I finished this book in February 2025. I recommend this book 8/10.
Why you should read this book:
This is a great book on how motivation techniques have changed over time. Humans will always strive for more freedom, and what motivated a workforce 30 years ago will not work today. The book's last section provides actionable steps for individuals, businesses, and parents.
Get your copy here.
🚀 The book in three sentences
Motivation has changed over the years.
Put the responsibility on the person—give freedom to succeed.
Great to-does at the end of the book.
✍️ My favorite quote
Tom Kelly, General Manager, IDEO, said, " The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote.
📝 My notes and thoughts
P32. One business leader, who didn't want to be identified, said it plainly. When he conducts job interviews, he tells prospective employees: "If you need me to motivate you, I probably don't want to hire you."
P33. Wikipedia is an example of open-source where people spend time on their own.
P39. Try to encourage a kid to learn math by paying her for each workbook page she completes—and she'll almost certainly become more diligent in the short term and lose interest in math in the long term. Take an industrial designer who loves his work and try to get him to do better by making his pay contingent on a hit product—and he'll almost certainly work like a maniac in the short term but become less interested in his job in the long term. As one leading behavioral science textbook puts it, "People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person's motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person's intrinsic motivation toward the activity. This is one of the most robust findings in social science—and also one of the most ignored.
P50. Like all extrinsic motivators, goals narrow our focus. That's one reason they can be effective: they concentrate the mind. But as we've seen, a narrowed focus exacts a cost. For complex or conceptual tasks, offering a reward can blink the wide-ranging thinking necessary to come up with an innovative solution. Likewise, when an extrinsic goal is paramount—particularly a short-term, measurable one whose achievement delivers a big payoff—its presence can restrict our view of the broader dimensions of our behavior. As the cadre of business school professors write, "Substantial evidence demonstrates that in addition to motivation constructive effort, goal setting can induce unethical behavior."
P57. But companies pay a steep price for not extending their gaze beyond the next quarter. Several researchers have found that companies that spend the most time offering guidance on quarterly earnings deliver significantly lower long-term growth rates than companies that offer guidance less frequently. (One reason: The earnings-obsessed companies typically invest less in research and development.) They successfully achieve their short-term goals, but threaten the health of the company two or three years hence. As the scholars who warned about goals gone wild put it, "The very presence of goals may lead employees to focus myopically on short-term gains and to lose sight of the potentially devastating long-term effects on the organization. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the economic calamity that gripped the world economy in 2008 and 2009. Each player in the system focused only on the short-term reward—the buyer who wanted a house, the mortgage broker who wanted a commission, the Wall Street trader who wanted new securities to sell, the politician who wanted a buoyant economy during reelection—and ignored the long-term effects of their actions on themselves or others. When the music stopped, the entire system nearly collapsed.
P59. Carrots and Sticks: Seven Deadly Flaws:
They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.
They can diminish performance.
They can crush creativity.
They can crowd out good behavior.
They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.
They can become addictive.
They can foster short-term thinking.
P80. Type I behavior is a renewable resource. Think of Type X behavior as coal and Type I as the sun. For most of recent history, coal has been the cheapest, easiest, most efficient resource. But coal has two downsides. First, it produces nasty things like air pollution and greenhouse gases. Second, it's finite; getting more of it becomes increasingly difficult and expensive each year. Type X behavior is similar. An emphasis on rewards and punishment spews its own externalities. And "if-then" motivators always grow more expensive. But Type I behavior, which is built around intrinsic motivation, draws on resources that are easily replenished and inflict little damage. It is the motivational equivalent of clean energy: inexpensive, safe to use, and endlessly renewable.
P90. Tom Kelly, General Manager, IDEO, said, " The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote.
P107. "Studies have shown that perceived control is an important component of one's happiness. However, what people feel like they want control over really varies, so I don't think there's one aspect of autonomy that's universally the most important. Different individuals have different desires, so the best strategy for an employer would be to figure out what's important to each individual employee." Still, however, those individual desires express themselves on the surface; they grow from common roots. We're born to be players, not pawns. We're meant to be autonomous individuals, not individual automatons. we're designed to be Type I. But outside forces—including the very idea that we need to be "managed"—have conspired to change our default setting and turn into Type X. If we update the environments we're in—not only at work but also at school and at home—and if leaders recognize both the truth of the human condition and the science that supports it, we can return ourselves and our colleagues to our natural state. "The course of human history has always moved in the direction of greater freedom. And there's a reason for that—because it's in our nature to push for it," Ryan told me. "If we were just plastic like [some] people think, this wouldn't be happening. But somebody stands in front of a tank in China. Women who've been denied autonomy keep advocating for their rights. This is the course of history. This is why, ultimately, human nature, if it ever realizes itself, will do so by becoming more autonomous.
P111. Where Motivation 2.0 sought compliance, Motivation 3.0 seeks engagement. Only engagement can produce mastery. And the pursuit of mastery, an important but often dormant part of our third drive, has become essential in making one's way in today's economy.
P125. But in the end. Mastery often involves working and showing little improvement, perhaps with a few moments of flow pulling you along, then making a little progress, and then working and working on that new, slightly higher plateau again. It's grueling, to be sure. But that's not the problem; that's the solution.
P133. The first two legs of the Type I tripod, autonomy and mastery, are essential. But for proper balance, we need a third leg—purpose, which provides a context for its two mates. Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels. But those who do so in the service of some great objective can achieve even more. The most deeply motivated people—not to mention those who are most productive and satisfied—hitch their desires to a cause larger than themselves.
P138. From the first sentence, the oath rings with the sounds of Motivation 3.0: "As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can create alone," it begins. And on it goes for nearly five hundred words. "I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers, and the society in which we operate," the oath-takers pledge. "I will strive to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide."
P145. We know that human beings are not merely smaller, slower, better-smelling horses galloping after that day's carrot. We know—if we've spent time with young children or remember ourselves at our best—that we're not destined to be passive and compliant. We're designed to be active and engaged. And we know that the richest experiences in our lives aren't when we're clamoring for validation from others but when we're listening to our own voice—doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause larger than ourselves.
P155. Here's something you can do to keep yourself motivated. At the end of each of each day, ask yourself whether you were better today than you were yesterday. Did you do more? Did you do it well? Or, to get specific, did you learn your teen vocabulary words, make your eight sales calls, eat your five servings of fruits and vegetables, and write your four pages? You don't have to be flawless each day. Instead, look for small measures of improvement, such as how long you practiced your saxophone or whether you held off on checking e-mail until you finished that report you needed to write. Reminding yourself that you don't need to be a master by day 3 is the best way of ensuring you will be one by day 3,000. So before you go to sleep each night, ask yourself the small question: Was I better today than yesterday?
P157. Give yourself a monthly performance review:
What's your learning goals?
How are you faring?
Where are you falling short?
What tools, information, or support might you need to do better?
Set both smaller and larger goals so that when it comes time to evaluate yourself you've already accomplished some whole tasks.
Make sure you understand how every aspect of your work relates to your larger purpose.
Be brutally honest. This exercise is aimed at helping you improve performance and achieve master—so if you rationalize failures or gloss over you mistakes instead of learning from them, you're wasting your time.
P159. Deliberate practice isn't running a few miles each day or banging on the piano for twenty minutes each morning. It's much more purposeful, focused, and, yes, painful. Follow these steps—over and over again for a decade—and you just might become a master:
Remember that deliberate practice has one objective: to improve performance. "People who play tennis once a week for years don't get any better if they do the same thing each time," Ericsson has said. "Deliberate practice is about changing your performance, setting new goals, and straining yourself to reach a bit higher each time."
Repeat, repeat, repeat. Repetition matters. Basketball greats don't shoot ten free throws at the end of team practice; they shoot five hundred.
Seek constant, critical feedback. If you don't know how you're doing, you won't know what to improve.
Focus ruthlessly on where you need help. While many of us work on what we're already good at, says Ericsson, "those who get better work on their weakness."
Prepare for the process to be mentally and physically exhausting. That's why so few people commit to it, but that's why it works.