By Daniel H. Pink

• A book which i borrowed from our college bookshelf, and now it is lying in my bookshelf

• The first chapter is very interesting, it conducts a lot of experiments and proves some interesting results through it

• It categorizes motivation into 3 types

  • Intrinsic motivation - The people who do it for passion and for a bigger outcome and not because of any reward or money as such
  • Extrinsic motivation - As guessed, the people who do it for a reward it can be food, pleasure, money, etc. Also known as Carrot and sticks
    • This kindof motivation is not longterm, as once the end reward is removed, the motivation just stops.
  • Third one is in between, if the people working with intrinsic motivation are attached with a reward, the results can turn the opposite, because they get addicted to the reward and if we remove it in future, there is a chance that people might lose the motivation to work

• He also beautifully demonstrates it by giving an example of Microsoft Encyclopedia and Wikipedia, and Wikipedia being the one with no rewards, was driven by intrinsic motivation, tend to suceed in the long run.

• Even I can connect it with Levels.fyi, as people volunteerly submit their salaries on our site without any extrinsic reward, just for a better cause of providing pay transparency to everyone. But if we attach an reward, and for some unforseen circumstance remove it, we might see a decline in the number of submissions, because we changed the motivation type.

• I only read the first third of the book, as later on it felt boring. Might give it a retry in the future if i feel like it.

• Would I read it again? Maybe No

• Would I recommend it?

  • The first chapter/section yes, it has some great experiments to learn from.
  • Rest I am not sure.