So when we think about what motivates people
maybe the first think about is what we think
motivates people and what don’t we understand
motivates people.
And maybe the first misunderstanding is about
the pleasure principle.
So we have this idea of we have the right
to pursue happiness and we’re trying to
be happy and that’s really what we’re
pursuing – happiness.
But think about it.
What gives you happiness in a way that is
observable?
Maybe sitting on the beach drinking a mojito
or maybe sitting on the sofa watching a sitcom.
But if you do almost anything that is useful,
meaningful, that you take pride of it’s
not the same things.
But imagine you have a whole life of sitting
on the beach drinking mojitos.
How happy would that life be?
So the first I think mistake is that we pursue
momentary happiness rather than longer term
happiness.
So we do the things that will make us laugh
out loud today kind of.
Not always laugh out loud but kind of like
that.
And we don’t do the things that are difficult
and complex and challenging but give us a
very different sense of happiness.
Think about something like running a marathon.
You don’t see anybody happy.
Like if you came as an alien and you image
peoples’ brains and you looked at their
facial expressions as they’re running a
marathon you would say somebody’s punishing
them.
Like they are paying for something terrible
they’ve done and this is how they’re paying
their debt to society.
But it is kind of miserable but it’s also
meaningful and create a sense of achievement
in someone.
So we’re pursuing momentary pleasure rather
than truly understanding the depth of what
happiness is or what meaning is.
And then the second thing is that we’re
trying to figure out how we externally motivate
people and we have usually a very simple equation
that says motivation equals money.
And if you’re not working hard enough or
doing something and they’re just not paying
you enough or not giving you a bonus in the
right way then we just jigger around bonuses
and payment and we say oh, let’s change
the payment this way and change the payment
this way and give is slightly big bonuses
here and slightly big bonuses there and we’ll
create point systems for evaluation and all
kind of things.
The beauty of human nature is that lots of
things motivate us.
A sense of accomplishment and achievement,
our title, our connection to work, our connection
to people at work, competing with other people.
All of those things motivate us.
So we write a motivation equation we would
write motivation equals yes, money is important
but so is achievement, sense of progress,
competition, dah, dah, dah, dah.
And the question is how do we use all of them
to create motivation.
And in physics people look for the perpetual
motion machine.
How do we get energy from nothing, right,
and continue growing.
In motivation there is something like that
so imagine two businesses.
In one of them the business doesn’t care
about motivation.
In one of them they care deeply.
In the first business people are miserable
and the business is miserable and they’re
not making lots of money.
In the second one people could be happier,
management could be happier and they could
be much more productive and efficient.
Everybody wins when we invest in deep motivation.
One of the first experiments we did on the
question of meaning.
It wasn’t like big meaning, it was little
meaning.
And here is what we did.
We got people to come to the lab and we say
would you like to build a bionical and we’ll
pay you three dollars for this bionical.
And people built their bionical.
We took it, we put it under the desk and we
say would you like to build another one for
two dollars and seventy cents?
If the say yes we gave them the next one.
And then the next one for thirty cents less
and less and less diminishing wage until they
decide stop, no more.
And we told all of those people that when
they finished the task we’ll take all the
bionical, we’ll break them into pieces and
prepare them for the next participant.
That was what we call the meaningful condition.
It’s not really meaningful but it is meaningful
compared to the next condition.
In the next condition which we internally
called the sisyphic condition it started the
same way.
We said to people would you like to build
a bionical for three dollars and they started
doing it.
When they finished we took it from them.
We kept it on the desk and then we said would
you like to build another one for two seventy.
If they said yes they started building the
second bionical but as they were building
the second bionical we took the pieces apart
from the first bionical.
So we destroyed it in front of their eyes.
And then we put it back in the box and then
we said would you like to build a third one
for thirty cents less.
And if they said yes we gave them back the
first one that they assembled and we broke.
And this way we continued back and forth.
And we called this the sisyphic condition
because if you remember Sisyphus from the
mythology he was sentenced to push a rock
up the hill and he almost got to the top and
the rock would roll back and he had to do
the same hill.
And the idea was that if there were different
hills, right, if you were just going over
different hills maybe he would feel some progress.
But having to do the same hill over and over
was the depth of demoralizing of people.
And what happened?
Kind of a couple of interesting things.
The first one is that people stopped much
faster in the sisyphic condition.
The second one is we asked people how much
they enjoyed Legos in general.
And we wanted to see whether there’s a correlation
between how much they enjoyed Legos and how
much they persisted in this task.
And what we saw was that in the meaningful
condition there was a correlation.
People who loved Legos did more bionicals.
People who didn’t like Legos internally
didn’t like so much.
In the sisyphic condition the correlation
was zero which means that we kind of sucked
away the joy of assembling Legos.
Because you see the people who love Legos
did not do any more than the people who didn’t.
Somehow the joy of it just went away.
The other interesting insight from this study
is we did another version of this experiment
in which people did not engage in building
bionicals but we did this in business school
and we asked the students to predict how other
people would behave in those two environments.
So we said okay, you have an environment with
more meaning and an environment with less
meaning.
How many bionicals will people build differently
in those two environments?
And we paid people for the accuracy of their
predictions.
What happened?
People predicted that the difference will
be in the meaningful condition people would
build more.
But they predicted it would be only one bionical
more.
So we understand that meaning matters but
we think it matters very little.
In fact, it matters a lot.
People built almost four more bionicals.
So there was a big gap and people don’t
understand how meaning is important.
And if you think about it as a manager actually
as anybody, if you’re trying to motivate
people.
It could be a school teacher, it could be
a parent, whatever it is if you’re trying
to motivate people you have to understand
how big is meaning.
And if you think that meaning has a very small
effect you would not invest much in it.
Only if you understand how big and important
it is you will invest in it.
