Daniel H. Pink Quotes

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.

If you look at the very best presidents, the most effective presidents, they were always decent salespeople. Ronald Reagan was an extremely effective salesman, very tuned to the people he was selling to, very clear in what he was selling, very resilient and buoyant.

Clinton was super attuned to other people to the point where he talks about feeling other people’s pain. Clinton is probably the most buoyant, resilient person in American political history.

If the only reason people are coming in and doing anything in your office is because you’re giving them a paycheck, I’m not sure you have the most productive workplace there.

It’s concerning to me when people look at the course of education as just a means for getting a job four years later. If you’re just doing this because it is going to lead to a ‘good job,’ you’re better off doing something you’re genuinely interested in.

Studying design has made me a much, much more astute observer of this aspect of business. And I’m working mightily to improve my empathic skills. I’ve dramatically improved my ability to read facial expressions – and I’m trying to be a better, more attentive listener.

There is a huge body of evidence showing that people do better in their work when they know why they’re doing it in the first place. They do better when they see what they’re doing contributes to something in the world.

What’s important now are the characteristics of the brain’s right hemisphere: artistry, empathy, inventiveness, big-picture thinking. These skills have become first among equals in a whole range of business fields.

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.

Typically, if you reward something, you get more of it. You punish something, you get less of it. And our businesses have been built for the last 150 years very much on that kind of motivational scheme.

The left-brainer and the economist in me says watch what people do, not what they say.

I think that designers and architects need to educate the people who don’t quite know what they do and make a strong case for why it’s valuable and why it changes the game. I think waiting for people to come around to it just won’t do.

The science shows that the best way to use money is to take the issue of money off the people. Pay people enough so that money isn’t an issue, and they can focus on doing great work.

In large organizations there are discrete functions. I do this; you do that. I swim in my lane; you swim in your lane. That can be very effective for certain processes and in certain stable conditions. But it doesn’t work in unstable conditions.

What entrepreneurs and artists have in common is that they give the world something it didn’t know it was missing.

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.

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.

I think people get satisfaction from living for a cause that’s greater than themselves. They want to leave an imprint. By writing books, I’m trying to do that in a modest way.

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.

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.

To some extent, the act of creation and the act of selling are hard to disentangle. 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.

I really think that in the media world that we live in now, especially for writers, it has to be a conversation. With very few exceptions, it can’t be this one-way, ‘Here I am on the mountaintop preaching to all of you great unwashed readers in hopes of saving you.’ It doesn’t work that way.

Artists should agitate and democratize their own work, but they should also work to democratize the arts themselves.

I think there are moral obligations, and I think there are economic transactions. So I think that chores are good; I think that allowances are good. I think combining them is bad.

Traditional performance reviews have passed their sell-by date. Big time. There’s research showing that roughly two-thirds of performance appraisals have either no effect – or a negative effect! – on employee performance.

In many professions, what used to matter most were abilities associated with the left side of the brain: linear, sequential, spreadsheet kind of faculties. Those still matter, but they’re not enough.

All of us can expect to live longer than any organization that we would work for. That continues apace. Human longevity is increasing; corporate longevity is decreasing.

Human beings are natural mimickers. The more you’re conscious of the other side’s posture, mannerisms, and word choices – and the more you subtly reflect those back – the more accurate you’ll be at taking their perspective.

The truth is, if we have our own reasons for doing something – reasons that we endorse – we’re more likely to do it; we’re more likely to stick with it.

People don’t know how to listen, and it’s not their fault. In school, we learn how to read, we learn how to write – but nobody teaches you how to listen.

Succeeding makes us feel good. But beating someone else makes us feel really good. Comparing ourselves to others and coming out on top creates a sense of entitlement. And when we feel entitled, we cheat more because, of course, the rules don’t apply to awesome people like us.

There’s an idea out there that salespeople have actually been obliterated by the Internet, which is just not supported by the facts.

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.