Payoff

Employers would like to know the secret to motivating their employees to give their best effort. According to Dan Ariely, author of Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations, the answer to what motivates us is complex, but his research has yielded some interesting results. I find just about everything Ariely writes to be fascinating, and this short book is no exception.

The book isn’t just about what motivates us at work. Ariely also tackles our attachment to our own ideas and creations, the importance of money (and sometimes lack of importance), and the urge for symbolic immortality. In short, “this book is about what we really want out of life before we die.”

One seeming contradiction Ariely points out is that happiness and meaning often don’t go together. A marathoner is strongly motivated to run hard for hours and finds deep meaning in the effort, but it’s hard to say that a person whose face is twisted in pain is happy, at least while still running.

Some of Ariely’s experiments revealed that “the more effort people expend, the more they seem to care about their creations.” This was true even when the experimenters manipulated conditions to cause subjects to work harder to produce something of lower quality.

On the subject of whether to pay someone to do certain tasks around your house or do them yourself, Ariely says that “a little sweat equity pays us back in meaning—and that is a high return.”

We search for meaning, even after our deaths. Some of us even seek to control others from the grave. “A man named Samuel Bratt, whose wife had no doubt badgered him about his smoking, bequeathed her £333,000 under the condition that she smoke 5 cigars a day.” German poet Heinrich Heine “left his estate to [his wife] on the condition that she remarry to ensure that ‘there would be at least one man to regret my death.’”

Overall, this book is entertaining, clear, concise, and gave me useful insights into motivation.