“People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation toward the activity.”

• “The candle problem solved. The key is to overcome what’s called “functional fixedness.” You look at the box and see only one function—as a container for the tacks. But by thinking afresh, you eventually see that the box can have another function—as a platform for the candle. To reprise language from the previous chapter, the solution isn’t algorithmic (following a set path) but heuristic (breaking from the path to discover a novel strategy).”
  

• “Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus. That’s helpful when there’s a clear path to a solution. They help us stare ahead and race faster. But “if-then” motivators are terrible for challenges like the candle problem. As this experiment shows, the rewards narrowed people’s focus and blinkered the wide view that might have allowed them to see new uses for old objects.”

• “Not always, but a lot of the time, when you are doing a piece for someone else it becomes more “work” than joy. When I work for myself there is the pure joy of creating and I can work through the night and not even know it. On a commissioned piece you have to check yourself—be careful to do what the client wants.”
• “Amabile and others have found that extrinsic rewards can be effective for algorithmic tasks—those that depend on following an existing formula to its logical conclusion. But for more right-brain undertakings—those that demand flexible problem-solving, inventiveness, or conceptual understanding—contingent rewards can be dangerous. Rewarded subjects often have a harder time seeing the periphery and crafting original solutions.”
• “Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on—can sometimes have dangerous side effects.”
• “The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road.”
• ” Contrast that approach with behavior sparked by intrinsic motivation. When the reward is the activity itself—deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one’s best—there are no shortcuts. The only route to the destination is the high road. In some sense, it’s impossible to act unethically because the person who’s disadvantaged isn’t a competitor but yourself”
• Shortcomings of using external incentives to promote behavioral change:
  • It extinguishes intrinsic motivation
  • It is addictive
  • It encourages short-term thinking
  • It discourages creativity
  • It enoucrages taking shortcuts, and cheating
  • It diminishes performance
  • It crowds out good behavior
• Situations in which rewards might work is where the tasks are repetitive or mechanical nature and do not require creativity. Think of a scenario in which you manage a team and there is a need to mail out lots of posters in a short notice. This requires the team to work on the weekend. While you could use your power as a boss and force the team to do it, you risk the potential long-term costs that come with such moves. Instead you could incentivize employees to help with this task by offering monetary or other forms of rewards. When it comes to these tasks, offer employess a rationale as to why the task is necessary, and ackonwledge that it is going to be boring, and increase autonomy in how they want to complete it and focus on the outcome
• Extrinsic rewards work best when they’re offered after the task has been completed and only when they’e unexpected. In other words, think more like “now that” vs “if then”. Make sure that the “now then” reward doesn’t return eventually into an “if then”. Also, you’re better off offering specific non-monetary feedback as a form of a reward.
• “Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.”