Quotes from Daniel H. Pink

They have an intuitive sense of what I call the "Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Theory of Innovation": sometimes the most powerful ideas come from simply combining two existing ideas nobody else ever thought to unite.

Cognitive neuroscientists at Drexel and Northwestern universities have found that the flashes of insight that precede "Aha!" moments are accompanied by a large burst of neural activity in the brain's right hemisphere

In several studies, Dweck found that giving children a performance goal (say, getting a high mark on a test) was effective for relatively straightforward problems but often inhibited children's ability to apply the concepts to new situations.

Regret is a retrospective emotion. It springs into being when we look backward. But we can also use it prospectively and proactively—to gaze into the future, predict what we will regret, and then reorient our behavior based on our forecast.

There is no reason to believe any longer that only irrelevant 'play' can be enjoyed, while the serious business of life must be borne as a burdensome cross. 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.

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.

Hay personas que prefieren decir "Sí", y hay otras que prefieren decir "No" —escribe Keith Johnstone—. Las que dicen "Sí" obtienen la recompensa de las aventuras que viven. Las que dicen "No" tienen su recompensa en la seguridad que obtienen.»

Puget Sound Community School. Like Sudbury and Big Picture, this tiny independent school in Seattle, Washington, gives its students a radical dose of autonomy, turning the "one size fits all" approach of conventional schools on its head.

Most inventions and breakthroughs come from reassembling existing ideas in new ways.

Down there—in the land of hadrons, quarks, and Schrödinger's cat—things get freaky.

largely metaphorical."7 In a complex world, mastery of metaphor—a whole-minded ability that some cognitive scientists have called "imaginative rationality"—has become ever more valuable

Lead with questions, not answers." "Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion." "Conduct autopsies, without blame." "Build 'red flag' mechanisms." In other words, make it easy for employees and customers to speak up when they identify a problem.

if people do things for lunk-headed, backward-looking reasons, why wouldn't we also do things for significance-seeking, self-actualizing reasons? If we are predictably irrational - and we clearly are- why couldn't we also be predictably transcendent?

in a time of abundance, when the largest rewards go to those who can devise novel and compelling creations, metaphor-making is vital.

Tell someone else about the regret in person or by phone. Include sufficient detail about what happened, but establish a time limit (perhaps a half hour) to avoid the possibilities of repetition and brooding.

Now it's time to create a "break list

Social breaks are effective

the Reggio Emilia philosophy for the education of young children and the Waldorf schools.

a particular complex of personality traits, including excessive competition drive, aggressiveness, impatience, and a harrying sense of time urgency. Individuals displaying this pattern seem to be engaged in a chronic, ceaseless, and often fruitless struggle—with themselves, with others, with circumstances, with time, sometimes with life itself.

Since roughly 90 percent of the population is right-handed, that means that in roughly 90 percent of the population, the left hemisphere is controlling important movements such as handwriting, eating, and maneuvering a computer mouse.

In the middle, we relax our standards, perhaps because others relax their assessments of us. At midpoints, for reasons that are elusive but enlightening, we cut corners—as one last experiment shows. Touré-Tillery and Fishbach also engaged other participants

Across the thirty-five studies, the correlation between extraversion and sales performance was a minuscule 0.07.)

Sit and talk about something other than work

Written language, invented by the Greeks around 550 B.C.E., has helped reinforce left hemisphere dominance (at least in the West) and created what Harvard classicist Eric Havelock called "the alphabetic mind."7 So perhaps it's no surprise, then, that the left hemisphere has dominated the game. It's the only side that knows how to write the rules.