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.