“For the first time in American history,” today’s New York Times reports, “a majority of union members are government workers rather than private-sector employees.”
Last year, the U.S. had 7.9 million unionized workers in the public sector and 7.4 million in private industry. Only 7. 2 percent of the private sector workforce belongs to a labor union, the lowest percentage since 1900.
(Source: NY Times, 1/23/10)
Okay. I’ve done it. I’ve created my own iPhone app. With the help of the amazing folks at Mobile Roadie, we’ve launched the official (sic) Daniel Pink app. You can download it — it’s free! — from iTunes.
What’s cool about apps in general, and this one in particular, is that they feel like web sites circa. 1995. Everyone’s going to need one, but we’re still frobbing around, trying to figure out how to make them maximally useful and effective. On that, I welcome — actually, I crave — your feedback. We’ll do an updated version soon — informed, I hope, by your suggestions.
Every so often, when I run through the streets near my Washington, DC, home, I see a truck that belongs to Rosa’s Mobile Pet Grooming. Instead of bringing their pooch to the pet barber, people in my neighborhood can wait for Rosa’s to come to them. I’ve always thought this was a good idea.
But on a recent visit to Google headquarters — which, I have to say, was very cool — I realized that I wasn’t thinking big enough. Apparently, what’s good for Fido and Fluffy is good for Larry and Sergei, as you see in this photo I took of a state-of-the-art mobile hair salon that was parked on Google’s Mountain View campus.
Maybe I can get Onsite Haircuts to open a DC branch. Or maybe I should just ask Rosa’s to expand its services from poodles to people.
If a place that looks like this has a line, you know the food will be good. But when you discover that the burritos cost just $4 and you have to eat them in a parking lot, you know the food will be really good. And it was. (2056 Hillhurst Ave, Los Angeles)
Richard Ryan, one of the behavioral scientists whose research figures prominently in Drive, thinks you might be, according to a recently released paper.
But the reason for this “weekend effect” isn’t leisure, he says. It’s autonomy most of all — as well as the satisfaction that comes from emotional relationships. On Saturdays and Sundays, he tells USA Today, ”there’s more connection with other people and more self-direction.”
What’s interesting about these findings is that they span across age, education, and profession. Ryan says it seems to be true even among people who generally enjoy their jobs. On weekends, he says, people have greater freedom to do what they want than they do during the work week. And many also feel greater competence.
It’s interesting stuff that makes me think slightly differently about the value of building this sort of time into our lives. What’s more, it raises a question: Why can’t work itself be like weekends — autonomous, self-directed pursuits that lead toward mastery and are animated by connection and purpose?
Do that — and maybe people can be more satisfied and productive the other five days of the week. Here’s hoping at least. TGIF. And have a great weekend.
This weekend’s Parade magazine features an interesting interview with mega-star Harrison Ford.
To my surprise, Ford spends little time talking about mega-ness or stardom. Instead, the carpenter-turned-actor offers some very keen insights on human motivation, especially the elusive and frustrating nature of mastery.
“When I was a carpenter, I once worked with this Russian lady architect. I would tell her, ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I want to change that a half inch,’ and she would say, ‘No limit for better.’ I think that is a worthy credo. You keep on going until you get it as close to being right as the time and patience of others will allow.”
No limit for better. Good advice for a Monday.
Speaking of no limits, my talented friend Elizabeth Marshall is hosting a free 1-hour interview/teleclass tomorrow (Jan. 12) at 1pm EST, during which I’ll be talking about some of the ideas in Drive. Sign up here. It’s free!
The way ideas spread is pretty simple: Conversation by conversation. One engaged person talks with another engaged person — and out of that daisy chain of human interactions come new ways to navigate our lives.
One of the best and most enduring forums for conversation is public radio. And in the past week, I’ve had the good fortune to talk about the ideas in Drive with several National Public Radio journalists. Here’s a sampler:
1. Morning Edition. A talk with Madeline Brand.
2. Talk of the Nation. Host Neal Conan invited listeners to tell their stories about motivation at work — which brought forth examples of the very good and the very bad.
3. Local programs. Some of the best journalism in this country goes on at the local level. Visiting with hosts like Washington’s Kojo Nnamdi, Philadelphia’s Marty Moss-Coane, Dallas’s Krys Boyd, and the Twin Cities’ Kerri Miller, I learned a lot about both the possibilities and limits of these ideas.
If, er, you’d like to join the conversation, please do — here, on your favorite radio program, or over coffee with your spouse, partner, friend, or colleague. And don’t forget about conversing with yours truly. You know where to find me.
Stuck on an airplane this morning, I had a chance to read today’s New York Times almost from cover to cover. (Ink on paper is a pretty good technology, no? — Ed.) Five stories, most of them small and easily overlooked, made me think, smile, or wince.
1. Person of the day. When retailer H&M couldn’t sell certain pieces of clothing, it mutilated the perfectly good garments and tossed them into a dumpster. Graduate student Cynthia Magnus found out, was appalled, and suggested to the company that this practice was wasteful. When her pleas went unanswered, she alerted the Times — and, lo and behold, H&M announced yesterday that it would donate unworn clothing to charity.
2. Obvious idea of the day. Maybe it makes more long-term sense to spend taxpayer dollars on schools and universities than on prisons and wars. The unlikely tag team of Schwarzenegger and Kristof make the case.
3. Dubious idea of the day. Instant coffee laced with skin-enhancing collagen?
4. Good hire of the day. The great Bill Moggridge is going to head the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum. Awesome choice.
5. Letter of the day. On Sunday, the Times’s David Carr wrote a long article about the countless virtues and inevitable staying power of Twitter. In today’s Letters section, Boomer Pinches (Love the name! -Ed.) of Northampton, Mass., offers his response: “I very much enjoyed the first 140 characters of David Carr’s article, ‘Why Twitter Will Endure.’”
High on the growing list of endangered media species is long-form magazine journalism. In a world of 140-character updates and 60-second video clips, do we have the attention span (and the business model) to sustain carefully-crafted 5,000-word articles?
I sure hope so. Because even in a tough environment, there’s some great work coming out of magazines. Here are three pieces I read in the past two weeks with ideas and stories hard to reduce to a Tweet — and that really come to life on the printed page. (Of course, this being the interwebs, I have to provide links.)
1. The Science of Success (The Atlantic) — David Dobbs reveals some remarkable findings from biological psychiatry showing that people with genes that predispose them to certain troublesome and self-destructive behavior can actually outperform those without such “bad genes.” They’re like orchids, Dobbs says. They’re fragile in many environments, but in the right greenhouse they can bloom spectacularly.
2. Vanish (Wired) — Writer Evan Ratliff tried to disappear for a month, shedding his identity entirely. Meanwhile, Wired offered $5000 to anybody who could find him. The result is a riveting cat-and-mouse tale — with some smart insights into identity in a transparent world. (Added bonus: The photography in this piece is gorgeous.)
3. Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up (Wired) — Many experiments in science fail, says Jonah Lehrer. But that’s not a problem. The problem is that most of those failures are ignored — and it’s these often-dismissed anomalies that contain the seeds of real breakthroughs. One of the most thought-provoking articles I’ve read in a long while.
And so it begins. Today is the day that DRIVE officially launches.
Here’s what I know from previous books: These ideas will spread solely because of people like you — intelligent, forward-thinking, optimistic folks who know that the way the world really changes is conversation by conversation.
If you’re up for the challenge, here are 5 ways you can spread the word:
1. Share the “Two Questions” video, the TED talk, or our super-short summaries.
2. Drop by one of our events this month in DC, Boston, Philly, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, or Dallas.
3. Write a review online — on your blog, on a bookseller site, on Facebook, anywhere you’d like.
4. Add to the #drivebook Twitter stream.
5. Talk about these ideas with your colleagues, your boss, your staff, your students, parents, friends, and neighbors. Maybe even buy one of them their very own copy. (If you do that, let me know. As my thanks, I’ll send that person a signed bookplate.)
Thanks for keeping me motivated.
