Dan Pink on why humans have not only a biological drive (we eat, drink, and have sex), and a second drive (we respond to reward and punishment), but a third drive:
We do things even when they don’t satisfy our biological urges, win us a reward or help us avoid a punishment. We play musical instruments during the weekend simply to master something challenging. We quit high-paying jobs to take new jobs that are less lucrative but more meaningful. Human beings, says University of Rochester psychologist Edward Deci, have an “inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capacities, to explore and to learn”. Few would deny that this third drive is also part of what it is to be human.Pink suggests three factors based on the third drive that offer a better route to enduring motivation and accomplishment:
1. Management leads to compliance, but only self-direction leads to engagement
2. Mastery is its own reward
3. We are purpose maximisers, not just profit maximisersBusiness, Pink points out, often stops at the second drive yet that’s a dated model rarely effective today. The goal, it seems, is to get to third.
It seems lately that a lot of the most popular services and products are selling based on the best experience and less on the technology behind them. Look at things likeApple’s iPhone, while yes there is a lot of technology behind the phone the real killer app of the phone is its incredible…
Startup entrepreneur Ben Horowitz recently wrote a post The Case for the Fat Startup. He summarizes the article with:
As you listen to the virtues of the lean start-up–lightweight sales, light engineering, and so on–keep the following in mind:
- If you are a high-tech start-up, your…
— Seth’s Blog: Driveby culture and the endless search for wow (via fred-wilson)
We have many words for the frustration we feel when an interface isn’t directing us to what we need to know. Loud, messy, cluttered, busy.
These words have been appropriated from other parts of life, of course, but we need them to express our feeling of being overwhelmed visually by content…
A very neat and concise post on an real life example of logo development. It helped open eyes on how much work goes through something we take for granted. enjoy!
