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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Build a tower, build a team?

Interested in teams, and design approaches? Spend 7 minutes watching Tom Wujec’s intesting stats on the “marshmallow problem”. I did loads of these projects while I was at school; and loved the Great Egg Race on TV - so I couldn’t agree more with his conclusions on how best to approach projects.

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How social media can make history

Another excellent TED talk, with a crystal clear presentation from Clay Shirky on how the world of media has changed. If you have a message and want to get it out to the world, or have a product and want to market it, you need to spend 15 minutes of your life watching this.

“While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.”

Seth Godin - Be Remarkable@TED