Lately, I’ve been wasting my me-time by reading a book called ”Drive - The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”. The book is written by a gentleman named Pink, Daniel Pink and it’s supposed to expose some of the things that motivate us (by us I mean humans) by using an imaginary drill bit into the an imaginary subconscious of an imaginary human being. It fails miserably at accomplishing this task.
Take the following: A couple of [British] scientists discovered that intrinsic motivation is more powerful that extrinsic one (the carrot and/or the stick technique). Now expand this claim into a a paragraph. Wrap it into some experiments that were performed to reach this conclusion. Continue to add flour, baking soda and spices until it grows into a book. That’s exactly what the author did. Not only does it get boring to hear him repeat the same thing over and over, but the annoyance is even bigger as the impression he wants you to walk away with is that he’s some kind of expert in the motivation field. C’mon… Maybe if the reader is a primate or a mentally challenged human being he could get away with it. But you’re not going to get away with it in case of people we are genuinely interested by the topic.