Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us pdfdrive com

FROM COMPLIANCE TO ENGAGEMENT

The opposite of autonomy is control. And since they sit at different poles of the behavioral compass, they point us toward different destinations. Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement. And this distinction leads to the second element of Type I behavior: mastery—the desire to get better and better at something that matters.

As I explained in Part One, Motivation 2.0’s goal was to encourage people to do particular things in particular ways—that is, to get them to comply. And for that objective, few motivators are more effective than a nice bunch of carrots and the threat of an occasional stick. This was rarely a promising route to self- actualization, of course. But as an economic strategy, it had a certain logic. For routine tasks, the sort of work that defined most of the twentieth century, gaining compliance usually worked just fine.

But that was then. For the definitional tasks of the twenty-first century, such a strategy falls short, often woefully short. Solving complex problems requires an inquiring mind and the willingness to experiment one’s way to a fresh solution. Where Motivation 2.0 sought compliance, Motivation 3.0 seeks engagement. Only engagement can produce mastery. And the pursuit of mastery, an important but often dormant part of our third drive, has become essential in making one’s

way in today’s economy.

Unfortunately, despite sweet-smelling words like “empowerment” that waft through corporate corridors, the modern workplace’s most notable feature may be its lack of engagement and its disregard for mastery. Gallup’s extensive research on the subject shows that in the United States, more than 50 percent of employees are not engaged at work—and nearly 20 percent are actively disengaged. The cost of all this disengagement: about $300 billion a year in lost

productivity—a sum larger than the GDP of Portugal, Singapore, or Israel.¹ Yet in comparative terms, the United States looks like a veritable haven of Type I behavior at work. According to the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., in some countries as little as 2 to 3 percent of the workforce is highly engaged in their

work.²

Equally important, engagement as a route to mastery is a powerful force in our personal lives. While complying can be an effective strategy for physical survival, it’s a lousy one for personal fulfillment. Living a satisfying life requires more than simply meeting the demands of those in control. Yet in our offices and our classrooms we have way too much compliance and way too little engagement. The former might get you through the day, but only the latter will get you through the night. And that brings us back to Csikszentmihalyi’s story.

In his early teens, after witnessing the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Soviet takeover of his country, Csikszentmihalyi was understandably weary of compliance and looking for engagement. But he wouldn’t find it at school. He dropped out of high school at thirteen. For nearly a decade, he worked in various Western European countries at a series of jobs, some odder than others, to support himself. And hoping to answer his youthful question about a better way to live, he read everything he could get his hands on in religion and philosophy. What he learned didn’t satisfy him. It wasn’t until he inadvertently stumbled into a lecture by none other than Carl Jung that he heard about the field of psychology and decided that it might hold the secrets he sought.

So in 1956, at the age of twenty-two, Csikszentmihalyi set off for the United States to study psychology. He arrived in Chicago, a high school dropout with

$1.25 in his pocket whose only familiarity with the English language came from reading Pogo comic strips. Hungarian contacts in Chicago helped him find a job and a place to live. His knowledge of Latin, German, and Pogo helped him pass the Illinois high school equivalency test in a language he neither spoke nor read. He enrolled in the University of Illinois-Chicago, took classes during the day, worked as a hotel auditor at night, and eventually wound up at the University of

Chicago psychology department, where—just nine years after setting foot in America—he earned a Ph.D.

But Csikszentmihalyi resisted rafting down the main currents of his field. As he told me one spring morning not long ago, he wanted to explore “the positive, innovative, creative approach to life instead of the remedial, pathological view that Sigmund Freud had or the mechanistic work” of B. F. Skinner and others who reduced behavior to simple stimulus and response. He began by writing about creativity. Creativity took him into the study of play. And his exploration of play unlocked an insight about the human experience that would make him famous.

In the midst of play, many people enjoyed what Csikszentmihalyi called “autotelic experiences”—from the Greek auto (self ) and telos (goal or purpose). In an autotelic experience, the goal is self-fulfilling; the activity is its own reward. Painters he observed during his Ph.D. research, Csikszentmihalyi said, were so enthralled in what they were doing that they seemed to be in a trance. For them, time passed quickly and self-consciousness dissolved. He sought out other people who gravitated to these sorts of pursuits—rock climbers, soccer players, swimmers, spelunkers—and interviewed them to discover what made an activity autotelic. It was frustrating. “When people try to recall how it felt to climb a mountain or play a great musical piece,” Csikszentmihalyi later wrote,

“their stories are usually quite stereotyped and uninsightful.”³ He needed a way to probe people’s experiences in the moment. And in the mid-1970s, a bold new technology—one that any twelve-year-old now would find laughingly retrograde

—came to the rescue: the electronic pager.

Csikszentmihalyi, who by then was teaching at the University of Chicago and running his own psychology lab, clipped on a pager and asked his graduate students to beep him randomly several times each day. Whenever the pager sounded, he recorded what he was doing and how he was feeling. “It was so much fun,” he recalled in his office at the Claremont Graduate University in southern California, where he now teaches. “You got such a detailed picture of how people lived.” On the basis of this test run, he developed a methodology called the Experience Sampling Method. Csikszentmihalyi would page people eight times a day at random intervals and ask them to write in a booklet their answers to several short questions about what they were doing, who they were with, and how they’d describe their state of mind. Put the findings together for seven days and you had a flip book, a mini-movie, of someone’s week. Assemble the individual findings and you had an entire library of human

experiences.

“Throughout my athletics career, the overall goal was always to be a better athlete than I was at that moment—whether next week, next month or next year. The improvement was the goal. The medal was simply the ultimate reward for achieving that goal.”

SEBASTIAN COE

Middle-distance runner and two-time Olympic gold medal winner

From these results, Csikszentmihalyi began to peel back the layers of those autotelic experiences. Perhaps equally significant, he replaced that wonky Greek-derived adjective with a word he found people using to describe these optimal moments: flow. The highest, most satisfying experiences in people’s lives were when they were in flow. And this previously unacknowledged mental state, which seemed so inscrutable and transcendent, was actually fairly easy to unpack. In flow, goals are clear. You have to reach the top of the mountain, hit the ball across the net, or mold the clay just right. Feedback is immediate. The mountaintop gets closer or farther, the ball sails in or out of bounds, the pot you’re throwing comes out smooth or uneven.

Most important, in flow, the relationship between what a person had to do and what he could do was perfect. The challenge wasn’t too easy. Nor was it too difficult. It was a notch or two beyond his current abilities, which stretched the body and mind in a way that made the effort itself the most delicious reward. That balance produced a degree of focus and satisfaction that easily surpassed other, more quotidian, experiences. In flow, people lived so deeply in the moment, and felt so utterly in control, that their sense of time, place, and even self melted away. They were autonomous, of course. But more than that, they were engaged. They were, as the poet W. H. Auden wrote, “forgetting themselves in a function.”

Maybe this state of mind was what that ten-year-old boy was seeking as that train rolled through Europe. Maybe reaching flow, not for a single moment but as an ethic for living—maintaining that beautiful “eye-on-the-object look” to

achieve mastery as a cook, a surgeon, or a clerk—was the answer. Maybe this was the way to live.