In December last year I started writing a blog post “All employees want to feel special” that I am yet to finish. However, I came across TED video from Dan Ariely that talks about what motivates us to work?. I want to mention some of them that I have experienced and noticed them at work to work!

1. Seeing results of your work and customer appreciation is a great motivator. Knowing that your work is helping someone, increases your own performance.

2. “Ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort before their eyes,” Ariely says. “The good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivation seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it.” I concur.

3. We erroneously think that other people will ascribe the same value to our own work as we do. This is specially true when we do work that involves good amount of effort. Many a times, outcome fetches higher value.

4. Positive reinforcement (from managers?) about our abilities increases our performance. A challenge state and not threat state helps with better results.

5. Finally, as Donald Driver, a noted football player and NY Times best selling author noted something very interesting in his article on “Why Do Kids Read What They Read?”

Kids read what they read to have fun!

I guess this feeling of having fun is independent of age, location, environment and many other things.