(no subject)

[netmouse]

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?

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Last time I looked, $1M was totally inadequate -- you have to plow back enough money to increase the capital to keep up with inflation, remember; otherwise, you've living on a decreasing income.

[nicegeek.livejournal.com]

$1M would be the lower bound; it assumes about a 3% inflation-adjusted ROI, to supply $30k/year in living expenses. That may be a little aggressive, but I don't think it's unreasonable for a single person over a long timeframe. I'm also not counting the cost of a primary residence in the $1M, and a person with a chronic health condition would definitely not be able to make it on that much.

That said, I initially arrived at these numbers in 2000, so to properly inflation-adjust them, they should probably be increased by about 20%.