Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

The Jolly Contrarian turns cultural critic →Go uptown A candle problem and a donut, yesterday. Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Reviews Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Despite the burgeoning suspicion of popular psych books that are subtiotled “the surprising ~ ”, and despite the truth about what motivates us not being that surprising — who doesn’t want “autonomy, mastery, and purpose” in love, life and vocation? — Daniel Pink’s Template:Br¬Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is a timely and rewarding book — especially now, in this mad COVID inflexion point, where the world is up-ended, research programmes are in crisis, all bets are off and — who knows? — perhaps this time it might really be different and we might finally be moving to some new sunlit upland paradigm of enlightened employment.

The JC likes to keep his glass half-full as you know, readers, but he is a perma-bear about human nature all the same. It will take more than the Gluckstein candle problem and the total falsification of the commuter ethos to change things, but we can only hope, and Mr Pink’s book can be our narrative as we do.

See also

• Candle problem