And so, by feeling more productive on work, you're more excited about it.
You want to think about it a lot more.
And like you said, by thinking through things,
you start making connections between things much more easily.
>> Right. >> The other thing that it gives you is
a lot more things to think about.
And so, for example, if you're writing a paper,
you can write an introduction to a paper, or while you're writing any kind of paper.
If you're stuck, you don't have much to think about.
If you just free your mind and write, you have a lot of things to think about and
piece together and change in your mind when you're driving home.
Or those moments that, yeah,
you just have free time to think about what you are working on.
>> Yeah, and in fact- >> What I think is actually,
it's one of the findings that I really like from your work,
is this perverse consequence of incentivizing people to be creative.
Because it locks people up.
>> Yeah. >> And it sort of has the opposite effect.
>> Exactly, and then what we, this early research, and
we're still doing some followup experiments.
But what we find is if you pay people just to be productive, they might not
necessarily be more creative than people that we pay for creative immediately.
But when we bring them back for follow up studies, they actually give us much more
creative work on the task that they were working on than if we don't pay people for
performance, than if we pay people for creativity.
And so, it actually seems to,
just being productive can drive kind of future creative insights.
>> Yeah, and that actually fits other work I know of suggesting that, for example,
professors who are the most creative and
impactful also produce the most articles, right?
>> Absolutely. >> They sort of value being prolific.
>> Absolutely.
>> Just getting stuff out there.
>> Absolutely.
>> On the chance that something will be good, right?
>> Yeah, exactly.
And if you just free yourself up to not worry about hitting a home run article
every single time,
if you just kind of make progress on things, all of a sudden an article 30 and
article 45 can be combined together to this really nice insight.
Where, if you aren't producing those,
you wouldn't have that available in your mind to put together and piece together.
>> Great, well, thanks, Michael.
That's a really interesting, and I think useful, perspective.
And sort of fits with the theme that if you want to be creative you've gotta put
in the work, so- >> Absolutely.
>> Thank you. >> Thank you.
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