11_Drive

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us [amazon]

Note: (a) The headings below do not correspond to the book's chapters, and (b) the author cites a lot of studies for their claims.

Introduction

The author starts off by defining three types of motivation:

1. Biological: What your body needs to survive and thrive
2. Extrinsic: External rewards, e.g. higher salary
3. Intrinsic: Something people internally find satisfying, e.g. phases of flow or working on something inspiring

The first two of these are threshold motivators, meaning once a certain amount of it is reached, additional rewards barely lead to more motivation. Additional salary and more/better food, for example, only additionally motivate to a small degree when one already earns and eats well. This is not the case with intrinsic motivation.

External rewards kill intrinsic motivation

What is rather surprising though: While additional external rewards help extrinsic motivation, they actively kill intrinsic one. The author explains a bunch of experiments in studies that show this, including the following two:

1. Participants have to solve the candle problem, and are randomly assigned to one of three groups: Group (a) does not get any rewards, (b) is told they will get one after solving the problem, (c) gets a reward after solving but do not know this beforehand. Groups (a) and (c) do much better than group (b)
2. Participants are all potentially interested in donating blood. Again, they are assigned to three groups similarly to the above: Group (a) gets no external reward, (b) will get a monetary one, (c) is told a donation will be made for them. People in groups (a) and (c) ended up donating significantly more often

This was quite unintuitive to me since the external reward is something given on top of the intrinsic motivation one does or does not have. However, it seems like it just leads to extrinsic motivation replacing the intrinsic motivation.

The author explains this as follows:

• Once an external reward is announced, participants focus their efforts solely on reaching the reward
• This leads to a tunnel vision: Instead of thinking creatively ("out of the box"), people try to find the fastest way to get the reward
• This prevents creative thinking and kills intrinsic effects

Furthermore, external rewards can be a bad idea because they might make people addictive: Instead of developing intrinsic motivation, people learn to associate the task with doing it for an external reward.

When to use external rewards

There are two situations where external rewards make sense:

1. Tasks that are well-defined and do not need creativity, e.g. always performing the same steps in a factory. Focusing one's efforts on the exact steps can be achieved by external rewards
2. For creative tasks, external rewards have to be unexpected and may only be given after the task is completed ("now that" rewards as opposed to "if then" rewards). Interestingly, this is how spot and peer bonuses work at Google

Nurturing intrinsic motivation

To find intrinsic motivation, three things are needed:

1. Autonomy: If you're micromanaged, you do not have enough space to be creative
2. Purpose: It needs to be work that you find meaningful
3. Mastery: Without being sufficiently good at it, you will not be able to reach a state of flow

There's one example in the book that I found particularly amusing and true: Imagine telling Picasso that he has to come to the office at 8:30am, has to paint in a certain manner, and at 5pm his manager has to say whether it was good piece of art or not. It's completely obvious that this could never work. Yet, many jobs nowadays are organized in this manner even though they mostly involve creative work.

Related to this, there was a study about art: Artists who work on commission generally create art that's worth much less than art that artists just created for the sake of creating. This exactly fits the idea that external rewards replace intrinsic motivation. I wonder if this is also the case for game development.

Reaching a feeling of flow

Flow is something most programmers are familiar with and I always thought the term maybe even originated from the coding community and is not that scientific. Turns out it is actually a few decades old, well established in psychology and was explored in many papers. The three things for intrinsic motivation above are actually based on studies.

Similarly, there's a few things that are needed to reach a feeling of flow, e.g.:

• Fast feedback: Otherwise one gets distracted or frustrated
• The right level of difficulty and skill: It has to be sufficiently difficult, yet not impossible to do
• Few context switches: Otherwise one never really gets into the flow

If you are in a position of distributing work to people, it is worth keeping these in mind.

Applications

Of course all of this can be applied to work, which is what the book is mainly about. However, it can also be applied to various other things. The end of the book has a lot of short chapters on such topics, including:

• School: Most education systems are based on extrinsic motivation. There's a few intrinsic ones, e.g. Montessori. It turns out that many big tech founders went to Montessori schools: Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg. Those are all big4/5 founders, even though only a small part of the US population is Montessori-educated
• Fitness: Motivating yourself based on eating certain foods afterwards or based on beating certain numbers is weaker motivation than finding intrinsic satisfaction
• Parenting: It's a bad to idea to motivate children by getting them to do things for external rewards
• Salary in companies: Just because intrinsic motivation is the strongest kind does not mean that salaries can be low. The salary needs to be fair, i.e. it is at least as high as the one of comparable companies or similarly performing people in the same company. Otherwise it distracts from the actual work and there is no space for developing intrinsic motivation
• 20% time: This is extremely compatible with the conditions for intrinsic motivation. Many great products were created this way. Interestingly, it did not originate at Google (like I thought) but at an old American manufacturing firm, and it seemed like a crazy thing to do back then. Fun fact: Sticky post it notes were invited during 20% time

My thoughts

This was an amazing book to read. I started reading it to learn about motivation but ended up realizing that this is deeply intertwined with happiness.

One intriguing thought I had: Let's assume someone purely wants a higher salary (or some other external reward). The best strategy for that person is actually not to directly optimize for that, but something like this:

• Get into a generally well-paying environment (e.g. tech or finance)
• Completely forgot external rewards and solely focus on finding intrinsic motivation and meaning in the work
• 2x a year correct course by checking whether one is on a good way of climbing the cooperate ladder (or having a profitable startup exit, or anything like that)

This would be a much better way to make use of intrinsic motivation. Not only would it be more effective but one would also be happier this way. Interestingly, this is quite compatible with perf at Google, which happens 2x a year and which individual contributors do not have to think about otherwise.