 rather than the area where they work best and if we want to actually refine how we motivate people in organizations what we're going to need to do is pay them well get rid of a lot of these event rewards pay them well give them a sense of autonomy give them a chance to get better at something that matters mastery and attach them to some kind of purpose that is a far better recipe for enduring motivation. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today we drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Alright well welcome to the show Daniel we're excited to chat about your latest book the power of regret how looking backward moves us forward thanks for joining us. I'm glad to be here with you guys. Awesome well I have to say you wrote one of my favorite books of all time Drive and the book really covers how human motivation is counter-intuitive and the carrot stick approach doesn't really work when it comes to motivating people and teams. Can you share a little with our audience what you've learned about motivation over the years because I think regret is often a powerful motivator. So for that book Drive AJ what I mentioned what I what I did is I went back and looked at about 50 years of science on human motivation and what it tells us is that human beings are complex okay we have we have a lot of different motivations but I think that the core idea there in terms of you know work and school and individual performance is this there's a certain kind of motivator that we use in organizations psychologists call it a controlling contingent motivator too many syllables for me I call it an if then reward as an if you do this then you get that if you do this then you get that here's what 50 science 50 years of science tells us not about all rewards but about if then rewards they're very good for simple tasks with short time horizons so you want someone to stuff envelopes paying per envelope no question about it human beings love rewards and so when you give us a dangled reward in front of us we focus however the same body of research tells us that if then rewards are less good for more complicated tasks with longer time horizons why is that it's the same reason that that it narrows our focus and when you're doing something more complex more conceptual more complicated with a longer time horizon you want to look expansively and so the problem is is that we use these if then rewards for everything rather than the area where they work best and if we want to actually refine how we motivate people in organizations what we're going to need to do is pay them well get rid of a lot of these if then rewards pay them well give them a sense of autonomy give them a chance to get better at something that matters mastery and attach them to some kind of purpose that is a far better recipe for enduring motivation and I think many are feeling a lack of all three of those areas with the great resignation and the way that work is rewarded in the current environment I think it's a great point you know at some level and I use this term intentionally that the last two years I can't even believe it's been freaking two years but the last two years have been a kind of an unmasking and I think what a lot of people I think part of the great resignation not all of it is people looking at their job and saying this is a terrible job I'm not being treated well I have no sovereignty over what I do or how I do it I'm not getting better at anything I'm not contributing what's the point and so at some level it's a wake-up call I'll give you one more beat even on even on on autonomy that which is one of the central things that that keeps people motivated over the long haul you know when we think about autonomy that to me the best way to understand it is to think about the opposite of autonomy which is control human beings have only two reactions to control we comply or we defy that's it and so with but if you if you want people to actually engage you got to give them some sense of self-direction and this is why autonomy is so central here and we've had we've had this two-year experiment in giving people greater autonomy and it worked I wrote a book guys I wrote a book 20 years ago called free agent nation about the rise of people working for themselves where I was like hey they're gonna be a lot of people self-employed and we're gonna be working at home and everyone says you're crazy you don't know what you're talking about you know you can't trust people to work at home and it's like we can't possibly do that and then you know around the world 200 million people did it in four days and as they say in my home state of Ohio that's a hard egg to unscramble man you know like and we've shown that you can trust people and if we go back to these very controlling mechanisms it's uh it's a disaster for organizations and people are going to leave now what we're always fascinated about with all of our guests is how they actually apply what they've learned from the science in their own lives how would you say you've utilized the science around motivation to help find drive yourself I'll give you two in particular so one of them is is what we know about from some great work from Teresa Mobulae at Harvard Business School is that the single biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is making progress and meaningful work so the days that we make progress the days were meaningful the trouble is is that many organizations and certainly in in remote work we don't always have a sense of how we're doing are we making progress so one of the things I've been doing probably for seven years eight years maybe is a progress ritual where at the end of every day I write down I have a running document what I got done and so the idea is you take a punctuation mark in your day literally 30 seconds and like what you got done you know it's like like I'm a little bit more analog than a lot of people but here I'm showing you know my this is my list of things to do to today which are in paper and with a pencil but you know have you okay have you guys ever had a to-do list and you guys ever used a to-do list yeah all the time okay in the old days in the in the in the Johnny saying in the in the late 19th century when he would get off his stagecoach and go into his log cabin he would sometimes use a a to-do list okay so here we go so have you ever done this you got a to-do list you have this stuff on your list but then you do something that's actually not on your to-do list have you ever then written that on the to-do list and crossed it off that that's what we're talking about we drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends we want to be it we want we need a ritual in our days to help make progress so well that's what i do at the end of every day as i actually list the things that i got done list the ways that i made progress it's 60 seconds at this point i do it so regularly it's hygienic it's like brushing my teeth one other thing that i do especially when i'm stuck well i'll give you an even better idea connected to this new book or i got stuck on this new book the power of regret and it was so bad i was spinning my wheels i was like oh my gosh what am i gonna do here and for the first time ever and i i reached out this and i you know what i think i need a coach i think i need to coach my way through this and i talked to this coach a lovely guy for literally like 15 minutes he said okay i know what it is you don't know the purpose of what you're doing you have no purpose in this book i think 15 minutes he's already diagnosed it and and he says and so here's what i want you to do dan we were gonna he gave me an assignment he said i want you we're done i want you to send me an email with the purpose of this book and i'm like oh man that's such a you know and and so i thought about it and i delayed and i delayed and finally i sat down and said okay like why am i doing this like what's the point of the exercise here and i wrote this statement of like the purpose of the book and i mean i literally have it on my wall i'm i'm sure you know literally have it on my wall and i look at that when i get stuck and so a lot of times when we get stuck so here's the technique when we get stuck we focus on how am i going to do this so i'm a writer how should i write this paragraph how should i structure this chapter and when i get really stuck and i shift from the how conversation to a why conversation why am i writing this chapter why am i doing this and it is it's unlocking i think it's true when we're dealing with people in teams so you know i have some people who helped me out in various projects wonderful people and sometimes i will say you know i can be a pain in the ass and say okay here's how you need to do this but when i when i when i some i often resist that and say okay hey you know what before we talk about let's talk about why we're doing this let's talk about why we're running this particular way of getting the message out let's talk about why we are writing the price release this way and it's really really helpful i love that and i certainly know in a lot of the work that we do at the art of charm i will certainly get bogged down into a lot of points of of getting stuck and forgetting why i'm doing things and it's always been about taking a step back asking what is the goal of this what is the intention of what i'm doing here oh oh that's right and it's and it centers me and brings me right back to what i was doing and why so that is a very powerful frame yeah and and the thing is what i like about it what i like about the way that i do it like again i i i'm i have a huge bias toward easy stuff and small wins because i think we're more likely to do it and so this progress ritual at the end of the day takes me 60 seconds you know if it was like then take a half an hour at the end of every day and write an essay that reflects on your sense of progress never gonna do that even this thing about even this like like this this purpose statement here that i wrote to unblock myself i just i look over that sometimes i don't even read it you know what i mean but simply that just having it within the site it so so so quick i'm just a big fan of quick easy interventions that help you make a little bit of progress i think what we found in a lot of our clients who have been struggling now with this move to remote work is the purpose was missing and a lot of the socialization and the connectedness of being in the office together was replacing that purpose and masking itself as motivation and now that they've been disconnected we don't really know if our work is meaningful we don't really know if it's actually moving the needle and now with no purpose you wonder well why am i doing this job and many of us set tend to focus on well financial earnings but the pursuit of financial earnings is not a great purpose and it's certainly not going to lead to a meaningful life it rarely does i mean you need to have a certain amount i mean you know so i don't want to i don't want to dismiss that like i don't want to use this research on motivation as an excuse for people for companies organizations not to pay people fairly you have to pay people fairly and people judge their pay with an eye toward that that fairness if you don't pay people enough you don't pay people fairly they're not going to be motivated but the idea that it's just a it's just a bad theory of human motivation to say that human beings are singularly motivated by money and nothing else and that money is the uber motivator for all people at all times it's just not it's just flatly not true and that way of thinking about human beings that we are merely these responders to stimuli in our environment the right carrot the right stick it doesn't explain a whole course of human behavior we do things because we like them we do things because they're interesting amazingly we do things because it's the right thing to do we do things because they help us learn and grow we do things because they give us meaning and that's a big that's not the only human motivation but it's also part of human motivation and so all I'm saying and if you look at the research it's like hey organizations why don't you take a three-dimensional view of human beings rather than this narrow-minded two-dimensional view