Tony Hsieh: Yeah, on average it’s about 2 or 3% of people take it. ... We started this a few years ago and it actually started out at $100 dollars and we keep actually upping the offer.  It’s at $2,000 now and actually at the end of the training, which is 4 weeks we up it to $3,000 and extend it beyond that and we keep upping it because we feel like not enough people are taking it and the original motivation was to get people that...  We don’t want people at Zappos that are there just for a paycheck.  Is this a company whose culture I want to be a part of and contribute to and when they decide to turn down the easy money when they come back to the office on Monday they’re that much more passionate and engaged and committed and that has been by far, the biggest benefit.

In one of his recent presentations, Frans Johansson explained why groundbreaking innovators generate and execute far more ideas than their counterparts. After watching his presentation The Secret Truth About Executing Great Ideas, my thoughts began to surface about how meaningful the presentation was regardless of a persons industry, culture, field or discipline. Anyone can come up with an amazing idea but how you execute the idea will determine your success.

Here are the top five reasons why being a “jack of all trades,” what I prefer to call a “generalist,” is making a comeback:

We've been conditioned to think that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is through external rewards like money or fame, or by the fear of punishment - the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, Daniel H. Pink says in his transformative new book. The key to high performance and satisfaction is intrinsic, internal motivation: the desire to follow your own interests and understand the benefits in them for you. In Drive, Pink lays out the hard science for these surprising insights; describes how people and corporations can embrace them; offers details about how we can master them; and provides concrete examples of how intrinsic motivation works on the job, at home and in ourselves.

Self-actualization is a term that has been used in various psychology theories, often in slightly different ways (e.g., Goldstein, Maslow, Rogers). The term was originally introduced by the organismic theorist Kurt Goldstein for the motive to realize one's full potential. In his view, it is the master motive—indeed, the only real motive a person has, all others being merely manifestations of it. However, the concept was brought to prominence in Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory as the final level of psychological development that can be achieved when all basic and mental needs are fulfilled and the "actualisation" of the full personal potential takes place.

In 2008, full-time blogger and entrepreneur Chris Guillebeau published a report called 'A Brief Guide to World Domination' on his blog. It outlined a plan to take over the world through individuals doing what is most meaningful to them while serving others in a unique way. Within weeks it was downloaded more that 100,000 times in 60 countries. Here Guillebeau expands on his ideas and challenges common assumptions about how people should live and work, motivating readers to create their own ideal life - working harder than they ever have on work that they really love.

Many of the iPhone games I’ve played include achievements as well, and they certainly make you look at a game differently: This time when I play, I’ll go as fast as possible to get a "shortest time" achievement. And then I’ll play it slowly to make sure I get all the coins for another achievement. Next I’ll work on killing all the bad guys. Usually the achievements are set up so that there’s no way you can get all of them your first time through -- they require different types of gameplay and strategy, many of which won’t actually move you toward the actual goal of the game.

All those reading incentive campaigns inflicted on elementary school children across the country provide sobering evidence of just how many parents and educators are trapped by Skinnerian thinking.  They also illustrate the consequences of extrinsic motivators more generally.  Asked about the likely results of "Book It!", Pizza Hut's food-for-reading program, educational psychologist John Nicholls replied, only half in jest, that it would probably produce "a lot of fat kids who don't like to read."

Comedian Harry Hill discusses his unusual paintings: "Being an artist is a higher calling than a comedian, because the comedian has to respond to his or her audience. In comedy I've had many jokes which I thought were really funny, but if the audience doesn't laugh, you end up having to drop them. An artist can do what he or she likes. You may not sell many paintings, but you're still an artist."

"A realization has been dawning on me as of late, one that I’ve always known, but that is easy to forget, easy to misplace, easy to neglect. The best way to learn anything is to do it, to struggle through, to forge on, to fight and gnash teeth and curse at. There is no knowledge as highly regarded as that which you have to work for."

"If you’re like me, there are times when you get so excited about learning something new that you spend a day or two on it non-stop, only to get tired of it and move on to something else. [...] When trying to develop a new skill, the important thing isn’t how much you do; it’s how often you do it."