ZenSRC

A friend of mine sent me a link to a great video about motivation, entitled “The surprising science of motivation” by Dan Pink. The video focuses on what it takes to motivate people in a workplace and contrasts mechanical labor intensive jobs versus cognitive labor intensive jobs.

What I particularly like about this video is how Dan analyzes the problem of motivating workers who spend their time doing creative, cognitive work. The science says that once you “pay people enough to take money off of the table” then there are three factors that lead to better performance and personal satisfaction:

• Autonomy – A person’s ability to self-direct his/her tasks.
• Mastery – A person’s feeling that they are learning, growing, and finding new and better ways to perform their jobs.
• Purpose – The feeling that a person has that his/her product is making the world a better place.

Most businesses still fail to realize that it isn’t about pay incentives. It’s about making people feel like they own the products they produce. This is one of those TED videos that rings true. In my own experience, I have had all three during one time or another in my career and I can honestly say that during those periods of time when I felt all three, work ceased to feel like work, and it felt more like play. Check out the video.

Over the last week or so, I’ve wrestled with the topics that I wanted to cover here and the frequency in which I should try to post. I’ve brainstormed a veritable laundry list of topics that I’d like to touch upon over at mindmesiter. I decided that a good starting place would be creative inspiration.

We all get our creative inspiration from different places. One place that I like to check out is TED. The about page does a far better job at explaining its mission than I could; but in my belief, TED is a place where brilliant people exchange great ideas. Often, I’ll check out random videos there because you never know what you’ll find and what will trigger your own creative spark.

Here is an unordered, incomplete list of my favorites:

• Al Gore’s new thinking on the climate crisis
• Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth
• Ben Dunlap talks about a passionate life
• Matthieu Ricard on the habits of happiness
• Philip K. Howard: Four ways to fix a broken legal system
• Dan Barber: How I fell in love with a fish