Motivation 3.0

I just read Daniel H. Pink's book Drive. First of all I need to say that I liked this book, I was expecting more of a self-help book but Pink had a much more organizational view on Motivation. Pink bases his work on research done by Teresa Amibile, Edward L. Deci and Mihaly Csikszentmihalay among others and investigates how changes in business needs and in our work environment impact our motivation. Drive is about the mismatch between current business practices to increase motivation and what latest research on human behavior tells us about motivation.

For many businesses, setting targets and offering bonuses and other monetary incentives is the way to motivate people. These incentives work well when people are doing repetitive and automated tasks. Employees don't need to use creativity to accomplish the tasks and the results can be improved with bonuses. This is something that Pink calls Motivation 2.0.

In today's business the repetitive tasks are in minority and most of our work require creative thinking and you are not likely to come across the same tasks from one day to the next. In this kind of environment bonuses and target based incentives are more likely to reduce the quality of the work and to demotivate people than to increase long term productivity. This means we need different ways to motivate people and this Pink calls Motivation 3.0.

For the creative workforce, work itself is the motivator. Salary needs to be fair compared to similar positions within the company and compared to the other companies in the market place. Money is not the motivator, but it can be the demotivator.

To motivate people it's important to give them autonomy and possibilities to improve their skills so they can reach towards the mastery of their art. People want also to feel that their job is filling a purpose higher than the bottom line. Autonomy means autonomy over what is done, when it's done, how it's done and which whom it's done. When people are able to decide for themselves they will perform better and are more motivated. Creative knowledge workers want to become better in their craft everyday and employers have to make sure this is possible in the organization, otherwise these people get demotivated and are likely to move to another company.

In Drive, Pink describes how some innovative companies have responded to the challenges of motivating creative workforce and these examples are the most valuable part of the book. This book really makes you think how you should organize your workplace and how to make your fellow employees motivated in their work. Not all incentive plans are bad, but it's important to acknowledge what kind of rewards are given, for what tasks and when.

The last part of Drive is The Type I Toolkit. The toolkit section has some practical guidelines to implement the Motivation 3.0 into your organization, into school and into your own life. The Toolkit is a nice addition to the book and helps you to take the theory into practice.

Pink has also a good list of books to read to dig deeper into this topic, enjoy.

• Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse
• Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalay 
• Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
• Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
• Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet by Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalay and William Damon
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Goodwin
• The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal by David Halberstam
• Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn
• Once a Runner by John L. Parker Jr.
• The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
• Mavericks: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler
• The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organizations by Peter M. Senge

I'm right now reading the book Team of Rivals by Doris Goodwin and recommend that warmly to all who are interested in history and management. Really great reading.

Getting Fit

One of my most important targets for this year is to duplicate my success from last year and lose another ten kilos from my waist. By Christmas, after two years of steady progress I should finally reach my target weight. And this time I believe it will be permanent weight loss.

Loosing weight is easy, you just need to eat less calories than you consume and that is easy, right? You only need to count calories from what you eat and what you consume, third grade math problem. Unfornatelly it's only easy in theory. I've been on this path earlier and I've got quite close to my ideal weight during my earlier weight loss periods. Somehow however the kilos have been coming back.

I have used quite a lot time to analyze the reasons for failure and mostly it feels that it's a matter of loosing too much weight too fast and doing too big changes to my daily routines that caused me to fail. I was really pumped up to exercise more, start running and going to gym, but one business trip or holidays could kill the momentum as quickly. All of a sudden I was back to my old habits and couldn't reach my target.

This time I have take a different approach and I have increased the amount exercise in small pieces over a long time. I have a dog and I take him to a walk two or three times a day. Instead of taking up running I started to take little bit longer walks with the dog. After a while I also started to walk to work (instead of taking the bicycle) to spend more calories. I also joined to Audible to get some audiobooks so I can learn something new while improving my physical condition.

I get my all important cardio exercise by playing floorball twice a week (1 hour at a time) and as I love to play that game, it's never difficult to motivate myself for that. I don't like going to gym or running as much and those habits won't stick no matter how many times I start. Walking on the other hand is something that I could add as a daily routine and the total amount of calories burned everyday is a big help in going down in weight. My target is to reduce a bit less than half a kilo per week and I'm succeeding mainly due to the daily low intensity training. At the moment it doesn't even feel like a diet as after about a year walking has become part of my daily routine.

Focus on Your Goals

In order to make change happen in your life you need to be really focus on the change. You need to be focused a long time. There is a lot of articles about making new habbits stick quickly, but I believe those studies are more or less unreliable. I also believe that in order to change your habbits you need to know why you're doing that. That is the only way to stay motivated and that's where goals come into play.

If you have a goal you need to have habits that will get you closer to your goal. If you want to lose weight you need to form many new habits: eat healthier, sleep better, exercise more etc. It's easy to do that for the first week or two, but it gets more and more difficult to stick to the new habits as time goes by. That is if you don't have a clear goal in mind (I want to lose 3 kg in this month). When you wake up just say to yourself why you want to form this new habit, what is my goal. Only way to reach goals is to change your habits, and to change your habits you need a goal that motivates you.

Most of us have some kind of target setting procedure at our work. It can be goals for the quarter or for a year and they are of varying quality. Not every goal that I've had during my career has been SMART (Specific, Measurable, Action oriented, Realistic and Time based). Far from it to be honest. But how is it with rest of our lifes? Do you have financial goals in your life, do you have goals for your family, your social life?

Zig Ziglar has created a Wheel of Life and he encourages us to create goals for seven different areas of our life: Career, Financial, Spiritual, Physical, Intellectual, Family and Social. So pick area of your life and spend some time thinking what you want to archive in that during this year. Then thing what habits needs to be changed or started and start pushing yourself towards more prosperous and fun life. Good luck for your journey.

Bad Habit in Disguise

Listerine commercials told me how nicely this mounthwash cleans my mouth of all nasty bacteria and make my teeth clean. I bought that and started to use Listerine to rinse my mouth every time I had brushed my teeth. Later on I was discussing this habit with my dentist and I found out a surprising fact about this good habit.

According to my dentist, every time I poured Listerine into my mouth I was washing away the protective flour that I was putting to my mouth while brushing my teeth. I use Pepsodent Super Flour and that has a flouride content of 0,32%. That is far more than Listerines 0,22% (this is the highest they sell, some of Listerine products have even lower flouride content). I stopped with that "good" habit immediatelly.

Listerine still has it's use, for example you can use that to rinse your mouth after you've eaten (if you don't brush teeth after you've eaten of cause), but using Listerine or other mouthwashes after brushing your teeth is actually a bad habit. You're not damaging your teeth, but you would be better of not using a mouthwash.

Keep it Up

Forming new habits take some time, exactly how long is very personal. According to a study by European Journal of Social Psychology it can vary between 18 and 244 days for a person to adopt a new habit and make it an automatic part of your daily life. As it varies so much between different people it can be really difficult to know how long should you keep working on a habit to make it stick. I'd also assume that the adaption time is not only dependent on the person, but also on the habit and what is the motivation to acquire the new habit.

How can I know how long does it take for me to adopt new habits? When do I know I have adopted a new habit? That is something that I don't have an answer to, but I hope I'll be able to find the answer while working with this blog.

Getting to Know Yourself

To improve yourself it's crucial that you know yourself. You get much better results if you know what you want to improve and why. One area I've been reading about lately is personality styles and how they impact your communication and co-operation with others. It's fairly important that you don't deliver your message the same way to everyone in your family or at your work. We are all different and not understanding the differences in personality can lead to a unnecessary conflicts.

One way to test what personality style you are is to do a DISC personality test. DISC divides personality to four different areas, Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance. Combinations and weights in these different categories give you a hint of what kind of personality style you have.

I did a free online DISC test at 123 Test and here are the results. Not far away from what I imagined before I took the test. You too can try it out and take a look into your personality. I might reveal some new sides of yourself.

Get More Sleep

It's a well known fact that our brains need rest. Lack of sleep is causing similar symptoms and mistakes in our daily activities as being drunk. I'm often hanging out in the internet very late in the night, either playing World of Tanks or reading interesting (at least most of the time) articles about business, leadership, programming or developing my skills. I wake up to feed the kids and get myself to work at the same time regardless of what time I went to bed. Often I get less than 6 hours of sleep. Well now it's time to put a stop on that bad habit and start getting my sleep.