The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is an amazingly simple way to uncover if and how strong your implicit biases may be. For example, you could test if you have a bias on gender roles (as in the sketch), race, religion or in fact any attitudes you may have. You could forget about reading this and simply go take the Implicit Association Test online now and you’ll get the idea and perhaps surprise yourself.

In the example I gave in the sketch, you could see how strong your biases are for traditional gender roles by measuring the difference in time it takes to sort first career words towards men and home and family words towards women, and then sorting the other way around.

It’s fascinating, and a little uncomfortable, to see your implicit attitudes so clearly come to light. Don’t forget to try taking a test.

The Implicit Association Test

In Dan Pink’s book Drive, he looks at scientific studies showing that the all too common approach to motivating people involving rewards and punishments, or the carrot and stick approach, ultimately doesn’t help motivate people for the tasks and work we have to do today.

Instead, we do our best work when driven by intrinsic motivation — motivation from inside us, rather than imposed externally like rewards or punishments. And the 3 facets he highlights that help intrinsic motivation are:

Autonomy: being in control and able to guide both what we do and how we do it

Mastery: our desire to continually be improving and learning and bettering ourselves

Purpose: working towards something we think is worthwhile. Having a North star to aim for and a reason it’s worth doing what we’re doing.

I find it a useful framework to think through whenever I’m not feeling motivated, or when I want to help make sure the people I’m working with are motivated.

Also see: flow at work, Goldilocks tasks, the zone of proximal development, on parenting

What drives us: autonomy, mastery, purpose

I love this term. From the Japanese shinrin-yoku, it means to soak in the atmosphere of a forest. And I think it’s not too far of an overstatement to say that a walk in Nature is about the closest to a miracle cure we have. There appear to be myriad benefits from simply spending time in Nature. As my sister put it, if it was a drug we’d be prescribing it.

Though we didn’t call it forest bathing at the time it’s definitely some of my happiest memories, like here, here, here, here, and here.

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Forest bathing