Drive vs. Startup Life
Every month I try to pick up Success magazine. This month, there is an interview with Daniel Pink, author of books such as Drive and A Whole New Mind, along with plenty of magazine articles. The great thing about Success is that each issue comes with a CD which expands on the magazine with longer interviews. It’s great to have in the car when you are stuck in traffic or transporting the kids to their next practice.
Last year, I read Drive but I had forgotten a couple of the key points he was trying to make. His basic premise is that while the current focus on carrot-or-stick motivation can help a business in the short-term, it will not produce long-term creative problem solving or innovation. Instead, he argues that businesses need to rethink how they motivate employees and focus on using autonomy, mastery and purpose for better results and more engaged employees.
To quote the interview:
Autonomy has to do with the desire to direct our own lives. Mastery is our urge to get better and better at something that matters. And purpose is the yearning we have to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
What struck me in reading this and hearing the CD interview with him is how these three things fit so well in my current startup life. I will admit that I didn’t quite know what to expect when I joined Chomp. I’ve worked for two other startups but both were a little further along, at least in terms of employees and process.
At Chomp, I am employee #11, charged with building the best search engine possible. In that charge, I come face-to-face with autonomy, mastery and purpose on a daily basis.
Autonomy is figuring out what comes next in what you are building or how you are building it. While there are goals of what needs to be accomplished, how you get there is generally left to you. There is a reason you were hired and you are trusted in your decisions until a different way is shown to be better.
Mastery is pushing your knowledge, finding new ways of doing things, new technology to use within reason and making what you have better each day. You don’t have to know all the answers but you do need to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B quickly even if the way is still somewhat foggy.
Purpose is really the belief in what you are building, believing that you are giving people a better way of finding apps. There is a part of the purpose that is personal though, that you are part of something small that will become big, that you are at the ground floor and just starting on a journey.
One aspect of startup life is the highs-and-lows are more intense it seems and can happen within the same day. Keeping an eye on your purpose or your mastery of what you are doing or the fact that you are making decisions and having an impact directly on the company can help when things don’t look great and perhaps can temper the highs just a bit.
