people built many more Bionicles -- eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition.

not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.

the people who love Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that's actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.

What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero -- there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people's eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.

if you understood how important meaning is, then you would figure out that it's actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting people to care more about what they're doing.

ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes.

by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying "Uh huh," that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people's motivations.

 What they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, "Here is my cake." No, it was somebody else's cake, as if you bought it in the store. It didn't really feel like your own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder.

the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami

they were willing to pay five times more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally.

Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world in their view. They thought everybody else would love it more as well.

when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it -- meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.