Motivation and Cognitive Surplus, Part i

I really don't mean to pick a fight with anyone; but this drives me nuts:

In December, [Daniel] Pink, a Wired contributing editor, came out with Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. The book digs through more than five decades of behavioral science to challenge the orthodoxy that carrots and sticks are the most effective ways to motivate workers in the 21st century. Instead, he argues, the most enduring motivations aren’t external but internal—things we do for our own satisfaction.

This drives me nuts, Part I: doesn't it make more sense to say that both methods motivate us? Sometimes we have the leisure to pursue stuff we're interested in, and sometimes we need to be poked and prodded to get stuff done.

And let me tell you: as a manager for the last five years, I've found that this notion of motivating workers to do their best is not so simple. A case in point: I had a highly educated assistant who felt the job was beneath her. Surely it was, and so I gave her ample opportunities to pursue interesting work that better suited her educational qualifications. What she chose to do instead was to spend all of her time job hunting. Another employee interpreted my largesse as a signal that she should go for my job. Another spent all of her time doing the stuff she liked, and none of the stuff that actually needed to get done. These women were all under 37 years old -- not old codgers by any measure.

I digress. But has Daniel Pink ever managed anyone? Do you have the leisure to do only interesting things? (If so, can you tell me how you've made billpaying interesting? Perhaps that'll be the next step from Blippy; the online billpaying game! Earn VISA points while you battle demon creditors and check your 401k!)

But the meme of doing only what interests you is an old and seductive one. Even the obscenely beautiful and wealthy have to do things they don't like to do -- finance overseas wars, liposuction, etc. I can't help thinking of the old adage that "You're still a kid until you have a kid", i.e. until you've assumed some responsibility and put yourself and your ego-centered interests on the back burner. Are we turning into a nation of perpetual adolescents? grump grump.

And finally, who has time to pursue what they're interested in? It's interesting to me that this pursuit is presented in a work context. Because increasingly, our lives have no leisure time. This is the Great White Hope -- or Great White Whale, that somehow our interest in 19th century pottery or gardening techniques can somehow get incorporated into a monetized framework. We take less vacation and fill our waking hours with media, so unless media is what we're interested in, it's hard to say what else we have time to pursue.