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.