Economists studied what people did, rather than what we said, because we did what was best for us.
Fully detached beats semidetached.
99 percent of us cannot multitask.
By neglecting the ingredients of genuine motivation – autonomy, mastery, and purpose – they limit what each of us can achieve.
Jobs that are demanding but don’t offer autonomy burn us out.
Does your boss allow you to do your best work?
Every circumstance in which we try to move others by definition involves another human being. Yet in the name of professionalism, we often neglect the human element and adopt a stance that’s abstract and distant.
We know – if we’ve spent time with young children or remember ourselves at our best – that we’re not destined to be passive and compliant. 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.
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.
E-mail response time is the single best predictor of whether employees are satisfied with their boss.
Design – that is, utility enhanced by significance – has become an essential aptitude for personal fulfillment and professional success.
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.
Vigilance breaks prevent deadly mistakes. Restorative breaks enhance performance. Lunches and naps help us elude the trough and get more and better work done in the afternoon. A growing body of science makes it clear: Breaks are not a sign of sloth but a sign of strength.
The most fulfilling jobs share a common trait: They prod us to work at our highest level but in a way that we, not someone else, control.
Meanwhile, instead of restraining negative behavior, rewards and punishments can often set it loose – and give rise to cheating, addiction, and dangerously myopic thinking.
Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice,” they write, “whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the experience of pressure and demand toward specific outcomes that comes from forces perceived to be external to the self.
Hire good people, and leave them alone.
Only contingent rewards – if you do this, then you’ll get that – had the negative effect. Why? “If-then” rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy.
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.
Expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time,” Collins wrote in Good to Great. “If you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. The real question then becomes: How do you manage in such a way as not to de-motivate people?