The Science of Small Wins
Here are articles discussing Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer's study on motivation at work, The Progress Principle.
It turns out that 95% of managers are wrong about what motivates people at work. It's not financial incentive or stress--rather, the most powerful motivator at work is the sense that you're making progress towards a meaningful goal.
Here’s the weekly round-up of the best of the blog & links we’ve shared on the interwebs! Happy Friday!
How to use iDoneThis to leverage The Progress Principle.
Tech/life balance is a myth.
3 ways to think deeply at work.
Introverts are awesome leaders too!
Love is the way to, um, conquer your competition.
(photo via fuckyeahdogsoncomputers)
Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.
Ray Bradbury, in an interview with the Paris Review.
Maybe we should make an iDoneThis theme song out of these words, they’re so apt.
We’ve written before about the secret to happiness and motivation at work. Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer wrote a whole book about it called The Progress Principle. They found that the number one driver of a positive inner work life, the key to motivated, engaged, and productive employees, is making progress on meaningful work, even if that progress is a small win.
In a recent 99U conference talk, Professor Amabile shared the best way to achieve those small wins and leverage the progress principle in our daily lives: keeping a work diary. We’re so pleased that she suggested using iDoneThis as an online work diary tool, and we thought we could break down how iDoneThis contributes to the four benefits of keeping a work diary that she identifies:
Teresa Norton writes at HBR about how a simple exercise called the story spine can help you get unstuck and make change while “living truthfully” at work.
The story spine is a narrative tool created by playwright, improviser, and theater educator Kenn Adams used to craft well-structured stories. As Norton’s post shows, the story spine can be used as a personal narrative tool to help you make sense of your situation, envision and then enact positive change, and make key self-discoveries.
The story spine structure goes like this:
Have you ever used the story spine? We’d love to hear about it!
Ten life lessons — for everyone!
dad’s wise words. applicable to any pursuit, i believe.
— Mark Hoffmann comments on this NYT Well blog post, suggesting that willpower improves when you define your tasks better.
Like accolades ought to be, the fulfilled life is a consequence, a gratifying byproduct. It’s what happens when you’re thinking about more important things. Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.
English teacher David McCullough Jr. delivered a rousing commencement speech at Wellesley High School, advising the graduating class to reach for achieving something good and genuine rather than for accolades.
The entire speech is worth a read, or watch the video:
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
