TED/Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation

What's your ambition? What's your motivation?

These are the two most asked questions, as people march into the society and start getting a job. However, motivation can be tipped to either the good side, or the bad side.

When we ask someone about his motivation, just like intention, motivation can mean: what you're going to do to achieve; or what are you going to do to harm.

It must be familiar to hear, what's the motivation of the murderer, or the killer, as in many of the crime TV series. And this motivation finally caught the attention of several sociologists, and they began to study about the link between motivation and action behind the human body.

First they come and discuss about how the mind works, and does action always correspond to the physics, or are these motivation always done impulsively? These scientists figured that if they can reach an agreement about the motivation topic, it might be useful in studying crimes, and convicts in the future.

Dan said that, people always have a motivation, or several, before doing something, even when he or she is pressured and the act is constructed out of impulse. And that indicated that we do things to achieve a purpose, no matter good or bad. For example, why you study? Why you work? The answer might be, to get good grades, to earn salary. This is a kind of motivation.

Why does this person kill the victim? Maybe to seal the secret or to gain more profit, these are also motivations. So maybe when we get to learn more about this subject, we can lower the crime rate and understand the human beings more thoroughly.