tampa tech solutions

 The other day I was browsing TED as I often do and just when I thought I had consumed everything that was consumable, I come across Daniel Pink. His bio, while interesting, didn't really give a hint to the brilliance of what I was going to see. So I click through to his "Surprising Science of Motivation" speech. I mean, who wouldn't be interested to hear any science that can increase my - or anyone's - motivation.
 
For the next almost 19 minutes, I'm marvelling at his striking resemblance to Danny Tanner, but still managing to hang on every word.  Dan is both engaging and funny, but not nearly as engaging nor funny as he is passionate.  You can tell that he has poured over books, articles and every other medium in order to come to the most specific, provable science.  The focus of the speech is Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.  Unfortunately he only has enough time to go through Autonomy, but the evidence he was able to get to in a short speech was convincing and eye-opening.
 
It's always interesting to me how the most successful ideas, scientific laws, etc are always the most obvious.  Almost to the point where when you hear them you go "DUH, why didn't I see that before?"  When Dan speaks of Autonomy, he's talking about the ability to steer your own thoughts.  Instead of working on a single task non-stop because you have to, instead finding things that you work on non-stop because you WANT to.  I've always had this internal battle thanks to many years working for a certain Big 4 accounting firm in their IT headquarters.  I had so many administrative (read:bull****), paper pushing tasks that were automat-able, redundant or simply unnecessary and yet I had this great passion for the industry itself.  In fact, there were many aspects of my job that I found enlightening and fun - learning about SANs, WANs, DNS, Load Balancers, 3 tier networking and the like all were of great interest to me and I learned as much as I could as often as I could.  This is what Dan refers to as Mastery.
 
Mastery is one of those things you can't stop.  You are just SO interested in learning about something that you obsess over it for weeks at a time.  Whether it be troubleshooting a problem, building a piece of furniture, learning how to play guitar ... anything.  You just want to master it ... no one is forcing you.  No one is really even encouraging you but yourself.  That's the intrinsic motivation that makes us the most productive.
 
Purpose is a driving force of humanity.  Purpose is the reason we have to many religions on this planet.  I certainly have no idea who is right and who is wrong, but I do know that humans are constantly asking themselves "Why am I here?" or more specifically "What's my purpose" because they want to involve themselves with something larger than themselves.  If you can do what you like to do, with the goal of doing something for the greater good, why not?  In terms of personal goals, I think most people can find a good form of purpose within their family.  Everyone wants to provide for their family in monetary and non-monetary ways.  It's something bigger than ourselves.  Corporations do things for the greater good by wanting to change the health of the country, as is Whole Foods' mantra.  Sure they want to make money, but it's because they want to spread what they think is good, healthy, whole foods to the entire country.  (Sure some would argue that they're liars, but for this example let's assume that's their heartfelt motivation.)
 
I'm so amazed at the obviousness of his findings and how he brought it all together so effortlessly.  I believe that Dan has found an answer this country desperately seeks at this moment.  Large companies need to wake up and see that there is a different way to do things that could make their employees far more productive than they currently are.  In turn this would make America more productive, creative and effective.  Dan's passion for this really comes jumps through the screen and I'm all for right brained work, autonomy, mastery and purpose, so I definitely can't argue his points.
 
Dan Pink is the author of many fine books.  You can find all his work on Amazon.com, you can also follow his tweets @danielpink.