Dan Pink, a renowned author, in his latest book Drive tackles the question of what motivates us to work. His counterintuitive research says that financial rewards do hinder our creativity. More money makes people less motivated to create, he says. There is of course an oversaturation of studies that dispute the motivation behind money, but Pink’s book has a very fascinating take. Most people would assume that the more they pay people, the better the results. However, Pink disqualifies this, saying that the greatest motivator for most smart people is personal reward- out of love and intellectual fulfillment and not external motivation.

Pink does not imply that money is not necessary. Of course we all need money to make it through the day. His point is “once people have a base level of money that makes them comfortable, using monetary incentives to get them to do creative work fails.” And it gets even worse. It leads to poorer performance. Therefore, creative people need to be motivated by some ‘higher bits’ points than just money.

Here is a whiteboard animated video that summarizes Dan Pink’s idea in the book, and how he comes to this conclusion.