Chapter 5

In this chapter, Pink discusses how compliance is the opposite of engagement in the world of business. He relates compliance to conforming to a bosses orders and engagement to learning from a boss to eventually master the work. He believes that if you have compliance, you are just doing what you're told without absorbing meaningful information, whereas when you're engaged, you start to care about the work you're doing and will want to improve upon it. I can relate to this on a learning level in the classroom. History class has been one of my least favorite subjects throughout my entire learning career. I hate remembering dates and reading about important historical figures from a dense textbook. I used to be that I would sit in class and take notes from the whiteboard then go home and take notes from the textbook. All the while, I wasn't absorbing any of the information that I was reading. I couldn't remember important dates, wars or people because I was only writing them on a piece of paper without actually taking the time to learn them, connect them and eventually remember them. Sophomore year I had a teacher who was very engrossed in her work. She would get excited about different things she would teach us and that translated over to her students. The class became engaged and excited about the subjects and, at least for me, felt that I was actively learning and caring about the work that I was doing. I did better in that history class than I had any other year and I attribute it to the teaching style of my teacher and her ability to get me to become engaged in class rather than just copying notes down and forgetting them later.

Chapter 4

In this chapter touched on the idea of autonomy. In short, autonomy is self-sufficiency or independence. I really related to this chapter because it in part describes who I am. I’m not someone who likes to feel as though I need some one else to succeed in my life. While I enjoy having people with close to me to help and support me, I don’t even want to feel as though I am relying on someone to get by. Pretty early in my life I knew that I wanted to break away from the shelter life that my parents had for me. It was important that I understood the world that I lived in even if that meant going through some challenges alone. A prime example of this is when I decided that I wanted to get a job. My parents first reaction to this was “why” and then in slowly turned into “okay” and then “we know someone who knows someone who owns a store”. When I expressed to them the importance of me finding, applying and getting my own job, they didn’t fully understand why I would want to do this. Why not use the connections that they had. That is how life works after all. What they didn’t understand was that the point of me actually getting a job was to go through the process. I was, in a way, testing myself for the years to come. I wanted to know, even in a small way like this, that I was capable of standing on my own and creating my own connections. It’s important for people not only to be self-sufficient, but to have the understanding that they can stand on their own. A lot of people begin to rely on a family member or a friend to keep them on their feet but it is important for the people that care most for them to give them to push that they need to make the realize that they have the ability to face the world on their own.

Chapter 3

In this chapter was all about the self-determination theory that people have a drive to be self-sufficient, self-determined and connect to one another. An example he gave was when two doctors were studying heart disease and what might cause it. They studied the behavior and mannerisms of the patients with heart disease and determined that there was a connection between heart disease and extreme competitiveness within people. Their lifestyle overcame any family history or environmental effects. Finding connections with people and what drives them is important in understanding that demographic of people. This chapter mainly talks about how a group of people can be connected by what drives them and because of this many do and act in the same ways. When we started to discover our target clientele for selling our shirts, we had to first understand what might motivate them to buy the shirts. For the most part, I believe, the target clientele would be people who believe that they can make a change or people who enjoy artistic t-shirts. Both of them have a sort of selfish desire in common. They will both spend $8 on a shirt in order to fulfill a desire. Weather that be helping those who cannot help themselves so that they can feel as though they have done a good deed or buying something that makes them look and feel better, the end result is the same. I think it’s important to target selfish people because it is then easier to turn what you are selling around and make them think that this purchase will benefit them in the end instead of the other way around. A lot of what selling is, is making the customer feel as though it is necessary for them to make the purchase for whatever reason. 

Chapter 2

In this chapter one of Pink’s main ideas is that there is a lack of motivation for people in the 21^st centaury. He believes that in most work settings, people neither enjoy nor perform routine tasks. This us unlike the time of assembly lines and tedious farming work. He thinks that because of this, the second motivation is becoming less and less effective in the work environment. People don’t just want to do work to get paid, they want to do it so that they can find some sort of self realization, pride or enjoyment. He talks about how employers have an easier time getting their employees to do things when they get across the understanding of the purpose of the task is. This way, the employee doesn’t feel as though they are just doing work to get it done and may not always try to do it as best they can. I can relate this to my work as city sports. One of the main things that I do is merchandising the store.  A lot of my coworkers believe that the purpose of this job is simply to put new things out on fixtures so that people can see them and hopefully buy them. At first I believe this as well, but it wasn’t until I was train to merchandise that I understood the purpose of it and started to take it more seriously. The idea is not to just throw clothing on a fixture, but to set it up in a way such that a customer would look at it and want to buy it. We do small things like putting shirts on top of pants and create an outfit. Or do a “color story” which basically puts all the clothing of the same colors near each other so the entire display is more appealing to the eye. Without this understanding it is easy to view the work as dull and pointless, but once it was explained, it became something that was very important to the success of sales in the store. 

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Chapter 1)

     In this book the author, Daniel Pink, talks about the importance of recognizing motivation. He brings up the fact that people don’t acknowledge the primary drive, the biological one, of the need to eat and procreate. He then goes on to talk about the second drive that is triggered by a punishment and reward system. This is an external motivation as it is partially controllable unlike the primary drive. The final drive that he mentions is the third drive, which is the motivation people find to fulfill an inner need. He talks about how there’s evidence of these drives in business. Whether it’s to make money to survive, make money to thrive or make money to support the lifestyle that you’ve chosen, Pink believes that these are the motivations that create a powerful and successful business. I think that it’s important to understand what drives a person to want to create something. This same concept is applied to the work Bex and I are doing for our senior project. We didn’t have a concrete, set in stone, plan for what we were doing. It wasn’t so much that we didn’t have any ideas, but we wanted to get it started before we figured out what the best approach for the work we were doing would be. We were motivated to give to those who cannot help themselves at this point in their lives. It was important work for us to do and would probably fall under Pink’s second motivation; it’s rewarding work for us. We had an idea to fundraise but it wasn’t until we actually got started with our volunteer work that we figure out exactly how to effectively raise money. The motivation we now have is one that helps others, a community, which would fall under Pink’s third drive category.  

Week of January 11: $200 Project

This project for us was not as successful as we anticipated. It attribute that mostly to our projections about what would sell and what wouldn’t We had thought that Freshmen and Seniors would be good targets for these bracelets. Seniors because we are almost out of Brookline High and a lot of us are going to miss our high school days and want some memento. We chose freshmen as well because they are new to the school and excited to finally enter into the world of a high school student. What we didn’t take into account was the fact that we didn’t know who any freshman were and when we did happen to find one they never had any money with them or any interest in the bands. It was easy for us to sell to seniors. We, for the most part, knew who was in our grade and because of this we could pull the friend card and they would buy it from us because they knew us. It was also easier to sell in our classes as they mostly consist of seniors and we know them. We had great success in selling our senior bands as we almost sold out of them, however on the flip side, we barely sold any freshman bands. I think that it was a mix of the design of the bands as well as a lack of understanding our target customer. We couldn’t really adapt as we had already spent our $200 and were stuck with the product we purchased. It was a learning experience for us in the end. We needed to think more about whom we were selling to and what people would be attracted to as far as design. Now that we have been through this project we understand the importance of knowing your customer.