Something You Should Know - Bonus: SYSK TRENDING - Finding Your Motivation

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

SYSK TRENDING takes a look back at conversations from the Something You Should Know archive that connect directly to topics people are talking about right now. Motivation is one of them. We tend to think people are motivated by carrots and sticks — rewards if you do what’s expected, punishment if you don’t. And while that approach can work in some situations, research shows it’s often not the most effective way to motivate yourself or others. Daniel Pink explains what actually drives human motivation and why autonomy, mastery, and purpose matter far more than we realize. Daniel is the author of Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us (https://amzn.to/4kn5DGs) , and in this conversation he shares practical insights you can use at work, at home, and in your own life — especially at a time when so many people are struggling to stay motivated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So today on something you should know, we're launching a new bonus feature called S-Y-S-K trending. See, all the time I see topics trending and I think, oh, we actually did a great conversation about that years ago. And with nearly a decade of episodes, there are a lot of interviews I've done that speak directly to what people are dealing with right now. Today's S-Y-S-K trending topic is motivation. And let me ask you, what really motivates you? Is it money, deadlines, someone looking over your shoulder? Most of us assume that's how motivation works, but it turns out we've been getting it wrong for a long time.

And since motivation is something a lot of people are struggling with right now, this conversation with Daniel Pink explains what actually works and what doesn't. And we'll get to it right after this. Investing is all about the future. So what do you think is going to happen? Bitcoin is sort of inevitable at this point. I think it would come down to precious metals. I hope we don't go cashless.

I would say land is a safe investment. Technology companies. Solar energy. Robotic pollinators might be a thing. A wrestler to face a robot? That will have to happen. So whatever you think is going to happen in the future, you can invest in it at WealthSimple.

Start now at WealthSimple.com. What motivates you? I know that's a hard question to answer because it depends on a lot of factors. But think about it, for everything you do and everything you've ever done, something has motivated you to do those things. And those motivations come either from within or from outside. It's important to know about motivation not only to understand what motivates you, but also what works to motivate others. Because throughout your life, you have been and will be required to motivate people to do things.

Daniel Pink knows a lot about this. Daniel's been a guest here before, and one of the books that he's written that we haven't talked about is called Drive, the surprising truth about what motivates us. Hey, Daniel, welcome back. So motivation seems like kind of the perfect Daniel Pink topic to tackle. How did you approach this? I went into the, looked at the science of motivation,

looked at some research on human motivation, which turned out to be a treasure trove. there's a treasure trove of research over the last 50 years in human motivation, and it said some things that really, really surprised me. Things like what? Things like carrots and sticks, the classic motivator that we use in business, work, but in only a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances, and that for a lot of things, they either don't work or backfire colossally,

and that there's actually a better approach to motivation that is not rooted in carrots and sticks, but has to do with autonomy and mastery and purpose. And that in the 21st century, when more and more of us are doing creative, conceptual, somewhat interesting work, companies that treat people like horses, as if they're motivated only by carrots or the threat of a stick, are actually going to fall behind. And companies that actually treat people like people offer autonomy,

help them move toward mastery, infuse the workplace with a sense of purpose, those are the companies that actually are flourishing and will continue to flourish. Well, what would that mean exactly? I mean, what would a company do if a company wanted to do what you just described? I'll give an example. I mean, there are companies that are doing this. Here's a really interesting example from an Australian company called Atlassian. It's a software company.

Atlassian is a software company, and they do something really cool. Once a quarter, they say to their software developers, for the next 24 hours, you can work on whatever you want. You can do it with whomever you want. You can do it the way that you want. You just have to show the results to the software developers. the company, the rest of the company in this fun meeting at the end of those 24 hours, they call these things FedEx days because you have to deliver something overnight.

Well, it turns out that that one day of undiluted autonomy has produced a whole array of ideas for new products, upgrades to existing products, fixes for some flaws in current products that would never have emerged except for that FedEx Day. Now, this is not a carrot and stick motivator. This is not saying to them, if you are innovative, I will give you 500 bucks. It's saying, you probably want to be innovative, so let me just get out of your way and let you be innovative. That's a very different approach to motivation. But I would think that some people are motivated by some things and others by other things. So when you try to motivate a group of people with one motivation, well, it might work on some, but

it might not work on others because they don't find it particularly motivating. I think that's true at one level, but I also think that human beings, Listen, human beings are complex. We're motivated. We have biological motivations, okay? We drink when we're thirsty and we eat when we're hungry. That's a motivation. Human beings also have a, you know, reward and punishment motivation.

So, you know, if you say to me, Dan, I'm going to go pay you $100 to go stand out on the street corner and tap your head, I'm going out the door right now. We respond well to rewards and punishments. But human beings also have other motivations. The drive to do things because they're interesting. The drive to do things because they matter. the drive to do things because we get better at them, the drive to do things because they contribute to the world. And what the science shows is that you've got to pay people enough.

You've got to pay people enough. If you don't pay people enough, you're not going to have any realistic motivation. But once you pay people enough, external rewards like that, contingent rewards, if then rewards, don't play that big of a role in high performance. What really plays a role in high performance, once you pay people enough, is giving them freedom, allowing them to get better at something that matters, and infusing the workplace with a sense of purpose, a sense that they're doing something larger than themselves. That is far more potent and far more enduring than this elaborate regime of carrots and sticks

that we've been using for 150 years. But does it not depend on the type of work you're doing? Yes and no. I'll give you an example. Let's take something like call centers. Call centers are very difficult jobs. They're not particularly interesting. people are often monitored.

The call center employees are monitored. Their calls are timed. They, when they get a call in, they essentially just have to read a script. It's low on the autonomy scale. It's not particularly interesting. And it's not a job that most of us would covet. Well, you have a company like Zappos who comes in and deals with its call center in a fundamentally different way. They say to their call center employees, solve the customer's problem.

Solve the customer's problem. do it however you want for as long as you want. We're not going to monitor you. We're not going to time you. Solve the customer's problem. And lo and behold, Zappos comes out of nowhere to be one of the top-rated customer service firms in America. So here's a job that isn't being a graphic designer or software writer,

where if you offer up some amount of autonomy, people perform at a higher level and the company benefits. What if you're working for a company, though, that is less enlightened than Zappos, and you're losing your motivation because you work in a company that's very top-down, very strict like you just described. Can this work the other way? Can this change come from the bottom up?

To some extent, and what you're describing is in some ways the landscape of American work right now. I mean, job satisfaction numbers have been plummeting. It's a combination that people are nervous and uninspired, very dangerous combination. You have levels of workforce engagement dropping, it seems, more each year. There are some things that individuals can do to take it back a little bit. And one of my favorites is this idea of a do-it-yourself performance review. Now, most people hate performance reviews, whether they're giving them or receiving them. And we sort of lost sight of what the purpose is of a performance review.

The purpose of a performance review is to help people get better, to help them move toward mastery. But the way, doing that twice a year in this Kabuki theater, style settings where everyone's playing a rehearse role isn't particularly effective. So one thing people can do that I encourage people to do is a do-it-yourself performance review where at the beginning of a month you set out your goals and at the end of the month you call yourself into the office and ask yourself how you're faring. Are you making progress? Are you falling behind? Do you need other information? Some people are doing these kind of peer-to-peer performance reviews where I set out my goals and what I want to accomplish in the month.

You set out yours. Fred sets out his, Maria sets out hers, and then at the end of the month we get together, have coffee for an hour, talk about our performance, hold each other accountable. I think that's one way for individuals to take motivation back and not rely on companies to do it. One of the people I write about is a scholar named Edward D.C. says that we've got to get past this notion that motivation is something somebody does to you.

It's something that you do for yourself. I'm talking today with Daniel Pink, and we're talking about what's in his book, Drive, the surprising truth about what motivates us. Everyone needs help with something. If investing is your something, we get it. Cooperators' financial representatives are here to help with genuine advice that puts your needs first. We got you. For all your holistic investment and life insurance advice needs, talk to us today.

Cooperators, investing in your future together. Mutual funds are offered through Cooperators Financial Investment Services Inc. to Canadian residents except those in Quebec in the territories. Segregated funds are administered by Cooperator's Life Insurance Company. Life Insurance is underwritten by Cooperators Life Insurance Company. Now streaming on Paramount Plus. It began on the shores of New Jersey. The calls of gym, tan, laundry, reverberated north to Canada, where a new type of party animal resides.

They move as a herd migrating to their favorite watering holes, asserting dominance by flexing, grinding, and twerking. is quick, steamy, and sometimes in hot tubs. When morning arrives, they do it all over again. Canada Shore, new original series, now streaming on Paramount Plus. So Daniel, I can imagine, though, managers at companies thinking, well, you know, this all sounds great, FedEx days, go take time off, do whatever you want, sounds great, but we're much more nuts and bolts here. We need to be in the office from nine to five. You need to do your job. And we don't have time for that. Yeah, I think that most companies can actually do the FedEx day the 24 hours. But you could also do things in a more modest version.

I mean, you could say, you know, for this month, one afternoon a week, you can work on whatever you want. And who among us has not squandered one afternoon at work? And, you know, I think people could surprise you. The other thing about this is that, you know, the dark cloud of the recession might have a silver lining on motivation for a couple of reasons. Number one is that recessions are often inflection points for people. people where their life has gone a direction they didn't expect and they have to think about where it's going to go next. So what you see in recessions is coming out of it is some amount of reinvention, some amount of entrepreneurship. A lot of those kinds of activities are often

very, very self-motivated. The other thing from a company's perspective is in these kind of tough times, you're pretty much out of carrots. You don't really have many bribes left. and that might force some companies, not all, might force some companies to think a little bit more creatively, a little bit more deeply about motivation. So it sounds like you're saying there's really two kinds of motivations. There's the traditional carrot and stick, which is just reward or punishment motivation,

which is kind of the old school way of doing it. And then there's these other kinds of motivations that you're talking about that are more creative and interesting and motivating. But aren't those just carrots and sticks in different language? I mean, ultimately, aren't they also rewards or punishments in order to get people to do what you want them to do? Not necessarily because it comes from within. A carrot and a stick come from without. I mean, what you're doing is you're giving people freedom.

I mean, I don't think that freedom is a carrot. Freedom is, I think, qualitatively different. It allows people to be self-motivated. They're not chasing after something that you're dangling in front of them. what you're doing is that you're in some ways giving up control, and there are a lot of managers out there who think that their job is to control people. And I think for, you know, in the industrial age or even in the information age when people are doing simple work, when they're turning the same screw the same way,

or they're answering calls at a call center, or they are adding up columns of figures that maybe control makes some sense. But when fewer people are doing that, and they're inevitably forced into doing things that require more innovative, and creativity, giving up control is actually a better strategy. The problem with that is that managers giving up control faced a little bit of a crisis, because if they're not controlling people, then what the heck are they doing there? You know, I think, I mean, I think that the question all of it should be asking yourself

in any kind of job is, okay, what the heck are you doing here? And if you went away, would anybody care and would it have any effect on the world? And if the answer is no, then my hunch is that you're not going to be around that much longer, and what you're doing isn't all that satisfying. And if you move into something as difficult as it is that is a little bit more satisfying and actually answers the question that, you know, people would care if you went away, then I think you're going to have greater satisfaction and greater job security. So what about those people in those jobs where they turn the screw the same way every time

or they flip burgers the same way every time? Are we to say that this doesn't apply to them? No, but I actually think they do. I mean, the call center thing we talked about, is a way to, you know, you can, I think that any kind of job has room for autonomy. And we see this over again, over and over again. You saw it with the Zappos Call Center example. You see it with an interesting study that I write about of hospital janitors, okay, not a job that most of us would covet. There were some hospital janitors who saw the job essentially in that one way where they

said, okay, my job is to come in at a certain time, sweep the floors, and get out. In other environments where managers, people leading these hospitals, maybe encouraged janitors to think of their jobs a little bit differently. So, you know, if you're going in and cleaning a room, feel free to talk to patients, see how they're doing. You know, talk to the nurses and say, hey, you know, these janitors are, you know, pretty clued in about what's going on. You have a question or need something done.

You know, don't hesitate to ask them. Well, suddenly these janitors who were able to sculpt their jobs a little bit, low and behold, they report higher job satisfaction. There's less turnover. uh... they're more likely to move up the rank so even in a job that most of us would uncover it you know cleaning floors in a hospital there's room for tapping people uh... intrinsic motivation and again it's not this kind of nicey nice thing

it's not you know kumbaya uh... touchy-feely uh... management that says we're going to sacrifice the bottom line it's actually in its in its own way we're a remarkably hard-headed sophisticated savvy and strategic approach to business. Do you think, though, and maybe one of the reasons managers are reluctant to embrace this, is, okay, if you have people working and you tell them, all right, you can now have, as a motivation, you're now, we're going to give you 10% of your time to do whatever it is you want to do,

because that's going to motivate you to work better. But initially, it might not. That initially we would see a drop in productivity, a drop in results, however you measure them, and who wants to drop in results. Yeah, I don't know. I think it could. I mean, one of the things, let's take 20% time, one of the things about companies where, like Google and some others,

where people can spend 20% of their time working on anything that they want, you know, chief financial officers go into cardiac arrest when that's proposed. Because you're saying, oh, let's take one-fifth thorough wages and we redeploy them into something we don't know if it's going to work. And so I think there might be cases where they do that. I mean, I think people, the workplace, for many of us, not all of us, but for many of us, is so controlling that if you release those controls, initially it can be somewhat disorienting. But I think over time, it can be far more powerful.

I'll give you an interesting study out of Cornell that looked at small businesses, and they categorize these small businesses based on whether they were top-down kind of carrot-and-stick management and bottom-up more autonomous management. and it turned out that the bottom-up more autonomous management companies had four times, four times, the growth rate of those other more command and control traditional companies. When you do things like this, though, when you say, okay, you can take 20% of your time and do whatever you want, what should a company expect to get in return for that? I mean, is the idea that if you tell everybody to take all this time and do whatever they want,

one person will come back with something spectacular, or should you expect great things from everybody because they now have this new freedom? I mean, what's the expectation? You don't know. I mean, I think that people want to do great things. I don't think that everybody who has that kind of autonomy tomorrow will do a great thing.

I think a heck of a lot more will do a great thing than people expect. But, you know, there is an element of risk there. There's an element of uncertainty there. But I think that the genuine uncertainty of something that could lead to an innovation is far better than the false certainty that these outdated regimes of carrots and sticks will work. I think that's, you know, in some ways, delusional. Well, thanks, Daniel. You always bring fresh insight into whatever topic you're talking about or writing about.

I always appreciate that. I've been talking with Daniel Pink. The name of the book is Drive the surprising truth about what motivates us. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. And this conversation has kicked off our new bonus feature, SYSK Trending, where we surface past SYSK conversations that connect directly to what people are dealing with right now. I'm Mike Herruthers.

Thanks for listening to something you should know.