Daniel H. Pink Quotes & Sayings

Create some psychological space between you and your project by imagining you're doing it for someone else or contemplating what advice you'd give to another person in your predicament. — Daniel H. Pink

Do what you can't and experience the beauty of the mistakes you make. — Daniel H. Pink

It's easy to dismiss design - to relegate it to mere ornament, the prettifying of places and objects to disguise their banality. But that is a serious misunderstanding of what design is and why it matters - especially now. — Daniel H. Pink

motivators" - things like enjoyment of the work itself, genuine achievement, and personal growth. — Daniel H. Pink

Make excellent mistakes.
Too many people spend their time avoiding mistakes. They're so concerned about being wrong, about messing up, that they never try anything
which means they never do anything. Their focus is avoiding failure. But that's actually a crummy way to achieve success. The most successful people spectacular mistakes
huge, honking screwups! why? They're trying to do something big, but each time they make a mistake, they get a little better and move a little closer to excellence.
Making mistakes seems risky. It is/ But it's more risky not to.
I'm not talking about random, stupid, thoughtless blunders, though. I'm talking about good mistakes.
Mistakes come from having high aspirations, from trying to do something nobody else has done. — Daniel H. Pink

Management isn't about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices, he told me. It's about creating conditions for people to do their best work. — Daniel H. Pink

Grades become a reward for compliance - but don't have much to do with learning. Meanwhile, students whose grades don't measure up often see themselves as failures and give up trying to learn. — Daniel H. Pink

It's not about you. It's about your customer. It's about your client. Use your strengths, yes, but remember, you're here to serve- not to self-actualize.
Of course you matter. But the most important successful people improve their own lives by improving others' lives. They help their customer solve its problem, They give their client something it doesn't know it was missing. That's where they focus their energy, talent, and brainpower.
The most valuable people in any job bring out the best in others. They make their boss look good. They help their teammates succeed. — Daniel H. Pink

In the past, work was defined primarily by putting in time, and secondarily on getting results. "We need to flip that model," Ressler told me. "No matter what kind of business you're in, it's time to throw away the tardy slips, time clocks and outdated, industrial-age thinking. — Daniel H. Pink

The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind-computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands.The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind-creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers.These people-artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers-will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys. — Daniel H. Pink

The Tinkering School. More of a lab than a school, this summer program, created by computer scientist Gever Tulley, lets children from seven to seventeen play around with interesting stuff and build cool things. — Daniel H. Pink

Policy makers and business leaders take note: money matters. But often the best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table - so that people can focus on the work rather than on the cash. — Daniel H. Pink

To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources - not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end. — Daniel H. Pink

I tend to pull nuggets out of many books - rather than having a handful of books that serve as guiding lights. — Daniel H. Pink

Finally, at every opportunity you have to move someone - from traditional sales, like convincing a prospect to buy a new computer system, to non-sales selling, like persuading your daughter to do her homework - be sure you can answer the two questions at the core of genuine service. If the person you're selling to agrees to buy, will his or her life improve? When your interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began? If the answer to either of these questions is no, you're doing something wrong. — Daniel H. Pink

In economic terms, we've always thought of work as a disutility - as something you do to get something else. Now it's increasingly a utility - something that's valuable and worthy in its own right. — Daniel H. Pink

Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else BY GEOFF COLVIN — Daniel H. Pink

The capacity for logical thought is one of the things that makes us human. But in a world of ubiquitous information and advanced analytical tools, logic alone won't do. What will distinguish those who thrive will be their ability to understand what makes their fellow woman or man tick, to forge relationships, and to care for others. — Daniel H. Pink

One of the best predictors of ultimate success in either sales or non-sales selling isn't natural talent or even industry expertise, but how you explain your failures and rejections. — Daniel H. Pink

The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization BY PETER M. SENGE — Daniel H. Pink

Extraverts, in other words, often stumble over themselves. They can talk too much and listen too little, which dulls their understanding of others' perspectives. They can fail to strike the proper balance between asserting and holding back, which can be read as pushy and drive people away.* — Daniel H. Pink

The ultimate pitch for an era of short attention spans begins with a single word - and doesn't go any further. — Daniel H. Pink

Empathy is an essential part of living a life of meaning. — Daniel H. Pink

Queston 1. "On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 meaning 'not the least bit ready' and 10 meaning "totally ready", how ready are you to study?
- After she offers her answer, move to: -
Question 2. "Why didn't you pick a lower number? — Daniel H. Pink

Once we realize that the boundaries between work and play are artificial, we can take matters in hand and begin the difficult task of making life more livable. — Daniel H. Pink

If you want people to perform better, you reward them, right? Bonuses, commissions, their own reality show. Incentivize them ... But that's not happening here. You've got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity. — Daniel H. Pink

If you believed in the "mediocrity of the masses," as he put it, then mediocrity became the ceiling on what you could achieve. — Daniel H. Pink

Money can extinguish intrinsic motivation, diminish performance, crush creativity, encourage unethical behavior, foster short-term thinking, and become addictive. — Daniel H. Pink

for some people work remains routine, unchallenging, and directed by others. But for a surprisingly large number of people, jobs have become more complex, more interesting, and more self-directed. — Daniel H. Pink

Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement. — Daniel H. Pink

Anytime you're tempted to upsell someone else, stop what you're doing and upserve instead. — Daniel H. Pink

Symphony is the ability to see the big picture, connect the dots, combine disparate things into something new. Visual artists in particular are good at seeing how the pieces come together. I experienced this myself by trying to learn to draw. — Daniel H. Pink

Questions are often more effective than statements in moving others. Or to put it more appropriately, since the research shows that when the facts are on your side, questions are more persuasive than statements, don't you think you should be pitching more with questions? — Daniel H. Pink

Harness the power of peers. — Daniel H. Pink

Most of what we know about sales comes from a world of information asymmetry, where for a very long time sellers had more information than buyers. That meant sellers could hoodwink buyers, especially if buyers did not have a lot of choices or a way to talk back. — Daniel H. Pink

Today, the defining skills of the previous era - the "left brain" capabilities that powered the Information Age - are necessary but no longer sufficient. And the capabilities we once disdained or thought frivolous - the "right-brain" qualities of inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness, and meaning - increasingly will determine who flourishes and who flounders. — Daniel H. Pink

It is springtime and I am blind ... Clarity depends on contrast - 134 — Daniel H. Pink

We live in a world of breathtaking material plenty. That has freed hundreds of millions of people from day-to-day struggles and liberated us to pursue more significant desires: purpose, transcendence, and spiritual fulfillment. — Daniel H. Pink

Think strengths, not weaknesses.
The research of Martin Seilgman and Marcus Buckingham has found that the key to success is to steer around your weaknesses and focus on your strengths. Successful people don't try to hard to improve what they're bad at. They capitalize on what they're good at.
... Think about it. What are your strengths? What do you do consistently well? What gives you energy rather than drains it? What sorts of activities create "flow" in you? (FLOW is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. )
You won't accomplish anything until you stop worrying about your weaknesses and start using your strengths! — Daniel H. Pink

One aspect of play is the importance of laughter, which has physiological and psychological benefits. Did you know that there are thousands of laughter clubs around the world? People get together and laugh for no reason at all! — Daniel H. Pink

The secret to high performance and satisfaction is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. — Daniel H. Pink

Here's why an allowance is good for kids: Having a little of their own money, and deciding how to save or spend it, offers a measure of autonomy and teaches them to be responsible with cash. Here's why household chores are good for kids: Chores show kids that families are built on mutual obligations and that family members need to help each other. Here's why combining allowances with chores is not good for kids. By linking money to the completion of chores, parents turn an allowance into an "if-then" reward. This sends kids a clear (and clearly wrongheaded) message: In the absence of a payment, no self-respecting child would willingly set the table, empty the garbage, or make her own bed. It converts a moral and familial obligation into just another commercial transaction - and teaches that the only reason to do a less-than-desirable task for your family is in exchange for payment. — Daniel H. Pink

Large companies are not going to disappear. Multinational companies with tens of thousands of employees are not going to disappear. In fact, many of them are getting larger because they can benefit from economies of scale. — Daniel H. Pink

Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing. - PAOLA ANTONELLI, curator of architecture and design, Museum of Modern Art — Daniel H. Pink

Especially for fostering creative, conceptual work, the best way to use money as a motivator is to take the issue of money off the table so people concentrate on the work. — Daniel H. Pink

Clarity depends on contrast. In — Daniel H. Pink

To reprise language from the previous chapter, the solution isn't algorithmic (following a set path) but heuristic (breaking from the path to discover a novel strategy). — Daniel H. Pink

HAVE A FEDEX DAY — Daniel H. Pink

He preserved the union and freed the slaves. — Daniel H. Pink

The freedom they have to do great work is more valuable, and harder to match, than a pay raise - and employees' spouses, partners, and families are among ROWE's staunchest advocates. — Daniel H. Pink

if-then" rewards usually do more harm than good. By neglecting the ingredients of genuine motivation - autonomy, mastery, and purpose - they limit what each of us can achieve. — Daniel H. Pink

For many of us, the opposite of talking isn't listening. It's waiting. When others speak, we typically divide our attention between what they're saying now and what we're going to say next - and end up doing a mediocre job at both. — Daniel H. Pink

A genuine smile involves two facial muscles: (1) the zygomatic major muscle, which stretches from the cheekbone and lifts the corners of the mouth; and (2) the outer part of the obicularis oculi muscle, which orbits the eye, and is involved in "pulling down the eyebrows and the skin below the eyebrows, pulling up the skin below the eye, and raising the cheeks."7 Artificial smiles involve only the zygomatic major. — Daniel H. Pink

What an individual does day to day on the job now must stretch across functional boundaries. Designers analyze. Analysts design. Marketers create. Creators market. — Daniel H. Pink

Inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capacities, to explore, and to learn. — Daniel H. Pink

Motivation 1.0 presumed that humans were biological creatures, struggling to obtain our basic needs for food, security and sex.
Motivation 2.0 presumed that humans also responded to rewards and punishments. That worked fine for routine tasks but incompatible with how we organize what we do, how we think about what we do, and how
we do what we do. We need an upgrade.
Motivation 3.0, the upgrade we now need, presumes that humans also have a drive to learn, to create, and to better the world. — Daniel H. Pink

But if you instead ask, "Can I make a great pitch?" the research has found that you provide yourself something that reaches deeper and lasts longer — Daniel H. Pink

Motivation 2.0 is similar. At its heart are two elegant and simple ideas: Rewarding an activity will get you more of it. Punishing an activity will get you less of it. — Daniel H. Pink

People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person's motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person's intrinsic motivation toward the activity. — Daniel H. Pink

Our "default setting" is to be autonomous and self-directed. Unfortunately, circumstances - including outdated notions of "management" - often conspire to change that default setting and turn us from Type I to Type X. To encourage Type I behavior, and the high performance it enables, the first requirement is autonomy. People need autonomy over task (what they do), time (when they do it), team (who they do it with), and technique (how they do it). Organizations that have found inventive, sometimes radical, ways to boost autonomy are outperforming their competitors. — Daniel H. Pink

When people aren't producing, companies typically resort to rewards or punishment. "What you haven't done is the hard work of diagnosing what the problem is. You're trying to run over the problem with a carrot or a stick," Ryan explains. That doesn't mean that SDT unequivocally opposes rewards. "Of course, they're necessary in workplaces and other settings," says Deci. "But the less salient they are made, the better. When people use rewards to motivate, that's when they're most demotivating." Instead, Deci and Ryan say we should focus our efforts on creating environments for our innate psychological needs to flourish. — Daniel H. Pink

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success BY CAROL DWECK — Daniel H. Pink

The billable hours is a classic case of restricted autonomy. I mean, you're working on - I mean, sometimes on these six-minute increments. So you're not focused on doing a good job. You're focused on hitting your numbers. It's one reason why lawyers typically are so unhappy. And I want a world of happy lawyers. — Daniel H. Pink

Not always, but a lot of the time, when you are doing a piece for someone else it becomes more "work" than joy. When I work for myself there is the pure joy of creating and I can work through the night and not even know it. On a commissioned piece you have to check yourself - be careful to do what the client wants. — Daniel H. Pink

Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art. - TWYLA THARP — Daniel H. Pink

Nobody "manages" the open source contributors. — Daniel H. Pink

Meanwhile, instead of restraining negative behavior, rewards and punishments can often set it loose - and give rise to cheating, addiction, and dangerously myopic thinking. — Daniel H. Pink

One who is interested in developing and enhancing intrinsic motivation in children, employees, students, etc., should not concentrate on external-control systems such as monetary rewards, — Daniel H. Pink

The most deeply motivated people - not to mention those who are most productive and satisfied - hitch their desires to a cause larger than themselves. Motivation — Daniel H. Pink

Harvard Business School's Teresa Amabile have found that external rewards and punishments - both carrots and sticks - can work nicely for algorithmic tasks. But they can be devastating for heuristic ones. — Daniel H. Pink

If you create something, whether it's a painting or a company, I think if you care about it, you have some obligation to go out and tell people about it. — Daniel H. Pink

It seems the best approach for any venture is a combo platter - Japan's quality-consciousness paired with America's willingness to experiment and (sometimes) fail. — Daniel H. Pink

Pitches that rhyme are more sublime. — Daniel H. Pink

The balance of power has shifted - and how we've moved from a world of caveat emptor, buyer beware, to one of caveat venditor, seller beware - where honesty, fairness, and transparency are often the only viable path. — Daniel H. Pink

The Reggio Emilia philosophy for the education of young children and the Waldorf schools. — Daniel H. Pink

Today it's economically crucial and personally rewarding to create something that is also beautiful, whimsical, or emotionally engaging. — Daniel H. Pink

Lawyers often face intense demands but have relatively little "decision latitude." Behavioral scientists use this term to describe the choices, and perceived choices, a person has. In a sense, it's another way of describing autonomy - and lawyers are glum and cranky because they don't have much of it. — Daniel H. Pink

Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate and to connect with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives. — Daniel H. Pink

In just three years, Kickstarter surpassed the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts as the largest backer of arts projects in the United States.9 — Daniel H. Pink

It's nothing short of a whole new brain ... animated by a different form of thinking and a new approach to life. — Daniel H. Pink

A lot of white-collar work requires less of the routine, rule-based, what we might call algorithmic set of capabilities, and more of the harder-to-outsource, harder-to-automate, non-routine, creative, juristic - as the scholars call it - abilities. — Daniel H. Pink

In the past thirty years we have learned more about the workings of the human brain than in all of previous history. — Daniel H. Pink

The three things that motivate creative people - autonomy, mastery, purpose! — Daniel H. Pink

Abstract thinking leads to greater creativity ... But in our businesses and our lives, we often do the opposite. We intensify our focus rather than widen our view. — Daniel H. Pink

CARROTS AND STICKS: The Seven Deadly Flaws 1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation. 2. They can diminish performance. 3. They can crush creativity. 4. They can crowd out good behavior. 5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior. 6. They can become addictive. 7. They can foster short-term thinking. — Daniel H. Pink

Tens of millions of people have iPods, whereas eight years ago, they didn't know they were missing them. — Daniel H. Pink

The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic 'right-brain' thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't. — Daniel H. Pink

The teacher showed us how to see proportions, relationships, light and shadow, negative space, and space between space - something I never noticed before! In one week, I went from not knowing how to draw to sketching a detailed portrait. It literally changed the way I see things ... — Daniel H. Pink

ingredients of genuine motivation - autonomy, mastery, and purpose - they — Daniel H. Pink

You know, I'm not a huge fan of the concept of 'passion' when it comes to careers. Instead of trying to answer the daunting question of 'What's your passion?' it's better simply to watch what you do when you've got time of your own and nobody's looking. — Daniel H. Pink

The Queen died. The King died."
"The Queen died. And the King died of a broken heart."
The first line was fact. The second line was a story. It placed the facts in context, added emotion and made us connect to it by making it memorable. — Daniel H. Pink

As Carol Dweck says, Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it. It would be an impoverished existence if you were not willing to value things and commit yourself to working toward them. — Daniel H. Pink

There's no going back. Pay your son to take out the trash - and you've pretty much guaranteed the kid will never do it again for free. — Daniel H. Pink

By offering a reward, a principal signals to the agent that the task is undesirable. (If the task were desirable, the agent wouldn't need a prod.) But that initial signal, and the reward that goes with it, forces the principal onto a path that's difficult to leave. Offer too small a reward and the agent won't comply. But offer a reward that's enticing enough to get the agent to act the first time, and the principal "is doomed to give it again in the second." There's no going back. Pay your son to take out the trash - and you've pretty much guaranteed the kid will never do it again for free. What's more, once the initial money buzz tapers off, you'll likely have to increase the payment to continue compliance. — Daniel H. Pink

And the first step in bulldozing these obstacles is to enumerate them. As Peters puts it, What you decide not to do is probably more important than what you decide to do. — Daniel H. Pink

(Of course, other animals also respond to rewards and punishments, but only humans have proved able to channel this drive to develop everything from contract law to convenience stores.) — Daniel H. Pink

... In a ROWE* people don't have schedules.
They show up when they want.
They don't have to be in the office at certain time, or anytime.
They just have to get their work done.

How they do it ?
When they do it ?
Where they do it ?
It's totally up to them.

Meetings & this kind of environments are Optional.


What happens ... ?

Almost across the board !
- Productivity goes up
- Worker Engagement goes up
- Worker Satisfaction goes up
- Turnovers goes down


- Autonomy .. Mastery .. Purpose -
these are the building blocks of new way of doing things."


*ROWE: results-only work environment — Daniel H. Pink

Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization. — Daniel H. Pink

Being a professional," Julius Erving once said, "is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them."16 — Daniel H. Pink

What do artists do? Artists give people something they didn't know they were missing: a dance, a piece of music, a painting, a piece of sculpture. Catering to that need is the best business strategy. — Daniel H. Pink