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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
When the joy of the task becomes the strongest motivation to do it
In a book that has made it to the US bestseller lists, Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Riverhead Hardcover, 256 pages) audaciously contends that everything we thought we knew about what motivates people is wrong. The American writer, speechwriter, and motivational speaker marshals the latest scientific findings in human motivation to debunk claims that people can only be motivated by the hope of gain and the fear of loss. He argues that once the basic survival needs of people are met, the very prospect of growing and realizing their fullest potential becomes their driving force. “The joy of the task becomes its own reward,” he concludes.
In Drive, Pink explores what he calls the three elements of true motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—and discusses techniques for putting them into action in the workplace. He then walks readers through various companies that use modern motivational approaches and discusses the work of scientists and entrepreneurs using these approaches to promote even higher levels of individual achievement.
Says the management magazine Forbes in a review of Drive: “Pink’s ideas deserve a wide hearing. Corporate boards, in fact, could do well by kicking out their pay consultants for an hour and reading Pink’s conclusions instead.”
Read Barbara Chai’s review of Daniel Pink’s Drive in The Wall Street Journal now!
Read an excerpt of Daniel Pink’s Drive in The Wall Street Journal now!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Daniel H. Pink is an American writer, speechwriter, and motivational speaker who had worked as chief speechwriter for former US Vice President Al Gore. He is the author of four bestselling books that focus on the changing workplace: A Whole New Mind, Free Agent Nation, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, and Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. He has written on business and technology for The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Wired.
ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:
In “Selling Books by Day, Writing Them by Night,” an essay that came out in the May 6, 2011 issue of The New York Times, J. Courtney Sullivan talks about the upside and downside of bookselling as a steppingstone for aspiring writers. Some of the authors she writes about say that they decided to work as bookstore employees because they were too scared from a financial perspective to write fulltime; others say that it’s because bookselling work has a concreteness that writing itself can lack. “It’s tangible — you go in and straighten the shelves and sell a book to someone who might have never thought of buying it otherwise,” says a published author who works in a bookstore on weekends.
Read J. Courtney Sullivan’s “Selling Books by Day, Writing Them by Night” in The New York Times now!
