Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

Flow is a state of focused attention, so people skillful in focusing their attention, such as meditators or martial arts experts, are more likely to find themselves in flow. If you have been doing the mindfulness exercises in the early chapters of this book, you are already halfway there, Grasshopper.

“But this is how I usually improve flow.”

Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose

Bestselling author Daniel Pink proposes a framework that is nicely complementary to what we have already discussed. Pink uses fifty years of research in behavioral science to argue that external rewards like money are not the best motivator of high performance; instead, the best motivators are what he calls “intrinsic motivators”—motivation we find within ourselves. The three elements of true motivation are:

1. Autonomy: The urge to direct our own lives

2. Mastery: The desire to get better and better at something that matters

3. Purpose: The yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves 3

In his TED talk, Pink tells the fascinating story of research based on the candle problem. 4The candle problem works like this: participants are given a box of tacks, a candle, and matches. They are asked to find a way to attach the candle to the wall.

It takes a while to figure out the problem, but the solution is fairly simple: empty the box of tacks, attach the candle to the inside of the box, and then attach the box to the wall with a tack. The key creative “aha” moment needed to solve this problem is figuring out that the box is part of the solution. This is not immediately obvious; you usually begin by thinking of the box merely as something to contain the tacks. So the creative leap here is recognizing the nonobvious use of the box—sort of like thinking outside the box, about the box.

“I’m having real problems thinking outside the box.”

Here’s the interesting thing: you have two randomly assigned groups. For individuals in one group, the incentivized group, you tell them the faster they can solve this problem, the more money they’ll get paid. For individuals in the other group, the control group, you tell them they will get paid the same amount of money regardless of how long they take. Here’s the really interesting find: the incentivized group did worse ! That’s right, boys and girls, external incentives not only did not work but were counterproductive.

But wait, the story gets better. In another set of experiments, researchers gave the above items (a box of tacks, a candle, and matches) to participants with the box separate from the tacks. In this case, it is immediately obvious that the box is part of the solution, therefore there is no creative “aha” moment needed. In this case, the incentivized group does better than the control group.

What this and many other similar experiments suggest is traditional monetary incentives work well for routine, rule-based work: jobs that do not require a lot of creativity. For the type of work that requires creativity or other cognitive skills, monetary incentives do not work well; they can even be counterproductive.

For those types of work, the only motivators that work really well are the intrinsic ones: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In fact, they work so well, they can even turn supposedly soul-deadening jobs into jobs people become proud of. A great example is the customer service team at Zappos. They call themselves the Zappos Customer Loyalty Team (ZCLT). Team members are given very simple instructions: serve the customer, solve the customer’s problem, do it the way you want. This, plus attention to employees’ professional growth, plus their corporate motto of “delivering happiness,” infuses autonomy, mastery, and purpose to the jobs of the ZCLT folks. The result is happy folks delivering customer service that is sometimes rated even more highly than Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. 5

Know and Align Thyself

Alignment is built upon self-awareness. When you know yourself at a deep level, you begin to understand your core values, purposes, and priorities. You know what is really important to you and what gives you meaning. With this clarity, you know what makes you happy at work and how best to contribute to the world. You will then know what work situation you want to create for yourself. When the right opportunity presents itself, you will be able to work in ways that offer you autonomy, mastery, and purpose. With that, your work will become a source of your happiness.

The cornerstone of knowing and aligning thyself is mindfulness. Even if you have no other practice than mindfulness alone, you will, over time, create the level of self-awareness you need to find alignment. Mindfulness alone is sufficient—that is the good news.

The better news is there are also other ways to help you clarify your values and higher purpose to yourself. One way is to tell them to other people. Things like values and higher purposes are fairly abstract topics, and the act of verbalizing them forces us to make them clearer and more tangible to ourselves. Another way is to journal. Once again, a similar mechanism is at work—the act of verbalizing abstract thoughts makes them clear and tangible. We find that doing these exercises in a structured way can be very effective. In our class, for example, many participants told us they gained a useful amount of clarity with just a few minutes of speaking to each other.

DISCOVERING VALUES AND HIGHER PURPOSE

If you are doing this alone at home, do a Journaling exercise (see Chapter 4) for a few minutes with one or both of these suggested prompts:

• My core values are…

• I stand for…

Alternatively, if you have friends or family members to work with (lucky you), do a Mindful Listening exercise (see Chapter 3) in a group of two or three. Take turns to speak. The speaker starts with a monologue, which can be any length, and after that, the group engages in a free conversation when the listeners can ask clarifying questions or make short comments. The only rule during the conversation is the (original) speaker has preemptive priority, which means he or she has priority in speaking and when he or she speaks, nobody can interrupt.

Possible topics of the monologue are:

• What are your core values?

• What do you stand for?

After everybody has a chance to speak, have a meta-conversation to talk about what this experience was like for each of you.

“Core values, core values… Hmm…”

Envisioning

Envisioning is based on a very simple idea: it’s much easier to achieve something if you can visualize yourself already achieving it. Psychiatrist Regina Pally describes it this way:

According to neuroscience, even before events happen the brain has already made a prediction about what is most likely to happen, and sets in motion the perception, behaviors, emotions, physiologic responses and interpersonal ways of relating that best fit with what is predicted. In a sense, we learn from the past what to predict for the future and then live the future we expect . 6