Sublime

Not surprisingly, people who seem to do well in this world are ones who do not fit into the traditional organizational structures; they are difficult to hire and manage because they do not rely on traditional symbols of power, such as organizational titles, monetary rewards, and command of large departments. They are driven by intrinsic motivations

Drucker preached this idea of knowledge worker autonomy throughout his long career. As late as 1999, he still emphasized its importance: [Knowledge work] demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.

the new ABCs—Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the American economy has more than twenty-one million “non-employer” businesses—operations without any paid employees. These include everything from electricians to computer consultants to graphic designers. Although these microenterprises account for only a modest portion of America’s gross domestic product,

They apply their extraordinary abilities in ordinary ways, mastering their jobs without questioning defaults and without making waves. In every domain they enter, they play it safe by following the conventional paths to success.

In the early 1970s, psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan developed a concept called self-determination theory that forever changed how the scientific community viewed motivation. Deci and Ryan found that, contrary to common wisdom (both then and, to a large extent, now), one’s drive to pursue activities is not predominantly reliant on

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi from the University of Chicago. He wrote the 1990 book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Second Machine Age, written by the MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.

Teal Organizations start from the premise that even for routine work, people have a sense of pride and want to do a good job.