Drive - The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us (Daniel H Pink)

I read this book because I was interested to find out what motives me to do something and what I can do to continuously motive myself.

All this time I thought motivation was built around external rewards and punishments - people respond to rewards and punishments. For example, the more severe a punishment is, the less likely someone is gonna commit that crime. It is not something hard to understand and correlate after all. However, little did I know that it is more than sticks and carrots, we have our third drive called intrinsic motivation as contrast to extrinsic motivation. 

Why do I read books and keep a blog when I am not receiving any monetary perks? According to this book, it is powered by our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. The three elements of intrinsic behaviors are autonomy (our desire to be self-directed), mastery (our urge to get better and better at what we do) and purpose (our yearning to be part of something larger than ourselves). Come to think of it, owning a blog does give me a sense of control (to decide the layout/ fonts I am gonna use) and I do want to get better at writing, reading and thinking through blogging. And maybe I do have the inner yearning to share the knowledge and my thoughts with people from the other side of the world. But if I start generating income through blog advertising, I might lose all the fun, joy and satisfaction because such an act can transform an interesting task into a drudge, turn play into work which in turn diminish the intrinsic motivation. This is why carrots and sticks method is no longer compatible in today's corporate world. 

My main focus is mastery, one of the elements in intrinsic behaviors - what can we do to move toward mastery in our lives? There are 3 laws - mastery is a mindset, mastery is a pain and lastly mastery is an asymptote. This helps to remind myself whenever I procrastinate.

All in all, this book is very useful to help you understand and improve your lives and your business. Another good thing about this book is that at the end of it, the author actually provides a summary of all chapters to strengthen your memory in case you have forgotten certain key points. The author also goes as far as to provide you a list of books/ websites relevant to this subject matter. I will definitely reread once I get a hard copy of it.

I am reading this for Non-Fiction, Non-Memoir Reading Challenge 2012.