A Quote by Alfie Kohn

If I offered you a thousand dollars to take off your shoes, you'd very likely accept--and then I could triumphantly announce that 'rewards work.' But as with punishments, they can never help someone develop a *commitment* to a task or action, a reason to keep doing it when there's no longer a payoff.

Alfie Kohn

Quote Topics

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Quote Author

Alfie Kohn
American - Author
Born: October 15, 1957

Years of research in psychology has shown that rewards and punishments can be very effective in changing behavior. But, at the same time, they can create an addiction to rewards and punishments.

Barry Schwartz

The object of rewards is to encourage; that of punishments, to prevent. If rewards are high, then what the ruler wants will be quickly effected; if punishments are heavy, what he does not want will be swiftly prevented.

Han Fei

To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I'd like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year?

Steve Jobs

Nature is not affected by finance. If someone offered you ten thousand dollars to let them touch your eyeball without blinking, you would never collect the money. At the very last moment, Nature would force you to blink your eye. Nature will protect her own.

Dick Gregory

Often, the more reliably you perform a task, the less likely it is for someone to notice that you're doing it and to feel grateful and to feel any impulse to help or to take a turn.

Gretchen Rubin

Not only do I disbelieve in the need for compensation, but I believe that the seeking for rewards and punishments out of this lifeleads men to a ruinous ignorance of the fact that their inevitable rewards and punishments are here.

Thomas Huxley

Follow your interests, get the best available education and training, set your sights high, be persistent, be flexible, keep your options open, accept help when offered, and be prepared to help others.

Mildred Dresselhaus

The kids know what I'm doing when I exercise, and that's powerful. So don't just tell your kids to go play outside. Take a moment off your computer, put on your tennis shoes, hop outside and help them start their game and run off some energy.

Summer Sanders

USE COMMON SENSE. If somebody offers you a thousand dollars for this book, chances are their motives are not pure. Then again, a thousand dollars is a lot of money. Take the money and run.

Pseudonymous Bosch

If you aren’t where you want to be or you haven’t achieved all you hope to achieve, the reason most likely resides not around you but within you. Take responsibility and then take action.

Nick Vujicic

If you put on shoes that are too tight and walk out across an empty plain, you will not feel the freedom of the place unless you take off your shoes. Your shoe-constriction has you confined. At night before sleeping you take off the tight shoes, and your soul releases into a place it knows. Dreams glide deeper.

Rumi

If you want to be an artist, you have to know that art is an ongoing practice, that you're part of a long line. Take this test: if someone offered you a billion dollars, but you could never draw another illustration or write another word, would you take it? If you reject it, you need to find another way to pay the bills, but you're still an artist.

Nicole Georges

Once you envision something and the Universal forces come into play to help you in the creation of it, there's never again going to be enough action for you to keep up with it. You can't use the Energy that creates worlds to create a situation and then find the action to keep up with it. You have to keep envisioning. You have to keep imagining it better.

Esther Hicks

The whole reason Pinterest exists is to help people discover the things that they love and then go take action on them, and a lot of the things they take action on are tied to commercial intent.