For this event blog, I watched a Ted Talk called “The Puzzle of Motivation.” I thought that this would be a good one to watch because currently I have no motivation to finish out the semester and I thought that this Ted Talk might give me some inspiration.

The Ted Talk did not give me any more motivation, but it was still interesting. The talk looked at studies to see if monitary reward motivated people to do better work. In multiple studies, researchers found that in fact, the higher the reward, the worse/slower the work was done. The talk did not really explain in detail why money does not always motivate people. It did say though, that when tasks were purely mechanical, then a higher reward does produce higher productivity. However, when any kind of critical thinking or creativity was involved then the lower reward then the higher the productivity. The speaker then went on to explain that he has studied human motivation for years, and what he found was that there are three things that motivate people to do good work. Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. That is, the freedom to do their own work, the desire to become great at some skill, and the mission to have in impact greater than themselves.

The one aspect that the speaker focussed on was Autonomy. He talked about googles 20% rule. This means that employees have the freedom to work on any project that they want for 20% of their time at work. Some of Google’s best products have come out of this time. For example, Gmail and Google News were invented in employees free time. This is the kind of productivity that comes out of autonomy.

I think that this concept can be applied to college in many ways. For example, I know that some professors allow students to take classes at their own pace, with no strict deadlines. There are also examples in our own Critical Thinking class (Thanks Dr. Bezio!). For example, we were allowed to choose any topic that we wanted for our research project. Because we have the freedom to chose a topic that we are passionate about, we likely will do better work. Also, in terms of purpose, the Giving Games project was a good example of this. We knew that our work would have a real impact in the world, and so we worked harder at it.

Link: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_the_puzzle_of_motivation?language=en