Last night, I went to a potluck with a group of NYC Objectivists and had a fantastic time. It’s a group of amiable, intelligent people with a wide range of interests and experience, so the conversation was smart, funny, and hit on topics ranging from public urination to comparative mythology and ritual between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity to neuroscience and psychology of thought and motivation to sex and fetishes.
Anywhoodles, during one of our conversations, I mentioned some podcasts I’d listened to recently and this morning, one of the women at the party sent me a couple of links to TED Talks. TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design” and it’s a non-profit that does conferences and lectures on spectrum of topics.
Well, one of the links she sent to me was this lecture from Dan Pink on motivations and it has a lot of interesting insights and points about what motivates people to perform. I started to make a list of the neat things:
- Incentives don’t work for creative work.
- People perform better when they’re given autonomy.
- People perform better when they believe they’re working for something beyond immediate profit.
But you have to watch the whole thing because it’s interesting.
WARNING: It’s full of altruistic bromides about the greater good and changing the world and all that. There are also some cynical jokes like the one in the title of this post.
Update: Ribbonfarm has a lengthy post on Dan Pink. I also noticed that the embedded video doesn’t show up in Google Reader, so you’ll have to click over to see it.
