What motivates us?

I just finished Tony Hsieh’s book: Delivering Happiness about his journey to through LinkExchange and Zappos. In the book, he shows how creating happiness and record results go hand-in-hand.

I loved the first half where he told the story of the creation of Zappos, but got somewhat less interested in the middle section where he was giving an overview of how Zappos works today. I guess I was just depressed by the challenge of applying some of the Zappos concepts to the place I work. 

As he got towards the end of the book Tony moved into discussing the field of happiness, and I was reminded of the Dan Pink TED talk on the surprising science of motivation. I’ve embedded Dan Pink’s TED talk in the full post, along with a discussion [spoiler alert] of what I think the conclusions are - and why I think they’re both talking about the same 3 points.

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