Daniel's notes on Drive

Harlow eventually called it "intrinsic motivation". If the monkeys were rewarded--with raisins! for solving the puzzles, they'd no doubt perform even better. Yet when Harlow tested that approach, the monkeys actually made more errors and solved the puzzles less frequently. "Introduction of food in the present experiment," Harlow wrote, "served to disrupt performance, a phenomenon not reported in the literature."

Humans are more than the sum of our biological urges. That first drive still mattered- no doubt about that--but it didn't fully account for who we are. We also had a second drive to seek reward and avoid punishment more broadly. And it was from this insight that a new operating system-call it Motivation 2.0- arose.

the work of an American engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor. In the early 1900s, Taylor, who believed businesses were being run in an inefficient, haphazard way, invented what he called "scientific man-agement." His invention was a form of "software" expertly crafted to run atop the Motivation 2.0 platform.

surveyed 684 open-source developers, mostly in North America and Europe, about why they participated in these projects. Lakhani and Wolf uncovered a range of motives, but they found "that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver."

"social businesses”: These are companies that raise capital, develop products, and sell them in an open market but do so in the service of a larger social mission--"with the profit-maximization principle replaced by the social-benefit principle." The Fourth Sector Network in the United States and Denmark is promoting "the for-benefit organization"-a hybrid that it says represents a new category of organization that is both economically self-sustaining and animated by a public purpose.

Suppose somebody gives me ten dollars and tells me to share it- some, all, or none- with you. If you accept my offer, we both get to keep the money. If you reject it, neither of us gets anything. If I offered you six dollars (keeping four for myself), would you take it? Almost cer-tainly. If I offered you five, you'd probably take that, too. But what if I offered you two dollars? Would you take it? In an experiment rep-licated around the world, most people rejected offers of two dollars and below." That makes no sense in terms of wealth maximization. If you take my offer of two dollars, you're two dollars richer. If you reject it, you get nothing. Your cognitive calculator knows two is greater than zero- but because you're a human being, your notions of fair play or your desire for revenge or your simple irritation overrides it.

Behavioral scientists often divide what we do on the job or learn in school into two categories: "algorithmic" and "heuristic." An algorithmic task is one in which you follow a set of established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion. That is, there's an algorithm for solving it. A heuristic task is the opposite. Precisely because no algorithm exists for it, you have to experiment with possibilities and devise a novel solution.

solving novel problems or creating something the world didn't know it was missing depend heavily on Harlow's third drive. Amabile calls it the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity: "Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity.”

People have to earn a living. Salary, contract payments, some benefits, a few perks are what I call "baseline rewards." If someone's baseline rewards aren't adequate or equitable, her focus will be on the unfairness of her situation and the anxiety of her circumstance. You'll get neither the predictability of extrinsic motivation nor the weirdness of intrinsic motivation. You'll get very little motivation at all. But once we're past that threshold, carrots and sticks can achieve precisely the opposite of their intended aims.