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Pink’s most influential book takes aim at the idea that people work mainly for rewards and punishments. Drawing on decades of behavioral science, he argues that for anything beyond simple mechanical tasks, extrinsic incentives often backfire, and that real, durable motivation comes from three things: autonomy, the desire to direct our own lives; mastery, the urge to get better at something that matters; and purpose, the pull of a cause larger than ourselves. It reframed how a generation of managers thought about motivation.