From Amazon:

the secret to high performance and satisfaction in today’s world is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of our lives. He demonstrates that while the old-fashioned carrot-and-stick approach worked successfully in the 20th century, it’s precisely the wrong way to motivate people for today’s challenges. In Drive, he reveals the three elements of true motivation:

*Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives
*Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters
*Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

This strikes me as almost exactly right. To enjoy my job, I need to be intellectually challenged and improving my skills every day (although those are two slightly different things, both important but for me the first is more important), and I need to feel that my job has some larger social and environmental mission. And even when I have those two things, there are days when I resent the feeling that my time does not belong to me. I think there is one more thing that matters, which is generally positive interaction with other human beings. The wrong people can make an otherwise good job bad. And forming bonds with other people can help people perform terrible jobs, just ask any soldier in the trenches.