What motivates us to work?

What motivates us to work?  Is it recognition, independence, money,  challenge,  self-esteem, creative expression or personal growth?  Finding what motivates us  can help us to approach our work with vitality and purpose.

In this interesting TED talk, Daniel Pink explains that rewards work well for tasks with a simple set of rules and a clear destination to move toward.  That is, they work well for routine, rule-based, left-brained work–which includes things such as certain kinds of accounting,  kinds of computer programming, and so on. These are the kinds of jobs that are easy to automate and outsource.

For tasks that require creativity and innovation, rewards produce the opposite of their intended result: they dull thinking and block creativity.  People who are very creative rely on intrinsic motivation, instead of external rewards.

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