Daniel Pink

The way to improve performance, increase productivity, and encourage excellence is to reward the good and punish the bad.
Despite

This new way of organizing what we do doesn’t banish extrinsic rewards. People in the open-source movement haven’t taken vows of poverty. For many, participation in these projects can burnish their reputations and sharpen their skills, which can enhance their earning power.

Lakhani and Wolf uncovered a range of motives, but they found “that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver.”

In 2002, the Nobel Foundation awarded its prize in economics to a guy who wasn’t even an economist

In real life our behavior is far more complex than the textbook allows and often confounds the idea that we’re purely rational. We don’t save enough for retirement even though it’s to our clear economic advantage to do so.

We leave lucrative jobs to take low-paying ones that provide a clearer sense of purpose.

But for a surprisingly large number of people, jobs have become more complex, more interesting, and more self-directed

Routine work can be outsourced or automated; artistic, empathic, nonroutine work generally cannot

This operating system rests on the belief that work is not inherently enjoyable—which is precisely why we must coax people with external rewards and threaten them with outside punishment

Take the curious example of Vocation Vacations. This is a business in which people pay their hard-earned money . . . to work at another job. They use their vacation time to test-drive being a chef, running a bike shop, or operating an animal shelter