Posts Tagged ‘culture’

Be Yourself, But Not Because I Told You To: The Paradoxes of Authenticity

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Image Credit - http://www.flickr.com/photos/through-this-window/1582790578/

The message in personal development, self-help, and the wider Western culture is clear—”be yourself.” We are told that being a conformist is bad. The marketplace demands creativity and innovation from passionate employees, consumers are bored of last year’s model, and many workers are tired of working meaningless jobs. But here’s the thing: if you obey this cultural demand, you are being a conformist—but if you don’t obey the demand to be yourself, you are also being a conformist! (more…)

The Science of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation, and the Implications for Society

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

I recently watched a very interesting, much-linked-to-and-discussed TED talk with Dan Pink entitled “on the surprising science of motivation.” Pink presents a case for why extrinsic motivation—rewards and punishments—worked great for manufacturing and compliance, but is counterproductive for knowledge work and creativity. He cites many interesting psychological studies as to why intrinsic motivation—a desire for autonomy, mastery, and purpose—works much better for engagement and self-direction, critical factors for contemporary knowledge work.

Pink presents two kinds of radical changes to workplaces that increase intrinsic motivation: 20% time and the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE). 20% time is famously employed at Google, where employees get to work on whatever projects they want for 20% of their designated hours. This unusual work structure has been said to have given birth to many of the cool Google features many people love, such as Gmail. ROWE is an even more radical idea, which is that employees are given full autonomy to work whenever they want, from wherever they want, and meetings are optional. The only things that matter are getting results defined by the company.

Many blogs in the personal development/marketing sphere have covered ROWE and 20% time, usually very positively, and rarely covering any socio-cultural, economic, or political aspects of these ideas besides that of increased productivity. What would be the likely implications for society if such measures were much more widely implemented? How might they benefit society, and what potential risks or drawbacks would there be?

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Youtopia and the Bubble in American Egos

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

bub

What happens when a whole society of people learns to project an image of success and capability that few members of that society actually possess? Let us create for ourselves an imaginary world – we’ll call it Youtopia – and explore what might happen there.

But first, let’s consider why we might want to project such an image. Personal development enthusiasts regularly teach that projecting such an image will actually make us more capable and successful. Fake it ‘til you make it. The technique works because self-image can be a powerful motivator. It changes how we feel about ourselves and how others feel about us as well. We might begin this process being incapable and unsuccessful, but that changes as we begin to project a new image of ourselves.

In a socially mobile society like that of the US, in which individuals craft their own lives for themselves and must regularly recreate their own social worlds as they move from place to place and from one social class to another, the ability to project an image of success and capability can mean the difference between success and failure in almost any endeavor. So let us travel to Youtopia and see what happens when all of us do this? (more…)

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What is Beyond Growth?

Beyond Growth is a collaborative blogging project focused on critiquing and expanding the personal development field. Noting a lack of critical discourse in personal development, Duff McDuffee and Eric Schiller founded Beyond Growth in the hopes of using it as a platform to foster growth and responsibility. We touch on a wide variety of topics, mostly centered around whatever we are interested in at the time.
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