1% Smarter Newsletter No. 14: Motivation
What I'm reading, listening to, and learning from the week ending 3/13/22
Recently, I began working with a professional coach to accelerate my leadership development. In a recent session, while discussing the factors behind motivation, she shared a framework from Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. People are motivated, Pink argues, by the following factors:
Autonomy: The desire to direct one’s own life
Mastery: The desire to improve one’s skills
Purpose: The desire to do something meaningful
Salary, benefits, bonuses, RSUs… these all matter up to a point. Until our daily needs are met, the promise of higher compensation is extremely effective at motivating humans. Once those needs are met, more pay does little to inspire us. Or in other words, according to Kanye West,
Having money ain’t everything, not having it is
This theory has direct applications to the workplace. For example, I can be a more effective leader by encouraging my team and my colleagues to be self-directed, growth-oriented, and purpose-driven. And to ensure I remain highly motivated, I must do the same. If I find my motivation flagging, I can return to this framework to see what ingredients are missing.
In a separate conversation with my wife, we opined on what motivates Mark Zuckerberg. Even after the recent decline in Meta’s stock price, he is still worth tens of billions of dollars. Surely, the prospect of yet more wealth cannot be his primary motivator. Nor can it be fame and public adulation, given how few Americans like Zuckerberg. Perhaps he seeks yet more power, although this would be odd in light of his decision to create an independent Oversight Board that has taken on the company’s thorniest and most divisive decisions.
No, what likely motivates Zuck is some combination of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Listening to him talk on Lex Fridman’s podcast in this week’s featured content, I would argue “purpose” is the most compelling of all three inputs to him. He is passionate about building an entirely new world from scratch, where people can create, connect, and express their full selves. Whether you find this vision electrifying or dystopian—and I fall in the former camp—you must admit it is certainly ambitious.
Humans are capable of incredible achievements. We’ve landed on the moon and will soon do so on Mars. We created and ramped the production of Covid vaccines in mere months. We invented the internet, the iPhone, Infinite Jest, and impressionist art. Anything that is not explicitly proscribed by the laws of physics (like traveling faster than the speed of light) is theoretically possible for humans to accomplish—all we need is the know-how and the motivation.
💡 Featured Content
My top pick this week
🎧 Mark Zuckerberg: Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and the Metaverse by Lex Fridman
📘 Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson1
🖥 Web3
📄 This 29-year-old book predicted the ‘metaverse’ — and some of Facebook’s plans are eerily similar by Tom Huddleston Jr.
👨💻 Tech
📄 How to Intentionally Structure & Scale Company Communications by Michael Mizrahi
💰 Money & Investing
📄 Victims by Josh Brown
🏛 Government and Policy
📺 The Peoples Convoy by Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan
📄 Why I Quit as FDIC Innovation Chief: Technophobia by Sultan Meghji
🎨 The Arts
📺 Lady Bird by Greta Gerwig
🌐 Miscellaneous
📄 Elder Stories by Little Brothers Friends of the Elderly San Francisco
This satirical, cyberpunk, dystopian, techno-thriller is one of the strangest books I’ve read in a while. Published in 1992, it is the origin of the term and concept “The Metaverse.” Facebook’s rebrand to “Meta” and accompanying corporate strategy can be traced back to this 30-year-old hacker novel, which I find both hilarious and inspiring.