Quotes from Daniel H. Pink

If you're an educator, know that all times are not created equal:

99 percent of us cannot multitask.

Say it with me now, brothers and sisters: Lunch is the most important meal

Management isn't about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices

autonomy over four aspects of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and whom they do it with. As Atlassian's experience shows, Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T's: their task, their time, their technique, and their team.

Anytime you're tempted to upsell someone else, stop what you're doing and upserve instead. Don't try to increase what they can do for you. Elevate what you can do for them.

People born in the fall and winter are more likely to be larks;

The most fulfilling jobs share a common trait: They prod us to work at our highest level but in a way that we, not someone else, control.

Rewards can deliver a short-term boost—just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off—and, worse, can reduce a person's longer-term motivation to continue the project.

In a world where anybody can find anything with just a few keystrokes, intermediaries like salespeople are superfluous. They merely muck up the gears of commerce and make transactions slower and more expensive.

Carrots & sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery & purpose.

I call time-outs like these "vigilance breaks"—brief pauses before high-stakes encounters to review instructions and guard against error.

Report cards are not a potential prize, but a way to offer students useful feedback on their progress. And Type I students understand that a great way to get feedback is to evaluate their own progress.

In fact, the business school professors suggest they should come with their own warning label: Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.

The freedom they have to do great work is more valuable, and harder to match, than a pay raise—and employees' spouses, partners, and families are among ROWE's staunchest advocates.

In the past, work was defined primarily by putting in time, and secondarily on getting results. We need to flip that model," Ressler told me. "No matter what kind of business you're in, it's time to throw away the tardy slips, time clocks, and outdated industrial-age thinking.

researchers have found that extraversion has "no statistically significant relationship . . . with sales performance

Only 1 percent of our respondents said that they never engage in such behavior—and fewer than 17 percent do it rarely. Meanwhile, about 43 percent report doing it frequently or all the time. In all, a whopping 82 percent say that this activity is at least occasionally part of their lives, making Americans far more likely to experience regret than they are to floss their teeth.[17]

But the most common negative emotion—and the second most common emotion of any kind—was regret. The only emotion mentioned more often than regret was love.

take meaningful restorative breaks

The problem is that our corporate, government, and education cultures are configured for the 75 or 80 percent of people who are larks or third birds. Owls are like left-handers in a right-handed world—forced to use scissors and writing desks and catcher's mitts designed for others. How they respond is the final piece of the puzzle in divining the rhythms of the day.

Each of us has a "chronotype"—a personal pattern of circadian rhythms that influences our physiology and psychology.

Hire good people, and leave them alone.

Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it. It would be an impoverished existence if you were not willing to value things and commit yourself to working toward them.