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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?
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?
no subject
I've always been interested in getting paid as much as I can for any writing projects I undertake. But if the pay rate turns out to be nothing (or a token sum), it doesn't discourage me from wanting to write about stuff that I'm interested in. The way that payment rates limit me is that low or non-existing rates stop me from spending as much time writing the stuff that I would write, anyway -- whatever the pay rate for that stuff happens to be.
Ten or fifteen years ago, I could get paid more than a living wage to geek out with computers, explore the nooks and crannies of hardware and software and write about my findings in books, magazine articles, and on websites. So I did that. There was a high market demand and pay rate for magazine and web pieces on more generic aspects of personal computing. But I was just as likely to pitch and take on an assignment for 10 cents a word on something geekier that really intrigued me. I wrote reviews for the New York Review of Science Fiction for only token payment, because I thought it was the place to be -- a focal point of interest in science fiction. The better-paying work covered me to take on the assignments at lower rates.
Now, there's no higher-paying market in computer journalism that's accessible to me. I still write geeky stuff on computer operating systems and reviews of science fiction and graphic novels for token payments -- because a) I'm interested in the exercise of thinking about those subjects and expressing myself and b) I'm under the impression that the publication points are reasonably high-traffic focal points.
I have to earn my living, now, through non-freelance writing work: salaried IT support and document production for a software company, and instruction/course design for a vocational college. (I did those things ten or fifteen years ago, too, but I didn't have to spend most of my work time doing them.) I still get to do a little bit of paid writing in these jobs -- but I'm no longer my own master on choosing content and setting my own production rate.