netmouse: (Dark Simpsons Anne)
netmouse ([personal profile] netmouse) wrote2010-05-31 10:47 am

(no subject)

A ten-minute piece on Motivation, by Dan Pink, author of Drive (with a nod to Tobias Buckell, who just posted about this).



I find I'm unsurprised by these findings. This is what was found when Wikipedia studied why people participate in it, and why we identified the fact that having your work go away there with no notification to you is an active disincentive for people to keep doing it. People want to feel like their work has purpose, and that their mastery is recognizable, if not recognized. Having an authoritarian structure that stifles creativity there has hurt the project, because people want to be creative as they build mastery and serve a purpose. If good work is casually destroyed because someone thought it was off-topic or was insufficiently encyclopedic for wikipedia, people don't stick around to do more of it.

In the middle there, he talks about how the key point with paying people is that you need to pay them enough to take the question of money off the table. Beyond that, paying people more leads to worse performance.

How much do you think you would need to get paid to take the question of money off the table?

[identity profile] dd-b.livejournal.com 2010-05-31 03:30 pm (UTC)(link)
To take the question of money "off the table" meaning I wouldn't have to worry about it anymore? Hmmmm; probably around $140,000. Or 1/3 of that, if everybody was playing.

[identity profile] nicegeek.livejournal.com 2010-05-31 03:46 pm (UTC)(link)
Interesting. I'm curious about the math behind this number, if you wouldn't mind sharing.

[identity profile] dd-b.livejournal.com 2010-05-31 04:13 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm currently most of the support for three adults. And I'm not really sure I understand the question properly. At our current (lower) income, we're recovering slowly from some earlier problems and behind on preparing for future issues, so I made a guess on how much more would straighten things out.

[identity profile] nicegeek.livejournal.com 2010-05-31 04:19 pm (UTC)(link)
Okay, so that number is for overcoming current demands, not for providing financial independence going forward. I was just trying to figure out the order-of-magnitude difference between your number and the one I gave below.

[identity profile] dd-b.livejournal.com 2010-05-31 04:57 pm (UTC)(link)
And definitely DOES include the cost of primary residence, car, etc.

[identity profile] dd-b.livejournal.com 2010-05-31 04:14 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, and that's a per year figure.