent), mostly rehashing Dweck’s oft-quoted research in which praising children for intelligence rather than hard work makes them less motivated and more afraid of challenges.
The latter sections of the book are where Pink started to lose me. At first, I was intrigued because on page 154 there was an eye-opening quote by Clare Boothe Luce, who offered advice to then president Kennedy
“‘A great man,’ she told him ‘is one sentence.’ Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was : ‘He preserved the union and freed the slaves.’ Franklin Roosevelt’s was: ‘He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.'”
I loved that idea, that a person should orient themselves towards a one sentence life*, that we should avoid being, as Luce said: “splintered among different priorities[,] that his sentence risked becoming a muddled paragraph.”
At this point, Pink offers suggestions, such as giving oneself a performance review every once in a while, to assess how close you’ve come to your goals. (Maybe doable, but weird) or taking a “Sagmeier” a sabbatical from your life every seven or eight years to try something completely different (Intriguing, but largely incompatible with responsibilities like spouse, family, house and career.) At this point, his suggestions started to become off center. For example, create your own motivational poster? Move five steps closer to mastery? Use 3 x 5 cards to ask yourself if you’re on the path to autonomy? Without concrete examples of how this would work, I found them useless and frankly, kind of annoying in that preachy self-help way.
Pink offers some conclusions about how to motivate your employees (most of us aren’t CEOs) and how to motivate your kids (mostly geared towards teachers). After that, the last twenty or so pages of the book felt like choppy filler. He had a bibliography, a glossary, a chapter by chapter summary (as if this were a textbook), and then a few one or two page mini essays. I could have done without all of it.
If it had stopped midway through, and only talked about how to make people more intrinsically motivated rather than extrinsically motivated, I would have been happier with this book. Better to discuss one subject well than a smattering of subjects poorly. There were some terms, ROWE, for example, that were so new that I had to remind myself of what they meant. There were other ideas that I just didn’t get and or like. He says that a person is either an “I” person or an “X” person (Intrinsically or extrinsically motivated) and offers a link to an online test where you can find out which kind you are. That seemed incompatible with the notion that people could be motivated by either. If this were a diet book on how to get people to eat more from hunger than boredom, would it really be helpful to have people take a test to find out if they were “H” eaters or “B” eaters? If they came out as “H,” they’d assume they didn’t need the book, and if they came out as “B,” they’d assume they couldn’t be changed.
Pink also spends a lot of time talking about “flow” or “autotelic” experiences (bonus points for using a word I didn’t know.) This is a great concept, but he just brings it up and says it’s important, but doesn’t spend a lot of time defining it. Since the concept of seeking this state of “flow” was mentioned over and over again as an important state to achieve, I would have liked a better description, rather than just the title of the book we should read to understand what it means.
Frankly, now that I think about it, I’m kind of perplexed as to why “flow” was mentioned so often. What does losing track of time by doing something enjoyable have to do with what motivates people? I’m not sure. At some point, the book diverged from a book about psychology and turned into a self-help book as to how to achieve mastery and autonomy and purpose. I suppose they fit together in a certain logical way, in that carrot-and-stick is for short-term motivation and “contemplating states of engagement and autotelic experiences” and “defining your life’s ambition” is more for long-term motivation, but the stylistic changes still made me feel as though the book took a left turn somewhere. The cover says “The surprising truth about what motivates us” and somewhere around page 100, it became “how to fix your life.”
Maybe that’s a minor difference, but the latter third of the book also felt significantly less coherent and not written with the strength of the first third. The last part was the point at which I felt that the book had ceased to become a “one sentence book” and got muddied into a rambling paragraph. It’s too self-help to be a good pop science book, and too shallow and unspecific to be a good self-help book. It’s not a bad read, and I did get two good things out if it, but it’s not likely to be the book that changes your life forever.
*My life sentence: “She created many beautiful things.”
