Incito MentisA blog by Syed Abdul Karim

Just finished reading another amazing book by Daniel Pink – Drive. It’s a nice amalgamation of thoughts and learning from some of the greatest psychologists and behavioral economists of our time and Dan Pink wonderfully builds on their thinking to give us a nice operating system for the 21st century – dubbed Motivation 3.0. It is the key to unlocking hidden human potential especially in this day and age when the world needs more creative and conceptual thinking. The most profound learning for me was the impact of this thinking on parenting. I guess this is the change in perspective that comes when you became a father of three kids.

So what is the big learning. The idea that we as humans do our best when we are inner directed and self-driven is both very intuitive and at the same time quite unreal. Why the paradox? Well there are so many people out there who seem to only operate when there is a carrot or stick to drive them forward. They seem to be getting by, following the wave, going with the flow of the status quo. Thinking about why this is so I realized that this is a probably a symptom of Motivation 2.0, as Dan Pink puts it. After spending years of their life in a world of Motivation 2.0, people feel succumbed and resistant to the idea of autonomy. Now it is hard for them to imagine being self-directed and tune in to their inner selves. And I believe a large part of this has to do with parenting and schooling. What happens in an organizational life only further perpetuates a mindset many have grown up with. This is the reason why I feel it is important to positively influence the environment early on for kids and help them find their way to a self-directed and autonomous way of living.

Although the principles in the book apply across all life stages I have looked at them from a perspective of parenting. What are the the three driving principles of Motivation 3.0 as Dan Pink puts it?

• Autonomy
• Mastery
• Larger Purpose

These are simple yet powerful principles that are key to unlocking human or a child’s hidden potential. The key premise being that we as humans thrive in an environment when we are given the freedom to do what we want to do, how we want to do, when we want to do and who we want to do it with. Obviously from a child’s perspective it seems bizarre to let them simply even do what they want since a young mind will not always know the difference between something harmful and harmless and therefore could end up doing some serious damage to themselves or to someone around them.

However, with proper direction and a set of controlled variables a child can be given the freedom to choose and practice some level of autonomy. For example, if a child is sent to the library for an hour to freely explore and choose a book as he pleases, there is little damage he could do but what he would do out of his own choice will be far more enabling and motivating then any forced learning.

The principle of Mastery is yet another profound concept. The idea being to shift behavior from performance goals to learning goals. For example, getting an A in science or becoming an explorer of the universe are two different things. Dan Pink talked about how performance goals have driven many corporate executives to game the system and focus so narrowly on short-term targets that they vastly undermine an organizations longer term interests. The same applies to children. A blind focus on grades means less learning and more focusing on anything that will help to get the grade. The quest for mastery creates enthusiasm and creates engagement in the task itself. One key trigger of this behavior is the mindset. If a child believes their intelligence is limited they would push to a certain extent until their self-belief drives them to stop trying. This was proven in an experiment when in another scenario children who believe that intelligence is expandable and can be nurtured work harder to overcome challenging situations. One way to put a child on the quest for mastery is to create opportunities which encourage “Flow” – a concept by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi which he covered in a book by the same name. Those experiences when we are engaged in a Goldilocks task – not too hard, not too easy, but just right keep us going. And it is through these everyday experiences of “flow” we can set ourselves and our children on a path to mastery.

Last but not least, driving behavior through a larger purpose. I think this idea is important at all levels. From a child to an organization. Brands which adopt a larger purpose not only build loyalty amongst it’s customers but also it’s employees. I think there is a DNA code within us that drives us to pursue a purpose larger than ourselves and it is this larger purpose that makes us the most happy. The same applies for children. Explaining to them the larger purpose of what they are doing and why they are doing it can really drive them forward to pursue a task with greater zeal.

I could probably go on writing but in sum, Motivation 3.0 is driven by three principles: Autonomy, Mastery and Larger Purpose. This is one of the longest posts I have written and despite that I don’t think I have done justice to both the book and the topic. Drive is an amazing light read – one that I would highly recommend whether you are a parent, teacher, organization leader or simply human. It has some lessons in there for everyone.

The Internet has done it again! Ted Williams a 54 year old from Columbus, Ohio – a homeless, jobless nobody just 3 days ago has not only got a home and a job! He has been a guest star on the “Today” Show, “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” and is now probably on his way to becoming a celebrity. The Internet has just created a radio star and all this happened in a matter of days. This is the world we live in. The world of Justin Bieber, the world of the iPhone playing Korean applegirl, Kim Yeo Hee who also got discovered on YouTube sometime last year and has signed a record deal since then. This is the world of “The Lonely Island” a trio from Berkley, California that posted some comedy skits that went viral eventually landing them on Saturday Night Live and now they are a famous Hollywood trio. Ted Williams is the latest entrant among the internet famous. This is the video which made it all happen!

The guy is talented alright! But is he the most talented voice known to man or are the forces of ‘The Long Tail’ at play? What just happened! It seems the Long Tail has bubbled up yet another niche and turned it into a hit! Chris Anderson is going to be proud. This is a great example of technology discovering something in the Long Tail of talent and bringing it out to the world. A reporter from Columbia Dispatch takes a video of the “Homeless Man with the Golden Voice” and posts it on their website, which gets reposted on YouTube, gets over 13 million views in about 48 hours, Twitter goes crazy with it and here I am in Saudi Arabia reading and blogging about this guy from nowhere! Amazing. This could not have happened just 5 years ago!

I just finished reading Freakonomics. Quite a book. It was long overdue but when I got to it, it flew like a breeze.  Stephen Dubner did a wonderful job capturing the insightful research and anlaysis by Steven Levitt. What really inspired me was his writing style - very engaging and purposeful. I will probably take a break with another book or two before reading Super Freakonomics. But I must say this was hardly like the Economics textbook from way back in business school.

So what was some of the key learning. For one, things are not always what they seem. ‘Conventional Wisdom’ maybe conventional but it is certainly not wisdom. It may seem quite obvious that the risk of a child getting shot by accident in a household with a gun maybe far greater than a child drowning in a house with a swimming pool. But quite the opposite is true. In fact most people would find a swimming pool a great thing to have in a home. Statistically however it has been proven that more children die from drowning than from a gun shot accident.

The same is true for riding in a car and flying in a plane. Mosy people are afraid of flying than they are of riding in a car. Why is that? Data again proves that flying is safer than riding in a car. In a car we feel more in control, especially when we are in the driving seat but in an airplane we are in the hands of someone we usually don’t even see and the unknown sparks a far greater fear in us. We intrinsically fear uncertainty. The more unknown the variable the greater our fear. But the point is this, what we believe or know to be conventional wisdom is not necessarily true.

Looking underneath the surface usually reveals a completely unexpected picture. Like the case of the sudden drop in crime in the United States and more specifically in New York. Surprisingly this topic has been a subject of many books and quite amazingly now looking at some of the examples in retrospect, this case has been used nicely to fit the context of whatever that was being talked about.

I don’t want to be the judge on who is right and who is wrong but in the ‘Tipping Point’ the context was that when small things are taken care of, when graffiti on the streets is removed, when broken windows and damaged street property is kept in shape it eventually leads to a Tipping Point in crime when suddenly the larger crimes being to reduce leading to an overall decline in crime rate. This was the apparent strategy by Mayor Giuliani to bring crime rate down in New York. In Freakonomics the reason for this reduction is completely different. After exploring a number of possible angles and then negating them Steve Levitt concludes that it was the legalization of abortion in the 1970s that eventually led to the reduction in crime in the 1990s. His theory being that women who usually seek abortion are women who for whatever reason are not in a shape or condition to raise a child, from being too young or too poor to everything in between. Therefore when they were allowed abortion it reduced the number of unwanted babies, babies who would not have been cared for, raised, educated and groomed in the same way as a mother who wanted a child and as result are more likely to perform poorly at school, drop out and eventually turn to a life of crime. Quite a theory but very interesting nevertheless.

Now having read Malcolm Gladwell’s Broken Window Theory to crime reduction in New York and Steve Levitt’s Abortion Theory you can’t help but think that it is unlikely both theories are true. I will let you draw your own conclusions, feel free to tell me what they are in the comments below. But I learnt one important thing. It is amazing how powerful writing can be as a tool to convince people and change their opinion. At the time of reading both perspectives I was equally convinced by each. Upon further research for this blog post I learnt that perhaps both are questionable but they both made a damn good case of what they were saying and they surely had me convinced.

These were just some of the highlights from the book. There are a lot more interesting examples and observations in Freakonomics that I would like to talk about. Perhaps in a future blog I will cover those as well, which if I keep to my promise should be not too far away.

What can I say about Dan Ariely! This book is simply awesome! It’s a goldmine of insights. A must-read for planners looking to understand human behavior. This whole idea of behavioral economics is very intriguing (I did a post earlier on the same subject). Through a series of experiments Dan repeatedly proves his point about the infallibility of our mind that drives us to make decisions and do things we rationally cannot imagine doing. The scope of his research covers various dimensions of life from society to economics, from the mundane to the extraordinary. The findings are shockingly counterintuitive. For example, how a decoy on the Economist Subscription page leads people to go for the expensive print plus web subscription because the decoy makes it seem that the web subscription has been thrown in for free. Whereas without the decoy experiments have proven that most people went for the cheaper web-only option. See image below (although this has been changed now!). How can we be manipulated so easily?

I would like to talk about a whole bunch of such intriguing examples and insights, but I guess I would save those for later posts. But I would like to point to a section towards the end of the book which I think captures it’s essence. It is surprising to see how in a world where “change is the only constant” some old ways of looking at the world continue to dominate popular thinking. The analogy that Dan draws on is how man is clear when it comes to his physical limitations and is using all resources and technology to overcome these limitations but when it comes to the mind he believes he is limitless, flawless and continues to operate under the age-old framework of rational economics to explain how he would behave in real life. This he proves through the course of his book is far from true. He also states that continuing to operate under this framework is dangerous as some key issues facing mankind need to be addressed like how to avoid getting into another big economic crisis, how to create better educational systems, how to model health-care etc. It is time for us to look more openly and challenge these conventional ways of dealing with societal and economic issues.

Not surprisingly Dan also spoke about the core concepts of his book in a talk at TED. I have posted the video here. Check it out !