TED Talk #3: Daniel Pink

To begin the speech, Pink uses humerous talk to draw his audience into the speech.  I find that many people who are displaying an idea through speech tend to do this as it gives the audience an easy thing to grab on to at the beginning.  One of the main ideas in Pink's speech is that of the "If, Then, Reward" type of motivation.  He explains that these kinds of incentive-laiden tasks eliminate creativity.  He also talks about how many  businesses and tasks in the U.S. are based off that idea while countries like China work much differently.  With that said, Pink also talks about studies of amounts of incentive.  In a study, he says, people doing a task  with a higher incentive than others performed worse than those with less of an incentive.  I find that interesting because of the contradiction made.  It also shows that people aren't always motivated by compensation (there is more to people than worldly greed).  In watching this video, it makes me realize how humans work with creativity.  When some kind of task is put in place with an incentive on the other side, it eliminates the aspect of creativity that is important to solving problems.  For example, the Candle experiment shows that those using their normal creativity to solve the problem were much more successful than those who were using analytical thinking for the purpose of obtaining the incentive.   In conclusion, from watching the speech, Pink has conviced me that rewards should not be offered for things like school, work etc. because humans work better when they use creativity instead of analytical thinking to try to get the reward.