Motivation Comes From Having No Motivation?

A very inspiring and interesting TED talk I watched recently is called, "The Puzzle of Motivation."  The speaker Dan Pink starts talking about a social experiment that has been repeated for almost forty years, and the conclusion to that experiment is that people given an incentive to finish a task faster actually finished slower than people who were just asked to finish the same task with no incentive.  He goes on to explain how this is not how the working world today operates, people are incentivized to work hard and to

finish a task.  This seemed abstract to me and I couldn't believe it until he gave a real world example that coincidently dealt with a mass media outlet.  He used an example of Encarta and Wikipedia.  I had never heard of Encarta and I use Wikipedia on almost a daily bases.  He explained that Microsoft created Encarta and there was a huge team of paid professionals to put the encyclopedia together, while Wikipedia doesn't pay anybody to write articles and anybody can write articles.  Encarta stopped operating in 2009 and Wikipedia is a very well known encyclopedia that has over 30 million articles.

            This TED talk was exactly what TED was designed to do.  It presented a very good idea that is not used in the world today and could change the entire way the workforce can operate.  This is what makes TED so great, it gives many different people a way to communicate their ideas through mass media and those ideas could potentially change the world.  

Here is a link to this talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html