Daniel Pink asserts in his new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us that asking yourself two questions each and every day is a great discipline to becoming motivated and reflective about your own performance.
The first question of what is your sentence? (fill in the blank "________________________") asks us to think about our purpose, our legacy, our individual mission. If we know what we are about and what we are working so hard to do everyday for ourselves, our family, our community and our world, then we should be able to express it as validation and aspiration in a single sentence. This sentence becomes a powerful reminder of our mission and the legacy we are striving to create.
The genesis of the one sentence idea come from Clare Luce Booth's statement to President Kennedy that every great man is a sentence. Why? Because it focuses his energy, his efforts, his aspirations. Bill Taylor, who blogs for Harvard Business Review, extends the one sentence challenge to companies in his article What's Your Company's Sentence?
The second sentence that Dan Pink recommends that we use, like a one-two punch combo, is was I better today than yesterday? Success at anything, personal or professional, takes intention, diligence, and discipline. Improvement is incremental. Each day is a part of the journey and it is through self-observation and self-reflexive objective feedback that we are able to chart our course.
Pink writes extensively about people not getting enough feedback, on the job and off. Annual professional reviews are hardly great sources of information that we are motivated to act on. Think of a professional athlete. They get feedback from their coach and from their own highly developed mechanism of self-awareness and self-observation with each attempt. Pink asserts that professionals on the job would not only benefit from more frequent and meaningful feedback but that they would be more motivated to act upon the feedback and adjust their actions.
Watch this vimeo to hear Dan Pink's story of the two questions.
Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.
What's your sentence?
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