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Daniel Pink on Incentives and the Two Types of Motivation
Rewards work for routine tasks that require no creativity. If we put incentives on creativity, the drive to create can disappear once the incentives or rewards are removed.
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Intrinsic motivation is necessary for creative work. We need broad thinking, so we can come up with innovative ideas and see new connections.
Extrinsic motivation narrows our t...
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When we know that our work will make a difference to someone else, it makes us work harder.
Try to reach out to the people who directly benefit from your work. This could boost your motivation to work hard.
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As we grow older, we take cues from our environment and become serious and rigid, conforming to the norms and rules imposed upon us.
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In the 70s, creativity was thought of as a trait, something a few geniuses have, and the rest of us do not.
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Knowledge that someone will check, evaluate and grade one’s work, surveillance, a promise of a reward, threat of a punishment, creative constraints, competition and motivating factors like power, money and fame can kill creativity.
Rewards generally provide the individual with a feeling of being controlled, but can also enhance creativity in some cases.
When Ivan Pavlov and his dogs led to the discovery of learned behaviour through repeated exposure, and Edward Thorndike discovered the Law of Effect that stated that rewarded behaviours tended to increase, many psychologists were impelled to separate psychology from armchair introspection and formulated their theories as mathematical formulas.
Donald Hebb realised that existing theories were too focused on reacting to the immediate environment. Thoughts, ideas and goals could be just as strong for triggering action as sights and sounds.
Together with John Atkinson, they noted that the study of motivation had undergone a "paradigm shift", where motivation couldn't be seen as how actions get started, but how the organism decides to change its behaviour from one thing to another.