What makes us want to learn? What makes us want to do something well, to accomplish a task, to finish something? Where, exactly, does motivation come from?
Daniel Pink looks at how one experiment takes on this question. The results aren't surprising to me, from my own personal experience as a student, teacher, and parent: the highest performance comes when a person not only is told the benefit the task provides on a personal level, but also when the significance of the task is spelled out. Meaning? We want what we do to matter.
