Quotes from Daniel H. Pink

What you decide not to do is probably more important than what you decide to do.

The purpose of a pitch isn't necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea. The purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you.

High performers, its research concludes, work for fifty-two minutes and then break for seventeen minutes.

We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathic, big-picture capabilities of what's rising in its place, the Conceptual Age.

When feeling is for thinking and thinking is for doing, regret is for making us better.

if we stick with a task too long, we lose sight of the goal

The science shows that the secret to high performance isn't our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to make a contribution.

change is inevitable, and when it happens, the wisest response is not to wail or whine but to suck it up and deal with

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.

coffee, followed by a nap of ten to twenty minutes, is the ideal technique

Have you ever seen a six-month-old or a three-year-old who's not curious and self-directed? I haven't. That's how we are out of the box.

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.*

A calling is the most satisfying form of work because, as gratification, it is done for its own sake rather than for the material benefits it brings

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.

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.

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.

A few of us are extraverts. A few of us are introverts. But most of us are ambiverts, sitting near the middle, not the edges, happily attuned to those around us. In some sense, we are born to sell.

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.

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.

Breaks are not a sign of sloth but a sign of strength

A look at the research shows that regret, handled correctly, offers three broad benefits. It can sharpen our decision-making skills. It can elevate our performance on a range of tasks. And it can strengthen our sense of meaning and connectedness.

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.

Connection regrets are the largest category in the deep structure of human regret.

Sales and theater have much in common. Both take guts. Salespeople pick up the phone and call strangers; actors walk onto the stage in front of them. Both invite rejection—for salespeople, slammed doors, ignored calls, and a pile of nos; for actors, a failed audition, an unresponsive audience, a scathing review. And both have evolved along comparable trajectories.