Quotes from Daniel H. Pink

Moral regrets are a peculiar category. They are the smallest in number, yet the greatest in variety. They are the most individually painful.

Alas, at the heart of private legal practice is perhaps the most autonomy-crushing mechanism imaginable: the billable hour. Most lawyers—and nearly all lawyers in large, prestigious firms—must keep scrupulous track, often in six-minute increments, of their time. If they fail to bill enough hours, their jobs are in jeopardy. As a result, their focus inevitably veers from the output of their work (solving a client's problem) to its input (piling up as many hours as possible

The goal here is to recognize that slow-moving when problems have all the gravity of fast-moving what calamities—and deserve the same collective response.

All deep structure regrets reveal a need and yield a lesson. With moral regrets, the need is goodness. The lesson, which we've heard in religious texts, philosophy tracts, and parental admonitions, is this: when in doubt, do the right thing.

Dishonest dealings tend to drive honest dealings out of the market," Akerlof wrote. "The presence of people who wish to pawn bad wares as good wares tends to drive out the legitimate business.

Forty-eight hours without flow plunged people into a state eerily similar to a serious psychiatric disorder. The experiment suggests that flow, the deep sense of engagement that Motivation 3.0 calls for, isn't a nicety. It's a necessity. We need it to survive. It is the oxygen of the soul.

The U.S. private sector employs three times as many salespeople as all fifty state governments combined employ people. If the nation's salespeople lived in a single state, that state would be the fifth-largest in the United States.

They're working hard and persisting through difficulties because of their internal desire to control their lives, learn about their world, and accomplish something that endures.

Clarity depends on contrast. In

Children careen from one flow moment to another, animated by a sense of joy, equipped with a mindset of possibility, and working with the dedication of a West Point cadet. They use their brains and their bodies to probe and draw feedback from the environment in an endless pursuit of mastery. Then—at some point in their lives—they don't. What happens? "You start to get ashamed that what you're doing is childish," Csikszentmihalyi explained.

Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation," they determined. "When institutions—families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example—focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people's behavior," they do considerable long-term damage.3

I could instead launch an Expedia-for-the-regretful site, which would include special travel packages for the legions of college graduates in the surveys who regretted not studying abroad.

But unless carefully managed and contained, self-criticism can become a form of inner-directed virtue signaling. It projects toughness and ambition, but often leads to rumination and hopelessness instead of productive action.[

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."4

The best predictor of success, the researchers found, was the prospective cadets' ratings on a noncognitive, non-physical trait known as "grit"—defined as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals."10 The experience of these army officers-in-training confirms the second law of mastery: Mastery is a pain.

The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. But once we've cleared the table, carrots and sticks can achieve precisely the opposite of their intended aims.

One of the most enduring scenes in American literature offers an important lesson in human motivation. In Chapter 2 of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom faces the dreary task of whitewashing Aunt Polly's 810-square-foot fence. He's not

But the most effective self-talk of all doesn't merely shift emotions. It shifts linguistic categories. It moves from making statements to asking questions.

Symphony is largely about relationships. People who hope to thrive in the Conceptual Age must understand the connections between diverse, and seemingly separate, disciplines. They must know how to link apparently unconnected elements to create something new. And they must become adept at analogy—at seeing one thing in terms of another.

By offering a reward, a principal signals to the agent that the task is undesirable.

Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation

And by diminishing intrinsic motivation, they can send performance, creativity, and even upstanding behavior toppling like dominoes. Let's call this the Sawyer Effect.a A sampling of intriguing experiments around the world reveals the four realms where this effect

The better strategy is to get compensation right—and then get it out of sight. Effective organizations compensate people in amounts and in ways that allow individuals to mostly forget about compensation and instead focus on the work itself.

Physicians sell patients on a remedy. Lawyers sell juries on a verdict. Teachers sell students on the value of paying attention in class. Entrepreneurs woo funders, writers sweet-talk producers, coaches cajole players. Whatever our profession, we deliver presentations to fellow employees and make pitches to new clients. We try to convince the boss to loosen up a few dollars from the budget or the human resources department to add more vacation days.