[Tom Peters] Motivate is a disgusting word

And hang him by his toes if he ever uses it, says Tom Peters! Quoting some famous sports coach on motivation, who says his players arrive motivated and he does his best to not beat the tar out of them and DEMOTIVATE them, Peters advised that we need to do the same in the workplace.

The point was that nothing in current Government education systems and the workplace necessarily encourages innovation and creativity.

In the ‘Ford Model of Education’ that the United States uses in which “we treat the student like the Ford line worker and hammer facts into their day, instead of helping them grow”, Peters went on to say that the only good thing with education is that we all start with a level playing field… “we are all awful to start with!”

“Every child is born an artist. The trick is to remain an artist,” said Picasso. Every 4-year-old child is born an inventor, artist, with an imagination. We drive it out in school, says Peters.

But, what are you going to strive for regardless? Mediocrity? Of course not. Strive for excellence, regardless of success, he urges.

His prediction is that as 40-year-olds in the US enter their first recession in their working careers, innovation goes out the window and the tendency is for people to hang onto their jobs.

Every single decision you make. Choosing a vendor, hanging out with a client, every single decision of that sort you make in your life, is an answer to the question… innovate… yes or no?

Classic Peters’ wisdom… “If you hang out with interesting people, you become more interesting!”

In fact, we were once all born entrepreneurs in the primordial soup… Peters quotes Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner and the father of micro-lending – “All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed… finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where human history began… As civilisation came, we suppressed it. We become labour because they stamped us, ‘you are labour’. We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.”