After watching Daniel Pink’s TED talk titled Daniel Pink – On the Surprising Science of Motivation I see how motivation is a major impact on our lives. In school there is a major little carrot big stick method used, we are rewarded for right answers, and punished for wrong answers (Schulz). However, as Pink mentioned in his talk, this isn’t a good thing because as studies have shown higher t incentives lead to worse performance. Why this is exactly, well, Pink didn’t exactly delve into that, but my theory is that there becomes a greater pressure, you start to rush yourself, and you make mistakes. This is true especially when money is involved because when there are financial incentives it results in negative impact on overall performance, but the issue is, all of the jobs in our society are based on financial incentives. We do a job and we get paid for our work.
This is where we run into the issue of how to change this norm while still keeping people employed and being compensated for their work. Daniel Pink gave several examples of how this autonomy has started to be implanted into businesses, including the fedex days created by Atlassian, during this 36 hour period employees get the chance to work on anything they want that is skewed toward their products, and at the end of the next day, they present their ideas to the company. Pink also mentioned the “playtime” (Mediratta) for Google employees. In this program the employees at Google get to devote 20% of their time, or one day a week to something that is related to the company, but isn’t exactly in their job description. Another autonomy that has crossed over into the business world is ROWE (What), a type of business where the employees don’t have schedules as long as they get done, meetings and conferences are optional and it has been proven to increase productivity.
As far as Daniel Pink’s speaking styles go, nothing really grabbed my attention. In fact, throughout the talk, I even got bored. The subject matter he was speaking about didn’t maintain my attention. This surprised my because for the most part, his book A Whole New Mind keeps my focused and entertained, as well the excerpts from his novel, Drive. However, regardless of my opinion, I noticed that one of the components that dominated Pink’s talk is the eruptions of passion that came through while he was talking. It shows that he is truly passionate about what he is speaking about.
While watching the speech I couldn’t help but think how this applies to my schooling and me. The schooling system is the exact opposite of what Daniel Pink talks about so often in his novels and speech. The extrinsic motivators in my schooling are my parents and the pressure to achieve good grades in order to go to a good college, and eventually get a god job. The intrinsic motivators are the teachers and the same pressure to achieve good grades. Both of these pressures combine to become a massive force that is overwhelming. But you can’t slow down because if you stop than there are consequences which is exactly what Pink is trying to change. Our schools should be preparing us more for a right-brained world in a right-brained way. White color workers are doing less left-brained work, and more right-brained work, so how will our students survive in the real world after they graduate if all they have been taught and all that they have been taught with is left-brained? It’s a scary thought to think that working so hard to achieve good grades, and participate things that I know will look good on college applications, or in other words working my butt off, might get me no where in the real world. School’s say that they push us and have punishments for grades that are less than the “level they know we are capable of achieving” because they want us to succeed in life. But how can we be successful if we are not prepared for the real world?
Works Cited
Mediratta, Bharat, and Julie Bick. "NY Times Advertisement." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. 21 Oct. 2007. Web. 21 Apr. 2011.
"What Is ROWE?" Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE). Web. 21 Apr. 2011.
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