Ted Talk #3: Daniel Pink

Daniel Pink's ted talk was based on how rewards for good work can have a negative effect overall. The first moment that the camera landed on him, he jumped into a personal story about him starting out as a student in law school. He explained how it wasn't for him, as much as he wanted to succeed, and it was very easilly related to! Daniel used hand motions as he talked, and moved around the stage almost constantly, but didn't seem nervous of fidgety. I liked how confident and comfortable he seemed while giving his presentation, and he made his audience laugh several times. I learned about several studies testing testing how rewards can actually be a disadvantage to productivity. He explained how 8 out of the 9 studies conducted showed that "higher incentive lead to worse performance." He also emphasized that giving rewards to try and increase performance dulls the original thinking and creativity. I liked how he expressed these things as facts, not opinions. He said more than once that these studies and statistics are true facts, not feelings or philosophy. The most interesting part of the presentation was the part where Pink talked about an Australian companie's "Fedex days", and Google's "20% time" that they provided to their employees. During this time, employees were allowed to work on anything they wanted, and many huge ideas came out of these esentially free times. Overall i thought the presentation was very interesting, and Daniel kept me interested the entire time.