Daniel Pink explains Teresa Amabile's research showing that making progress on meaningful work is the strongest day-to-day motivator. When you see tangible progress, your mood improves, motivation rises, and you're more likely to keep going the next day.
What motivates us at work? It's a bunch of things. We want to have control over what we do and how we do it. We want to get better at something that matters. We want to make a contribution. We want to make a difference. We want to be surrounded by people who are interesting and who help us become our best selves. But at a day-to-day level, it turns out there's a very specific source of motivation. Teresa Amabile at Harvard Business School has done some remarkable research where she discovered that the single biggest The day-to-day motivator on the job is this: making progress in meaningful work. The days we make progress are the days we feel better, we're more motivated, we get more done, and we come back the next day with a better chance of making progress.
