Dan Pink TED talk blog response #3

Dan Pink’s TED talk, “Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us,” expanded my knowledge about humans and how we are most motivated. I learned about the main theme of the talk which is the fact that most tasks that are given follow the pattern of “higher reward, better performance.” Strangely, though, once the task requires even basic cognitive abilities, the previous statement is no longer true. Pink explains why that is during his speech. I learned about a technique called sticks and carrots which represents the statement, higher reward, better performance. I took away from the talk a new style of speaking that is quite effective.

I say this speaking style is effective, and what I mean by that is it is effective for visual learners mostly. Because the speaker chooses to have the listeners attention focused on a white board and not a person, people who enjoy visuals will benefit most from this talk. I’m not saying other learners cannot learn at all from the TED talk, but it would be more difficult than for a visual learner.

Using purely visuals is Pink’s main style. He communicates to his audience by drawing his words almost exactly. He draws actual words as well as pictures to communicate his message to the audience. This makes Pink’s talk very easy to follow. The disadvantage is that if you stop paying full attention for even 10 seconds, you will be totally lost and swept up in the next diagrams he has moved to. Another style of Pinks’ is humor, but that humor is more scarce than Sir Ken Robinson. He scatters funny images during his stories, like the image of his professor when he introduced an idea like Wikipedia to her. That has brought me to his final evident style, which is storytelling. He has personal stories and non-personal stories, but if you look at the big picture, his entire speech is a story. His story even has pictures!

Pink’s message is an important one for everyone to know. It is to our benefit to know how we are motivated as humans collectively as well as how we are motivated individually. Pink definitely shared an idea worth spreading, and it’s our job, and your job now, to spread it.