Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

In Part 3 of Drive, Pink focuses on providing a toolkit for managers, instructors, and parents to implement the ideas explored in the book in their own work environments, classrooms, and homes.

In the first chapter, Pink offers a toolkit for individual people to “awaken” their motivation and foster more Type I Behaviors in themselves. These tools include:

• Giving yourself a “flow test,” inspired by Csikszentmihalyi’s pager experiment
• Trying to sum up what you want the ultimate accomplishment of your life to be in a single sentence
• Asking yourself at the end of the day whether you are better than you were yesterday
• “Borrowing” a few years from your retirement and sprinkling them throughout your working years, so that about every seven years you take the entire next year off from work to travel or try new projects
• Using “oblique cards” with statements such as “Your mistake was a hidden intention” or “What is the simplest solution?” to help you keep your mind open when you fall into a rut at work
• Making a “to-don’t” list of various behaviors or activities that tend to sap your energy
• Being deliberate and focused on your path to mastery by repeating actions that you want to perfect, seeking out critical feedback, and focusing on your weaknesses rather than your strengths
• Writing on the front and back of an index card your answers to the questions, “What gets you up in the morning?” and “What keeps you up at night?” to remind yourself of what drives you
• Making your own motivational posters.