Drive (ch 6 - end)

Chapter 6 - Purpose

• According to United Nations data, a sixty-year-old American man can expect to live for another twenty-plus years; a sixty-year-old American woman will be around for another quarter of a century. In Japan, a sixty-year-old man can expect to live past his eighty-second birthday, a sixty-year-old woman to nearly eighty-eight. The pattern is the same in many other prosperous countries.
• Neither generation rates money as the most important form of compensation. Instead they choose a range of nonmonetary factors—from “a great team” to “the ability to give back to society through work.”⁴ And if they can’t find that satisfying package of rewards in an existing organization, they’ll create a venture of their own.
• The aims of these Motivation 3.0 companies are not to chase profit while trying to stay ethical and law-abiding. Their goal is to pursue purpose—and to use profit as the catalyst rather than the objective
• Gary Hamel, whom I mentioned above, says, “The goals of management are usually described in words like ‘efficiency,’ ‘advantage,’ ‘value,’ ‘superiority,’ ‘focus,’ and ‘differentiation.’ Important as these objectives are, they lack the power to rouse human hearts.” Business leaders, he says, “must find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals, such as honor, truth, love, justice, and beauty.”⁸ Humanize what people say and you may well humanize what they do.
• First, many psychologists and economists have found that the correlation between money and happiness is weak—that past a certain (and quite modest) level, a larger pile of cash doesn’t bring people a higher level of satisfaction.
• a psychologist at the Harvard Business School, how people spend their money may be at least as important as how much money they earn. In particular, spending money on other people (buying flowers for your spouse rather than an MP3 player for yourself ) or on a cause (donating to a religious institution rather than going for an expensive haircut) can actually increase our subjective well-being.¹¹ In fact, Dunn and Norton propose turning their findings on what they call “pro-social” spending into corporate policy.
• According to The Boston Globe, they believe that “companies can improve their employees’ emotional well-being by shifting some of their budget for charitable giving so that individual employees are given sums to donate, leaving them happier even as the charities of their choice benefit.”¹² In other words, handing individual employees control over how the organization gives back to the community might do more to improve their overall satisfaction than one more “if-then” financial incentive.
• Another study offers a second possible purpose-centered policy prescription. Physicians in high-profile settings like the Mayo Clinic face pressures and demands that can often lead to burnout. But field research at the prestigious medical facility found that letting doctors spend one day a week on the aspect of their job that was most meaningful to them—whether patient care, research, or community service—could reduce the physical and emotional exhaustion that accompanies their work. Doctors who participated in this trial policy had half the burnout rate of those who did not.¹³ Think of it as “20 percent time” with a purpose.
• What’s more, graduates with profit goals showed increases in anxiety, depression, and other negative indicators—again, even though they were attaining their goals.

“These findings are rather striking,” the researchers write, “as they suggest that attainment of a particular set of goals [in this case, profit goals] has no impact on well-being and actually contributes to ill-being.”¹⁵

• “One cannot lead a life that is truly excellent without feeling that one belongs to something greater and more permanent than oneself.”

MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

• the findings suggest that even when we do get what we want, it’s not always what we need. “People who are very high in extrinsic goals for wealth are more likely to attain that wealth, but they’re still unhappy,” Ryan told me.

Or as Deci put it, “The typical notion is this: You value something. You attain it. Then you’re better off as a function of it. But what we find is that there are certain things that if you value and if you attain them, you’re worse off as a result of it, not better off.”

• Failing to understand this conundrum—that satisfaction depends not merely on having goals, but on having the right goals—can lead sensible people down self-destructive paths. If people chase profit goals, reach those goals, and still don’t feel any better about their lives, one response is to increase the size and scope of the goals—to seek more money or greater outside validation. And that can “drive them down a road of further unhappiness thinking it’s the road to happiness,” Ryan said.
• “One of the reasons for anxiety and depression in the high attainers is that they’re not having good relationships. They’re busy making money and attending to themselves and that means that there’s less room in their lives for love and attention and caring and empathy and the things that truly count,” Ryan added.
• The profit motive has been an important fuel for achievement. But it’s not the only motive. And it’s not the most important one. Indeed, if we were to look at history’s greatest achievements—from the printing press to constitutional democracy to cures for deadly diseases—the spark that kept the creators working deep into the night was purpose at least as much as profit. A healthy society—and healthy business organizations—begins with purpose and considers profit a way to move toward that end or a happy by-product of its attainment.
• The science shows that those typical twentieth-century carrot-and-stick motivators—things we consider somehow a “natural” part of human enterprise—can sometimes work. But they’re effective in only a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. The science shows that “if-then” rewards—the mainstays of the Motivation 2.0 operating system—not only are ineffective in many situations, but also can crush the high-level, creative, conceptual abilities that are central to current and future economic and social progress. The science shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to live a life of purpose.
• We’re designed to be active and engaged. And we know that the richest experiences in our lives aren’t when we’re clamoring for validation from others, but when we’re listening to our own voice—doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause larger than ourselves.

Part 3 - The Type I Toolkit

Type I for individuals: nine strategies for awakening your motivation:

• Set a reminder on your computer or mobile phone to go off at forty random times in a week. Each time your device beeps, write down what you’re doing, how you’re feeling, and whether you’re in “flow.” Record your observations, look at the patterns, and consider the following questions:

• Which moments produced feelings of “flow”? Where were you? What were you working on? Who were you with?

• Are certain times of day more flow-friendly than others? How could you restructure your day based on your findings?

• How might you increase the number of optimal experiences and reduce the moments when you felt disengaged or distracted?

• If you’re having doubts about your job or career, what does this exercise tell you about your true source of intrinsic motivation?

• One way to orient your life toward greater purpose is to think about your sentence. Maybe it’s: “He raised four kids who became happy and healthy adults.” Or “She invented a device that made people’s lives easier.” Or “He cared for every person who walked into his office regardless of whether that person could pay.” Or “She taught two generations of children how to read.”

As you contemplate your purpose, begin with the big question: What’s your sentence?

• At the end of each day, ask yourself whether you were better today than you were yesterday. Did you do more? Did you do it well? Or to get specific, did you learn your ten vocabulary words, make your eight sales calls, eat your five servings of fruits and vegetables, write your four pages? You don’t have to be flawless each day. Instead, look for small measures of improvement such as how long you practiced your saxophone or whether you held off on checking e-mail until you finished that report you needed to write. Reminding yourself that you don’t need to be a master by day 3 is the best way of ensuring you will be one by day 3,000.

So before you go to sleep each night, ask yourself the small question: Was I better today than yesterday?

• So every seven years, Sagmeister closes his graphic design shop, tells his clients he won’t be back for a year, and goes off on a 365-day sabbatical. He uses the time to travel, to live places he’s never been, and to experiment with new projects. It sounds risky, I know. But he says the ideas he generates during the year “off ” often provide his income for the next seven years. “Taking a Sagmeister,” as I now call it, requires a fair bit of planning and saving, of course. But doesn’t forgoing that big-screen TV seem a small price to pay for an unforgettable—and un-get-backable—year of personal exploration? The truth is, this idea is more realistic than many of us realize. Which is why I hope to take a Sagmeister in a couple of years and why you should consider it, too.
• Figure out your goals—mostly learning goals, but also a few performance goals—and then every month, call yourself to your office and give yourself an appraisal. How are you faring? Where are you falling short? What tools, information, or support might you need to do better?

Some other hints:

• Set both smaller and larger goals so that when it comes time to evaluate yourself you’ve already accomplished some whole tasks.

• Make sure you understand how every aspect of your work relates to your larger purpose.

• Be brutally honest. This exercise is aimed at helping you improve performance and achieve mastery—so if you rationalize failures or gloss over your mistakes instead of learning from them, you’re wasting your time.

• Follow these steps—over and over again for a decade—and you just might become a master:

• Remember that deliberate practice has one objective: to improve performance. “People who play tennis once a week for years don’t get any better if they do the same thing each time,” Ericsson has said. “Deliberate practice is about changing your performance, setting new goals and straining yourself to reach a bit higher each time.”

• Repeat, repeat, repeat. Repetition matters. Basketball greats don’t shoot ten free throws at the end of team practice; they shoot five hundred.

• Seek constant, critical feedback. If you don’t know how you’re doing, you won’t know what to improve.

• Focus ruthlessly on where you need help. While many of us work on what we’re already good at, says Ericsson, “those who get better work on their weaknesses.”

• Prepare for the process to be mentally and physically exhausting. That’s why so few people commit to it, but that’s why it works.

Type I for Organizations: Nine ways to improve your company, office, or group

• You’ve read about the wonders of “20 percent time”—where organizations encourage employees to spend one-fifth of their hours working on any project they want. And if you’ve ever used Gmail or read Google News, you’ve benefited from the results. But for all the virtues of this Type I innovation, putting such a policy in place can seem daunting. How much will it cost? What if it doesn’t work? If you’re feeling skittish, here’s an idea: Go with a more modest version—20 percent time . . . with training wheels. Start with, say, 10 percent time. That’s just one afternoon of a five-day workweek. (Who among us hasn’t wasted that amount of time at work anyway?) And instead of committing to it forever, try it for six months.
• Kimley-Horn and Associates, a civil engineering firm in Raleigh, North Carolina, has established a reward system that gets the Type I stamp of approval: At any point, without asking permission, anyone in the company can award a $50 bonus to any of her colleagues. “It works because it’s real-time, and it’s not handed down from any management,” the firm’s human resources director told Fast Company. “Any employee who does something exceptional receives recognition from their peers within minutes.” Because these bonuses are noncontingent “now that” rewards, they avoid the seven deadly flaws of most corporate carrots. And because they come from a colleague, not a boss, they carry a different (and perhaps deeper) meaning. You could even say they’re motivating.