Notes: Dan Pink’s Drive
Intro
Like I wrote in the recent brain ticklers, I recently did a clean-up of my bookshelves. And found a book someone had gifted me a while ago that I completely forgot about. (This is probably the first time this has happened — A book given to me as a gift lying unread. Sorry Mr.X. There are many books gifted to me that I would not finish. But never one that I did not even start to read!)
It was Drive: The surprising truth that motivates us by Daniel Pink. This appears in good-reads of many people I follow and has been in my ‘books to consider’ note in Evernote for a while — all the while the physical copy lying at home. Sigh. Nonetheless, glad I read it finally and here are some notes from it.
Overview
As the title says, the book is about human motivation and how to get people to do things. The first few chapters are about motivation in individuals, motivation done at society-level, the history of motivation and things like that in general i.e. not some life-hack / personal development technique to pick up and implement. These chapters move towards the conclusion that carrot/stick approach is not an effective one. Even if it had been seemingly effective in the past, it is definitely not suitable in the current world. And so on. I am skipping all those for the review because my focus is going to be about what I can do to bring in drive in myself (and also because I only skimmed through those chapters).
Like Atomic Habits (which I realize I am yet to move from Evernote to Medium!), this book is a collection of several good ideas from various books, thinkers etc. with the insights distilled and packaged into a new form, as a “fresh framework”. To be clear, I do not mean this in a negative way.
The most important takeaway from the first few chapters is the new terminology of Type-X and Type-I people. You would have heard about Type-A and Type-B personality types, the need to have a mix of both personalities etc. i.e. have a balanced amount of impatience and temperance. The author makes another classification here and calls it Type-X and Type-I behaviors. Behaviors that need extrinsic motivation are Type-X (Extrinsic) and behavior that comes from an intrinsic motivation in people are Type-I (Intrinsic). You would have also read about Theory-X and Theory-Y about managing people.
Mixing the two, you could say Theory-X assumes all people exhibit Type-X behavior by default so need carrot/stick mechanisms (extrinsic motivation) to make them work; Theory-Y assumes all people exhibit Type-I behavior by default so we need to provide them the right environment their intrinsic motivation to kick-in.
Aside: I should say that Theory-X/Y and Type-X/I get a bit confusing. I guess the Type-X, Type-I terminology has not become as popular because of this.
The main point of the book is: We should all cultivate more Type-I behavior. Breaking that down, there are 3 elements that produce Type-I behavior: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. There are some nuances but for the large part, the dictionary meaning of these words are enough to understand what the author means. So, I am not going to define them for you here.
Like I said before, my focus is not about people management here, so we will skip those aspects and jump to what one can do as an individual to develop Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose and cultivate Type-I behavior.
Toolkit for an individual
Flow: This is about the same concept the book Flow talks about. The toolkit here is for us to use the same technique employed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his research — i.e. check-in about 40 times in a week at random times and ask a few questions, as follows: (1) What are you doing? (2) How are you feeling (3) Are you in a flow?.
Based on the answers to these questions, identify (a) moments that produced flow (b) people who were with you when you had the flow (c) time of the day when you were in flow (d) your sources of intrinsic motivation. This should let you identify what works for you and what not. Basically, a lot of hard and diligent work.
I have done this a few times previously (not 40 times a week though) and kind-of know the answers to these. The resistance to move away from whatever I do towards activities that produce flow has been the problem. That story is for another day.
Anyways, I did some search but could not find an app which would let me answer these Flow questions at 40 random times in a week. However, I found a good app called Blip, which simply chimes once every hour (or whatever you configure), which lets me be a bit more self-aware.
Big Question: This is like one of those things where you are asked to guess what would people speak at your funeral. i.e. it is about “What one sentence would describe you and your life?” So, call it the purpose of life, or some grand life-level goal you have. The book talks about big questions for people like Lincoln. Well, if it were easy to come up with this answer, guess I would not be reading this book. Actually, I installed an app called Goals and I have not gone beyond the first question because it asked something very similar — “If you can only choose one thing, what do you truly want to accomplish before you die”. Trust me, I did not get past this page of the app for the past several months. And for whatever reason, have not uninstalled it too :) Guess the “song” will die with me, ha!
Small Question: At the end of each day, ask yourself “Was I better today than yesterday?”. Of course, you decide what better means here but hopefully it will be about getting closer to the “big question” goal. I have attempted this daily-review thing a few times in the past few years but it really feels like work, causes stress-levels to shoot-up (I know — primarily because it makes me consciously think of difficult questions) so I have abandoned it every time. After this book, I have started it one more time with a Google Forms set-up that lets me fill it within my email box every morning and evening. Let us see. (Can share the Forms with you if you like!)
Take a Sagmeister: Don’t bother googling that word. It is just the name of a person who takes a year off once every 7 years. The suggestion from the author is that you do something similar too — Take a break once in every X period. Honestly, in the perso-dev world, this seems like a first-world problem to me :-|
Performance Review: Review your performance just with yourself every month — with all your learnings and progress towards goals. I do have a template for these reviews (weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly) but honestly, without the ‘Big Question’ answered, these have been either stress-inducing or plain fake exercises to feel good that moment. I typically do these in flights/hotel-rooms but with no travel in the past 5 months, I have not done these in a while.
Go oblique: This is like a set of seemingly irrelevant questions/quotes you may want to refer to once every while. The words in those would provide you guidance because of what is hidden in your sub-conscious and things like that. To me, this is more like the ‘random word’ technique in brainstorming, where you come up with a random dictionary word to get unstuck on a challenge. The word basically breaks barriers in your thought by taking you to different places. There is a reference to this Twitter account as the master list of all such things.
Deliberate Practice: The author calls it “5 steps closer to mastery” using deliberate practice in areas that need improvement. Those who get better apparently work on their weaknesses. If it is deliberate practice, it “should be physically/mentally exhausting”, the book says.
Sleep and Wake up thoughts: On one side of a card, write the answer to “What gets you up in the morning?”. On the other side, write the answer to “What keeps you up at night?”. Try different versions of the answers till you are comfortable. Those answers would be your compass. And check if they are still true from time to time. If you are not able to arrive at a comfortable answer to it at all, that is a more fundamental problem to address. (like I do). Btw, the wake-up thoughts are part of my aforementioned morning journal Google forms.
Create motivational posters: Kind of crazy but the author recommends a few sites for these. The skeptical me liked this though (“De-motivational Posters”).
Sawyer Effect: This is not a toolkit mentioned there but is a good mental model I learnt from the book. This is about the fact that you do not want to do things you should do i.e. the ones you ought to do, have-to do etc. If the same thing is conveyed in a different way, you will happily do it. How do we effectively use it to our advantage is the question. i.e. convert activities you ought to do into ones that you need not do.
Toolkit for raising a kid
As a responsible parent, how could I skip this section? So, here are the suggestions for raising kids in Type-I mode — though most are meant for teachers:
- Homework/Home Learning: Ensure they get autonomy/mastery/purpose
- FedEx Day: Conduct a FedEx day at home. (FedEx day is a day where they pick-up a project of their own choosing and deliver it within that day)
- DIY report card: Self-explanatory
- Allowances and Chores: This was one sensible thing in the book — Not to mix up allowances and chores so that they do not become Type-X people (always expecting a carrot)
- Offer praise the right way: A few obvious ones and one roll-your-eyes thing: (a) Praise the effort. Not their intelligence. (b) Make the praise specific (c) Praise only when there is a good reason for it (d) DO IT IN PRIVATE. (This was the roll-your-eyes thing. Well, it does not say criticize in public, but still, I think public praise is important for children to know their parents are proud of them.)
- Help them see the big picture
- There is a bunch of schools listed as ones that have Type-I compatible pedagogy. Well, as you would expect, this “international best-seller” has a list of schools in the US. Like most blogs, news sites, podcasts, and books, this also has a US-centric view. (“65% of the students in the country…”. Wait, which country? We know it is your hegemony and all, but still.)
- Turn them into teachers
- Take a leaf from un-schoolers (i.e. people who do homeschooling.) A few references given (that made some sense to me): (a) Book “Dumbing us Down” (b) Home Ed Mag (c)unschooling.com
That’s all, folks. Hope it was helpful.
