Quotes from Daniel H. Pink

Taking a Sagmeister," as I now call it, requires a fair bit of planning and saving, of course. But doesn't forgoing that big-screen TV seem a small price to pay for an unforgettable—and un-get-backable—year of personal exploration?

Think of this book as a new genre altogether—a when-to book.

Design—that is, utility enhanced by significance—has become an essential aptitude for personal fulfillment and professional success

The less evidence of extrinsic motivation during art school, the more success in professional art both several years after graduation and nearly twenty years later.

Wikipedia represents the most powerful new business model of the twenty-first century: open source.

Despite its greater sophistication and higher aspirations, Motivation 2.0 still wasn't exactly ennobling. It suggested that, in the end, human beings aren't much different from livestock—that the way to get us moving in the right direction is by dangling a crunchier carrot or wielding a sharper stick. But what this operating system lacked in enlightenment, it made up for in effectiveness. It worked well—extremely well. Until it didn't. As

management—not merely how bosses treat us at work, but also how the broader ethos has leached into schools, families, and many other aspects of our lives.

economic accomplishment, not to mention personal fulfillment, more often swings on a different hinge. It depends not on keeping our nature submerged but on allowing it to surface. It requires resisting the temptation to control people—and instead doing everything we can to reawaken their deep-seated sense of autonomy.

Ponder that humble toaster. The typical person uses a toaster at most 15 minutes per day. The remaining 1,425 minutes of the day the toaster is on display. In other words, 1 percent of the toaster's time is devoted to utility, while 99 percent is devoted to significance. Why shouldn't it be beautiful, especially when you can buy a good-looking one for less than forty bucks?

According to the research, the most effective executives deployed humor twice as often as middle-of-the-pack managers.

if we watch how people's brains respond, promising them monetary rewards and giving them cocaine, nicotine, or amphetamines look disturbingly similar.

Said a forty-eight-year-old Ohio man: I regret not being more adventurous . . . taking time to travel, explore, and experience more of what the world has to offer. I let the fear of disappointment rule me and allowed others' expectations to be more important than my own. I was always the "good soldier" and worked hard to please those around me. I have a good life—I just wish I had more experiences to share with others. Someday . .

Indeed, one of design's most potent economic effects is this very capacity to create new markets—whether for ring tones, cutensils, photovoltaic cells, or medical devices.

and, in its own sweet way, more beautiful than we realize. The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness.

Moral regrets make up the smallest of the four categories in the deep structure of regret, representing only about 10 percent of the total regrets. But for many of us, these regrets ache the most and last the longest. They are also more complex than the other core regrets.

The most telling demonstration of this point came from several dozen people from all over the world who described their regret—their failure to be bold—with the same five words: "Not being true to myself.

The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness.

The value of a life can be measured by one's ability to affect the destiny of one less advantaged. Since death is an absolute certainty for everyone, the important variable is the quality of life one leads between the times of birth and death.

Take this fifty-three-year-old Californian: I regret not coming out as a gay man sooner. It definitely impacted how I showed up and my performance and connectedness with my colleagues.

The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness. It has helped our species evolve, lifted our living standards, and enhanced our daily lives. The capacity to sell isn't some unnatural adaptation to the merciless world of commerce. It is part of who we are. As you're about to see, if I've moved you to turn the page, selling is fundamentally human.

DESIGN IS a high-concept aptitude that is difficult to outsource or automate—and that increasingly confers a competitive advantage in business.

I used to believe that the best way to overcome a bad start at work, at school, or at home was to shake it off and move on. Now I believe the better approach is to start again or start together.

I used to believe in the value of happy endings. Now I believe that the power of endings rests not in their unmitigated sunniness but in their poignancy and meaning.

much of what we assume are "natural" units of time are really fences our ancestors constructed in order to corral time. Seconds, hours, and weeks are all human inventions.