Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
BY GEOFF COLVIN
What’s the difference between those who are pretty good at what they do and those who are masters? Fortune magazine’s Colvin scours the evidence and shows that the answer is threefold: practice, practice, practice. But it’s not just any practice, he says. The secret is “deliberate practice”—highly repetitive, mentally demanding work that’s often unpleasant, but undeniably effective.
Type I Insight: “If you set a goal of becoming an expert in your business, you would immediately start doing all kinds of things you don’t do now.”
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
BY MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI
It’s tough to find a better argument for working hard at something you love than Csikszentmihalyi’s landmark book on “optimal experiences.” Flow describes those exhilarating moments when we feel in control, full of purpose, and in the zone. And it reveals how people have turned even the most unpleasant tasks into enjoyable, rewarding challenges.
Type I Insight: “Contrary to what we usually believe . . . the best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to the limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
For more of Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas, check out three of his other books: Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life; Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention; and the classic Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play.
Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation
BY EDWARD L. DECI WITH RICHARD FLASTE
In 1995, Edward Deci wrote a short book that introduced his powerful theories to a popular audience. In clear, readable prose, he discusses the limitations of a society based on control, explains the origins of his landmark experiments, and shows how to promote autonomy in the many realms of our lives.
Type I Insight: “The questions so many people ask—namely, ‘How do I motivate people to learn? to work? to do their chores? or to take their medicine?’—are the wrong questions. They are wrong because they imply that motivation is something that gets done to people rather than something that people do.”
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
BY CAROL DWECK
Stanford’s Dweck distills her decades of research to a simple pair of ideas. People can have two different mindsets, she says. Those with a “fixed mindset” believe that their talents and abilities are carved in stone. Those with a “growth mindset” believe that their talents and abilities can be developed. Fixed mindsets see every encounter as a test of their worthiness. Growth mindsets see the same encounters as opportunities to improve. Dweck’s message: Go with growth.
Type I Insight: In the book and likewise on her website, www.mindsetonline.com, Dweck offers concrete steps for moving from a fixed to a growth mindset:• Learn to listen for a fixed mindset “voice” that might be hurting your resiliency.
• Interpret challenges not as roadblocks, but as opportunities to stretch yourself.
• Use the language of growth—for example, “I’m not sure I can do it now, but I think I can learn with time and effort.”
Then We Came to the End
BY JOSHUA FERRIS
This darkly hilarious debut novel is a cautionary tale for the demoralizing effects of the Type X workplace. At an unnamed ad agency in Chicago, people spend more time scarfing free doughnuts and scamming office chairs than doing actual work—all while fretting about “walking Spanish down the hall,” office lingo for being fired.
Type I Insight: “They had taken away our flowers, our summer days, and our bonuses, we were on a wage freeze and a hiring freeze and people were flying out the door like so many dismantled dummies. We had one thing still going for us: the prospect of a promotion. A new title: true, it came with no money, the power was almost always illusory, the bestowal a cheap shrewd device concocted by management to keep us from mutiny, but when word circulated that one of us had jumped up an acronym, that person was just a little quieter that day, took a longer lunch than usual, came back with shopping bags, spent the afternoon speaking softly into the telephone, and left whenever they wanted that night, while the rest of us sent emails flying back and forth on the lofty topics of Injustice and Uncertainty.”
Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet
BY HOWARD GARDNER, MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, AND WILLIAM DAMON
How can you do “good work” in an age of relentless market forces and lightning-fast technology? By considering three basic issues: your profession’s mission, its standards or “best practices,” and your own identity. Although this book focuses mainly on examples from the fields of genetics and journalism, its insights can be applied to a number of professions buffeted by changing times. The authors have also continued their effort to identify individuals and institutions that exemplify “good work” on their website: www.goodwork.org.
Type I Insight: “What do you do if you wake up in the morning and dread going to work, because the daily routine no longer satisfies your standards?”• Start groups or forums with others in your industry or outside it to reach beyond your current area of influence.
• Work with existing organizations to confirm your profession’s values or develop new guidelines.
• Take a stand. It can be risky, sure, but leaving a job for ethical reasons need not involve abandoning your professional goals.
Outliers: The Story of Success
BY MALCOLM GLADWELL
With a series of compelling and gracefully told stories, Gladwell deftly takes a hammer to the idea of the “self-made man.” Success is more complicated, he says. High achievers—from young Canadian hockey players to Bill Gates to the Beatles—are often the products of hidden advantages of culture, timing, demographics, and luck that helped them become masters in their fields. Reading this book will lead you to reevaluate your own path. More important, it will make you wonder how much human potential we’re losing when so many people are denied these advantages.
Type I Insight: “It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine-to-five. It’s whether our work fulfills us. If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I’m guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that’s worth more to most of us than money.”
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
BY DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN
In her entertaining popular history, Goodwin shows Abraham Lincoln as an exemplar of Type I behavior. He worked mightily to achieve mastery in law and politics. He gave his staunchest rivals power and autonomy. And he developed a leadership style rooted in a higher purpose—ending slavery and keeping the union intact.
Type I Insight: Goodwin sheds light on Lincoln’s Type I leadership skills. Among them:• He was self-confident enough to surround himself with rivals who excelled in areas where he was weak.
• He genuinely listened to other people’s points of view, which helped him form more complex opinions of his own.
• He gave credit where it was due and wasn’t afraid to take the blame.
The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal
BY DAVID HALBERSTAM
What would compel a group of men to endure untold physical pain and exhaustion for a sport that promised no monetary compensation or fame? That’s the question at the heart of Halberstam’s riveting narrative about the 1984 U.S. rowing trials, a book that offers a glimpse into the fires of intrinsic motivation.
Type I Insight: “No chartered planes or bus
es ferried the athletes into Princeton. No team managers hustled their baggage from the bus to the hotel desk and made arrangements so that at mealtime they need only show up and sign a tab. This was a world of hitched rides and borrowed beds, and meals, if not scrounged, were desperately budgeted by appallingly hungry young men.”
Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes
BY ALFIE KOHN
Former teacher Kohn throws down the gauntlet at society’s blind acceptance of B. F. Skinner’s “Do this and you’ll get that” theory of behaviorism. This 1993 book ranges across school, work, and private life in its indictment of extrinsic motivators and paints a compelling picture of a world without them.
Type I Insight: “Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.”
Kohn has written eleven books on parenting, education, and behavior—as well as scores of articles on that topic—all of which are interesting and provocative. There’s more information on his website: www.alfiekohn.org.
Once a Runner
BY JOHN L. PARKER, JR.
Parker’s novel, originally published in 1978 and kept alive by a devoted coterie of fans, offers a fascinating look into the psychology of distance running. Through the tale of college miler Quenton Cassidy, we see the toll that mastery can take—and the thrill it can produce when it’s realized.
Type I Insight: “He ran not for crypto-religious reasons but to win races, to cover ground fast. Not only to be better than his fellows, but better than himself. To be faster by a tenth of a second, by an inch, by two feet or two yards, than he had been the week or year before. He sought to conquer the physical limitations placed on him by a three-dimensional world (and if Time is the fourth dimension, that too was his province). If he could conquer the weakness, the cowardice in himself, he would not worry about the rest; it would come.”
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
BY STEVEN PRESSFIELD
Pressfield’s potent book is both a wise meditation on the obstacles that stand in the way of creative freedom and a spirited battle plan for overcoming the resistance that arises when we set out to do something great. If you’re looking for a quick jolt on your journey toward mastery, this is it.
Type I Insight: “It may be that the human race is not ready for freedom. The air of liberty may be too rarified for us to breathe. Certainly I wouldn’t be writing this book, on this subject, if living with freedom were easy. The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.”
Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace
BY RICARDO SEMLER
While many bosses are control freaks, Semler might be the first autonomy freak. He transformed the Brazilian manufacturing firm Semco through a series of radical steps. He canned most executives, eliminated job titles, let the company’s three thousand employees set their own hours, gave everyone a vote in big decisions, and even let some workers determine their own salaries. The result: Under Semler’s (non)command, Semco has grown 20 percent a year for the past two decades. This book, along with Semler’s more recent The Seven-Day Weekend, shows how to put his iconoclastic and effective philosophy into action.
Type I Insight: “I want everyone at Semco to be self-sufficient. The company is organized—well, maybe that’s not quite the right word for us—not to depend too much on any individual, especially me. I take it as a point of pride that twice on my return from long trips my office had been moved—and each time it got smaller.”
The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
BY PETER M. SENGE
In his management classic, Senge introduces readers to “learning organizations”—where autonomous thinking and shared visions for the future are not only encouraged, but are considered vital to the health of the organization. Senge’s “five disciplines” offer a smart organizational companion to Type I behavior.
Type I Insight: “People with a high level of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to them—in effect, they approach their life as an artist would approach a work of art. They do that by becoming committed to their own lifelong learning.”
Listen to the Gurus: Six Business Thinkers Who Get It
While the list of companies that embrace Type I thinking is distressingly short, the blueprints for building such organizations are readily available. The following six business thinkers offer some wise guidance for designing organizations that promote autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
DOUGLAS MCGREGOR
Who: A social psychologist and one of the first professors at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. His landmark 1960 book, The Human Side of Enterprise, gave the practice of management a badly needed shot of humanism.
Big Idea: Theory X vs. Theory Y. McGregor described two very different approaches to management, each based on a different assumption about human behavior. The first approach, which he called Theory X, assumed that people avoid effort, work only for money and security, and therefore need to be controlled. The second, which he called Theory Y, assumed that work is as natural for human beings as play or rest, that initiative and creativity are widespread, and that if people are committed to a goal, they will actually seek responsibility. Theory Y, he argued, was the more accurate—and ultimately more effective—approach.
Type I Insight: “Managers frequently complain to me about the fact that subordinates ‘nowadays’ won’t take responsibility. I have been interested to note how often these same managers keep a constant surveillance over the day-to-day performance of subordinates, sometimes two or three levels below themselves.”
More Info: As I explained in Chapter 3, The Human Side of Enterprise is a key ancestor of Motivation 3.0. Although McGregor wrote the book a full fifty years ago, his observations about the limits of control remain smart, fresh, and relevant.
PETER F. DRUCKER
Who: The most influential management thinker of the twentieth century. He wrote an astonishing forty-one books, influenced the thinking of two generations of CEOs, received a U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, and taught for three decades at the Claremont Graduate University Business School that now bears his name.
Big Idea: Self-management. “Drucker’s primary contribution is not a single idea,” Jim Collins once wrote, “but rather an entire body of work that has one gigantic advantage: nearly all of it is essentially right.” Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker,” foresaw the rise of the nonprofit sector, and was among the first to stress the primacy of the customer in business strategy. But although he’s best known for his thoughts on managing businesses, toward the end of his career Drucker signaled the next frontier: self-management. With the rise of individual longevity and the decline of job security, he argued, individuals have to think hard about where their strengths lie, what they can contribute, and how they can improve their own performance. “The need to manage oneself,” he wrote shortly before he died in 2005, is “creating a revolution in human affairs.”
Type I Insight: “Demanding of knowledge workers that they define their own task and its results is necessary because knowledge workers must be autonomous . . . workers should be asked to think through their own work plans and then to submit them. What am I going to focus on? What results can be expected for which I should be held accountable? By what deadline?”
More Info: Drucker wrote many books, and many have been written about him, but a great starting place is The Daily Drucker, a small gem that provides 366 insights and “action points” for putting his ideas into practice. On the topic of self-management, read Drucker’s 2005 Harvard Business Review article, “Managing Oneself.” For more information and access to digital archives of his writing, check o
ut www.druckerinstitute.com.
JIM COLLINS
Who: One of the most authoritative voices in business today and the author of Built to Last (with Jerry Porras), Good to Great, and, most recently, How the Mighty Fall. A former professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, he now operates his own management lab in Boulder, Colorado.
Big Idea: Self-motivation and greatness. “Expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time,” Collins wrote in Good to Great. “If you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. The real question then becomes: How do you manage in such a way as not to de-motivate people?”
Type I Insight: Collins suggests four basic practices for creating a culture where self-motivation can flourish:1. “Lead with questions, not answers.”
2. “Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion.”