#77 [TRANSCRIPT]: How to harness the right kind of motivation
📄Full text of the podcast episode with Dan Pink, author of Drive
This is a transcript of the podcast interview with Daniel Pink.
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Hello! You’re listening to Why Would Anyone. This is a space where I try to figure out why we do the things we do, and how intrinsic motivation shows up in every part of our lives. My name is Tania Rabesandratana, and today my guest is best-selling author Daniel Pink.
If you have even a passing interest in motivation theory, I’m pretty sure I don’t need to introduce Dan Pink. His TED talk “The Puzzle of Motivation” is literally one of the most popular TED videos of all time, and he expanded his ideas in the book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
Pink and I discuss:
why he thinks intrinsic motivation matters now more than ever, and how many workplaces are–still–not getting it;
He reveals his method to sustain his own motivation, and gives us some advice to protect the inner drive of children.
And we talk about his most recent work: The Power of Regret, a manifesto for redeeming our regrets as a source of motivation.
01:01
First, I have some really simple questions about the basics of intrinsic motivation. I wonder why intrinsic motivation is so powerful?
I think it's so powerful because it's a fundamental part of being human. It is an often neglected part of being human that sometimes we do things not because we're biologically compelled to do them, not because we want to get a reward or a punishment, but because we like doing it. It's enjoyable, it's meaningful, it brings us pleasure, it brings us joy, it brings us significance, it moves us closer to a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning. We do things because it's the right thing to do.
And my gripe such as it is, is that in too many organisations and too many schools, we only have this two-dimensional view of human beings as essentially biological creatures with a reward and punishment drive. And we've neglected that intrinsic motivation drive. What's more, is that that intrinsic motivation seems to be the most important of those drives for high performance in just about any field.
02:07
You wrote the book drive in 2010, you published it in 2010. So that gripe you have that organisations don't pay enough attention to intrinsic motivation—have you seen a change in the past 12 years?
Some? Some. I think that again, the essential point in motivation in organisations, and even in schools is this: that there's a certain kind of motivator that we rely on quite a bit. Psychologists call it a “controlling contingent motivator”, I like to call it an “if / then reward”, as in: “if you do this, then you get that”. What 60 years of research tells us is that if / then rewards are effective, for simple tasks with short time horizons. You want somebody to stuff envelopes? Pay them per envelope, give them a bonus for every 100 envelopes, you will get more envelopes stuffed, right? There's no question about that.
So if / then rewards are effective for simple tasks with short time horizons. However, they are not very effective for complex tasks that require judgement, discernment, creativity, or with long time horizons. My view is like: let's use what's effective in the particular places. And the trouble is that the domains in which people are doing simple, algorithmic, short-term work are shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, and the domains in which people are doing more complex, heuristic, complicated, conceptual, creative, longer-term work are widening and widening and widening.
And so in in a way, where we have a way to think about this is that we have this set of motivators that were, you know, fairly effective for 19th century work, somewhat effective for 20th century work. But they're getting kind of old and tattered, for most 21st century work. And so we have to come up with a better way to do things. What we want, especially in schools, especially in workplaces is neither compliance nor defiance, but engagement, and you cannot control somebody into engagement. It doesn't work that way.
04:04
You describe three elements in the book that are necessary for that motivation, that intrinsic motivation to flourish: mastery, autonomy and purpose. Can you go through them really quickly, and maybe given us some examples of how to get those at work?
The best motivational regime at work is this. Let's start with: you got to pay people fairly. Right? Again, the research doesn't say that money doesn't matter. Money matters, but it doesn't matter in the simple mechanical way that people tend to think, where more money always get you better performance. Money is in some ways a threshold motivator. So you've got to pay people well, you got to pay people fairly, arguably, as I've said many times, there's an argument that the best use of money as a motivator, is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table.
So once we do that, as you say, there are three core motivators. One of them is autonomy. And autonomy is basically just having some—again, coming back to control—giving the control to the individual, so that the individual has some say over what she does, how she does it, when she does it, who she does it with.
Mastery is our desire to get better at something that matters, to improve, to learn to grow, to make progress. Teresa Amabile at Harvard has some really, really great research showing that the single biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is making progress in meaningful work. So that's mastery.
And purpose, well I've sort of thought about that a little bit differently than I did when I first wrote the book. I think that purpose is not one thing, but two things. There are two different kinds of purpose: One of them is what I call a capital-P Purpose. And that is “Am I doing something that matters in the world?” “Am I, you know, addressing the climate crisis?” “Am I feeding the hungry?”
But there's also another, quieter kind of purpose that I like to call small-p purpose that is equally important and that I've neglected writing about enough in the book. And that is: “Am I simply making a contribution?” “Am I helping a teammate get a project out the door?” “Am I helping a customer resolve a problem?” This quieter, kind of small-p purpose. And so capital-P purpose is making a difference. Small-p purpose is making a contribution.
06:13
I spoke with [Frank Martela], a researcher who was talking about meaning at work, meaningful work, and he was saying you don't have to be Nelson Mandela.
Exactly, exactly. And I feel like in the book, I didn't do a good enough job of explaining that.
Because it puts some pressure on having this big vocation…
Exactly, exactly. it's very hard to, you know, walk in every day and say, “I'm solving the climate crisis,” you know. So that's not at people's fingertips every day. It's effective, it's important. And if you can get it occasionally, it's fantastic. But it's not the kind of thing that necessarily is salient every single day in your job. The way you make a contribution is by having a sense of belonging and affinity with the people around you and doing something even modest together.
TRANSITION
06:58
I understand that children, when they're born, are kind of intrinsically driven to do most things. And we kind of suck that out of them.
I think that's there's evidence of that, you know. Go find me a two-year-old who's not autonomous, who's not self-directed, go find me a four-year-old who's not autonomous and self-directed. Go find me a four-year-old who's not interested in growing and learning and getting better, who's not asking questions about why.
I think that in certain kinds of structures, for instance, schools, kids can easily unlearn that. I think that this capacity that we have is somewhat fragile, and it can be shattered, it can be suppressed, it can be suffocated. And it's important that our institutions—companies, schools, community groups, whatever—allow this innate, intrinsic motivation to to flourish, because people are going to do better and live more happily.
07:53
I want to ask you your one top tip, maybe something you've applied with your children?
Well, my kids are my kids are older now. But so, I'll give you a few ideas here.
One: do not link allowances and chores. They're totally different worlds. Don't do that. So I mean, I'm all for parents giving kids allowances, a small amount of money basically to give them a little bit of a sense of how to manage money, how to defer gratification, so forth, all right. But I don't like linking them to chores, because what happens is, is that if I give, you know, if a parent gives a kid, you know, five bucks a week to do the chores, and the kid finally says, You know what, I'm kind of sick of this, I need eight bucks.
And then the parents originally says, Okay, here's eight bucks. And then two weeks later, he says, I need 10 bucks. It's polluting two different worlds. That's an example of, you know, why do people help out their family members; it's not a transaction, they help other family members because it's the right thing to do. And they have a moral obligation to do that.
Two: allow kids to explore. I think that there is too much pressure, especially in upper middle-class families, to begin specialising in anything—in a musical instrument, in a sport—very, very early in life. And there is a lot of evidence showing that kids’ interests change, that people need experience, need periods of exploration before they go deep on something.
I also think that the way that we talk about grades in school is really important. We have to disabuse these kids from thinking that grades are the point of school. Ideally, grades are feedback on what you're learning that allows you to learn and grow more effectively. And so we need to separate performance goals from learning goals. And I think that in too many schools, grades, for the students and the parents, are the point of the exercise, and that's very dangerous.
09:59
You have written seven books. As a journalist, I'm used to moving from one story to the next within days or weeks, and I'm really fascinated by people who sustain motivation for longer projects. So what is it that drives you and keeps you going on those long term projects?
I think part of it is just simply that I like figuring stuff out. And that gives me a sense of satisfaction. So taking a giant tangle of material, massive amounts, years and years of material across different disciplines, and including the stories of real people and so forth, and trying to make sense of it and wrestle it into something coherent. I like that. I like that challenge.
Some people like to sprint, some people like to run long distances, I'm a better long distance runner than I am a sprinter. And the way that I sustain the motivation really is through structure. That is, I don't sit around waiting to be inspired to write or to work, I show up in my office every day, and do my job.
11:02
Okay, so what does that scaffolding look like?
Typically, when I'm writing, I give myself a word count. So I give myself say, 500 words, or 600 words or 700 words, and I don't do anything until I hit that word count. I don't answer email, I don't pick up my phone. I don't, you know, check social media, I don't play Wordle, I don't do anything, until I hit that word count. And then once I hit that word count, I'm free to do whatever I want. And then I do it the next day, and the next day, and the next day. It's about allowing that intrinsic motivation to flourish by creating the context and the environment in which that kind of motivation can can blossom. And so there's a sort of a paradox here, which is that in this case, for this kind of project structure is liberating.
TRANSITION
11:49
I want to talk about your new book, The Power of regret. How looking backward move us forward. So in the book, you turn the mantra of “no regrets” on its head and push us to look at regrets as a guide towards a better life. And how can regret act as a source of motivation?
Let me start with with some background. So one of the things that we know about regret is that it there are two key things we know about regret. One is that it's integral to our cognitive machinery, everybody has regrets. This is really important. This is the thing that sort of—in some ways, it's related to the material in Drive because, you know, there was something there in people that we needed to shine a light on, in the same way that everybody's always had intrinsic motivation. And we need to shine a light on that. It's, Hey, we need to pay attention to this. Regret is somewhat similar. Everybody has regrets. It is one of the most common emotions that human beings have. The only people who don't have regrets are people with some kind of disorder, or little kids whose brains haven't developed. So that's one thing.
The second thing is like this. That's kind of weird, right? Because like intrinsic motivation feels good. But regret feels bad. So why would somebody that feels bad to be so ubiquitous? And the answer is, it's useful, okay. It clarifies what we value and instructs us on how to do better, what we need to do is we need to actually have a new view of regret: not ignore regrets, which I think a lot of us in this overly positive environment are encouraged to do, but also not wallow in our regrets, but actually confront our regrets, use them as information, as signals, as data.
So now what does it teach about motivation, I think that when you understand what people regret the most, you understand what they value the most. So as you know, I've collected at this point over 21,000 regrets from people in 109 countries, and around the world, these four root, four core regrets keep coming up over and over again. And they operate as a reverse image of what people want out of life.
13:47
Can you give us an example of a regret that maybe you've had and how you turn it on its head and use it as a positive drive?
One of the ones that bugs me the most. I have a lot of regrets about kindness, particularly earlier in my life, when I was younger. It wasn't unkindness that came from being a bully, because I was not. It was sort of unkindness by inaction. So I was in many situations where people were not being treated well, where they were being excluded. They were being, you know, not handled fairly.
And I saw it go on. And I didn't do anything. I didn't contribute to it. I wasn't sort of actively excluding, you know, disadvantaged people. But I saw it go on. And I knew it was wrong. And it bugs me, man.
And so here's a question that, what do I do with that? I can do this ridiculous thing and say, no regrets. I never look backward. I don't have any regrets. I never look backward. I'm never negative, I'm always positive. Okay, that's delusional. Or I can say, Oh, my God, I was unkind by inaction. I'm a terrible human being, I always do this, I'm worthless. I'm a complete idiot. That's a bad idea too.
What I want to do is say: Wait a second, this regret that I'm feeling for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, is telling me something, it's a knock at the door. It's telling me something. And what it's telling me is that I value kindness. It's telling me Okay, Dan, here's what you need to do. You need to be more inclusive when you are in those situations. Now, when you see somebody being excluded, you need to say something, you need to bring that person in, you need to actually step up.
15:36
Can you tell us what is a Sagmeister? And have you have taken your Sagmeisters?
This is an idea that Stefan Sagmeister, the designer, had where he said, you know, you typically have—at least in sort of upper middle class, industrialised world—you go, your life goes: education, work, retirement. And what he did, which I thought was brilliant, is he takes the retirement chunk, and he slices it up, and puts little slices of retirement in the work thing. So you take like, a one-year sabbatical, if you can afford it, so you have like a year of retirement, a year of sabbatical in the middle of your work life. And I have not done that yet. But it's going to happen soon.
16:20
Do you have regrets about not taking your Sagmeisters in the past?
No, but this is this is a case where truly I think about anticipating regret if I don't do it soon. So, so one thing to do, but when we think about our regrets is that if I let's say I have a conversation with myself, 10 years from now, right? So I call myself in I call the me of 2032 and say, Hey, Dan, it's you know, it's 2032. Wait a second, what the hell are you doing? 10 years past and you didn't do your sabbatical? What's wrong with you? I don't want to have that conversation with the media 10 years from now.
6:57
I have a most sombre version of this when I talk to my death, to myself on my deathbed. It's pretty pretty much the same.
But it's okay. It's okay. It's a very important technique called it's called self distancing, where we sort of take think about our own lives from the perspective of as if we're somebody else. And that helps. That helps, again, clarify, helps clarify our decision making can very easily lead to better decisions.
17:24
Thank you to Dan Pink and to you for listening to our conversation. If you'd like to find out more about Dan Pink's work and his books, go to his website: danpink.com.
This was Why Would Anyone with me, Tania Rabesandratana. For the complete shownotes, go to my newsletter about intrinsic motivation and subscribe: tania.substack.com
Finally, I want to let you know I am the recipient of the Attuned Writer Fellowship. Attuned is a psychology and AI-powered platform that tracks and measures Intrinsic Motivation to boost employee engagement, drive performance, and make work more meaningful. Find out more and sign up for a free demo at www.attuned.ai
Thank you, and till soon.
18:24
ENDS.
