Your World Within Podcast by Eddie Pinero - A New Type of Motivation

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

What motivates you?  In the book Drive, by Daniel Pink, he mentions a new type of motivation, backed by ample scientific research, yet frequently overlooked on both the business and personal levels. It is our greatest source of opportunity and still, we unknowingly walk right by it. This new type of motivation is what he refers to as intrinsic motivation. It is action, not guided but external rewards, but driven by flow, curiosity and interest.  In other words, the activity is the reward. It's what pushed the Wright brothers to pursue flight, Edison to create the lightbulb and Picasso to share his gifts with the world; it was the journey, not the destination. In this episode, I take a look at how we might incorporate intrinsic motivation into our own lives in a world driven by externalities. The answer is an important one, as it just may be the gateway to extraordinary.  

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So you could save big, like really big. Last year, Redfin saved home sellers $118 million. So whether you're buying, renting, or selling, Redfin's ready to help you win. Download the Redfin app and start searching today. Welcome to Your World Within Daily. I'm Eddie Penarro. In this episode, we're going to look at a new type of motivation. Ask ourselves how we're incentivizing our action

and whether we may or may not be leaving our greatest weapon on the table. So let's talk a little bit about flow today. As Daniel Pink says in his book, Drive, the new type of motivation, intrinsic motivation. Like so many concepts, right? He talks about it in the realm of business. business. But after all, businesses are just people. And this comes all the way down to the personal level as well. It's a very important concept. So I'm going to give you a quick kind of 101, right?

He talks about three different types of motivation. The first one, survival, right? The need to sleep, eat, reproduce, push the species along, survive. Okay? And we're not going to talk much about 1.0. We're going to talk about the other two. 2.0, the carrot and the stick, reward. and punishment. You do something great. You get a reward. You do something bad. You get punished. If you walk into any company in the world now, I mean, it's the most prominent idea structure. It's the same, you know, it guides a lot of our actions on the individual level as well, right? 2.0, carrot and stick. And then you have 3.0, the new type of motivation, where you're doing something because you love it, where the activity is the reward, where there's flow, which is a

essentially you're doing something and you love it so much that you don't realize time goes by. Now, this is a piece of human motivation, or I should say a component of human motivation that is ignored because the reward's not right in front of our face. But the greatest things arguably ever created have come from this space. The exploratory, you know, doing something because you're so interested. you don't want to stop doing it, that type of mindset. So when it comes to incentive, right, it's not that the carrot's always bad, right? It's not that money's bad. I would never say that or imply that. It's that maybe it should be looked at differently. And this is where I'm going to

kind of bridge the conversation. It's like money, it's very difficult to do something of substance when money is legal because there's nothing driving the pursuit, right? There's a lot of studies that say once you hit, and the number varies, but roughly $75,000 a year financially, right? When you're secure, money then becomes indifferent or we become indifferent to it. As long as we're secure, it doesn't change our quality of life much. And then so the obvious question, well, then what? Once we hit that mark, once we're safe and secure, what? What is our motivator?

And that's Daniel Pink's message. It's the 3.0. It's the exploratory space. And he gives a lot of examples of this, right? And I'll give a few where, you know, at a high level, he's got two groups of people, you know, and each group has to put a puzzle together. One person's being, one group's being paid. one group is not. The group being paid does it a lot slower than the group that's not being

paid because they can't, they're not thinking about the right thing. They're so focused and channeled on the outcome, on the money that they can't even immerse themselves in the project, right? It's that much of a disruptor. You know, he talks about art where art students that write down their purpose and are purpose driven do better in art school and do better after art school than the the ones who are financially driven, right? Not to mention there's studies like blind contests where the pieces that folks love the most, you know, were created by students who weren't paid to do them, right? There was no, you know, time crunch. There weren't parameters on what they were creating. They just got to create. And one of the more impressive examples he gives is Google,

where they went through a period, I think it's 10% now, he was saying, but at the time, 20% of their time was given to do whatever they wanted, right, to just explore, to get into groups, to make whatever they want, create whatever they want, it was their time to get into flow and see what happens.

And, you know, you have things like Gmail that came from this. I think he said Google News, Google Talk, which I'm not sure, what that is, but, you know, a lot of their big products came from this idea, and it's because the incentive changed, right? The parameters were removed. There was autonomy. There was freedom in what they were doing. And to me, the question becomes, or at least as I was listening to the book, you know, my question was, well, awesome, how do I inject this into my life? You know, how do I move out of the 2.0? and further down the realm of 3.0, right, the intrinsic piece.

You know, I've always sort of geared towards that route. Is anyone who creates content for two years, right, with very little pay at all, until I saw things start picking up, because I loved what I was doing. And the art or the creation itself was so satisfying that it was my motivation, right? it pushed me forward. But what about on a daily level? Because anytime you scale something, I'm doing, for example, a podcast a day,

a YouTube video, a week, you know, my other podcast books to business, two times a week, you start to quantify, you start to scale, and like anything, you kind of, the creativity has to get boxed out a little bit.

And it's always the first thing that goes. Motivation 3.0 is always the first thing we try and box out. when it should be the thing we embrace because it's what creates our results. You know, yeah, you need to scale. Yes, there needs to be numbers you hit. But they shouldn't be the focus. They should be a consequence of the intrinsic piece.

And so we had a chance to interview Daniel Pink the other day. And one of the things he talked about that I loved and related to on a personal note is he wandered. He followed that sense of flow. And sometimes he said it wasn't even flow. It was more curiosity. but you know he started out in politics he was a speech writer he was doing political campaigns then he realized he loved writing and he started doing books on certain topics he says you know when i'm i'm 60 i probably won't be writing anymore i'll be moving on to the next thing and i i just

i love that sense of just excitement and adventure curiosity towards life um the the challenge is right It's hard to look in the mirror and see the immediate impact from trying something you're curious to do or leaving the parameters of what you know your day to day. But I'm telling you the greatest things in life, the greatest things you'll ever discover, they live on the fringes. You have to find them. They don't find you. And that is why I wanted to talk about this idea, this new motivation, this 3.0, because it is following that sense of excitement. searching for flow. Let's not get so caught up in the effort reward cycle that we end up leaving the best things on the table, right? So maybe it doesn't need to be 20% of your day like Google.

But let's make a commitment, an hour a day, half an hour a day, and do something with no expectation. You're doing it for the sake of doing it. There's no reward attached. This is self-discovery. We're looking for flow. We're looking to enjoy this moment. And maybe find something out about ourselves that we didn't know, that we didn't know existed. Guarantee that that's the start of something, you know, hopefully amazing. On that note, my friends, I'll wrap it up.

Thank you for watching. If you enjoy this podcast, please make sure you subscribe. rate and review. Helps me get it out to the world. That is my goal. Thank you for that. And we'll see you tomorrow. What you're hearing is Hardy fiber cement siding

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