I am a little bit afraid that this post is going to start to sound a little like a broken record after my last two posts. Then again, I don’t know how many of you reading this are even old enough to remember records and how they would get scratched, and skip, and play the same segment over, and over, and over again.

But then again, I’ve sort of felt like my mind is a little bit like a broken record, going over and over some of the ideas in Daniel Pink’s book Drive. If you’re new here, start with this post I wrote last week for background.

I really have been struck powerfully by how unuseful extrinsic motivation is in my life, and the kind of work that I do; everything I do has creative components, and extrinsic motivation has been proven to reduce creativity.

I spent quite a bit of time over the last several days with friends from college, one of whom is a Montessori teacher. We talked about motivation, and the ideas in Drive at some length, and she loved the image that I created of the dangling carrot in the “no smoking” sign. I call this the “No Extrinsic Motivation” sign. She said that she wanted it on a T-shirt, so I decided to upload it to a cafépress store for anyone who’d like to get this cool graphic on almost anything. Choices range from T-shirts to throw pillows to underwear, and almost everything in between.

No Extrinsic Motivation Sign (click for the Cafépress store)

Check it out at: http://www.cafepress.com/mythworld