Top 180 Daniel H. Pink Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “If you create something, whether it’s a painting or a company, I think if you care about it, you have some obligation to go out and tell people about it.”

— Daniel H. Pink

52. “A world of flat organizations and tumultuous business conditions – and that’s our world – punishes fixed skills and prizes elastic ones.”

— Daniel H. Pink

53. “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.”

— Daniel H. Pink

54. “A lot of white-collar work requires less of the routine, rule-based, what we might call algorithmic set of capabilities, and more of the harder-to-outsource, harder-to-automate, non-routine, creative, juristic – as the scholars call it – abilities.”

— Daniel H. Pink

55. “Human beings are natural mimickers. The more youre conscious of the other sides posture, mannerisms, and word choices – and the more you subtly reflect those back – the more accurate youll be at taking their perspective.”

— Daniel H. Pink

56. “Typically, if you reward something, you get more of it. You punish something, you get less of it. And our businesses have been built for the last 150 years very much on that kind of motivational scheme.”

— Daniel H. Pink

57. “Do what you can’t and experience the beauty of the mistakes you make.”

— Daniel H. Pink

58. “In economic terms, we’ve always thought of work as a disutility – as something you do to get something else. Now it’s increasingly a utility – something that’s valuable and worthy in its own right.”

— Daniel H. Pink

59. “I think people get satisfaction from living for a cause that’s greater than themselves. They want to leave an imprint. By writing books, I’m trying to do that in a modest way.”

— Daniel H. Pink

60. “So get rid of the unnecessary obligations, time-wasting distractions, and useless burdens that stand in your way.”

— Daniel H. Pink

61. “Create some psychological space between you and your project by imagining you’re doing it for someone else or contemplating what advice you’d give to another person in your predicament.”

— Daniel H. Pink

62. “The misuse of extrinsic rewards, so common in business, impedes creativity, stifles personal satisfaction and turns play into work.”

— Daniel H. Pink

63. “Carry a notebook and write down examples of good and poor design. After a week, you’ll begin to realize that nearly everything is the product of a design decision.”

— Daniel H. Pink

64. “Financial firms are sending their back-office jobs overseas. But what do fine artists do? They create something new, unexpected, and delightful that changes the world. MFA abilities are harder to outsource and more important in an abundant world.”

— Daniel H. Pink

65. “When the reward is the activity itself – deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one’s best – there are no shortcuts. The only route to the destination is the high road. In some sense, it’s impossible to act unethically because the person who’s disadvantaged isn’t a competitor but yourself.”

— Daniel H. Pink

66. “I think the more important task for a young person than developing a personal brand is figuring out what she’s great at, what she loves to do, and how she can use that to leave an imprint in the world. Those are tough questions, but essential ones. Answer those – and the personal brand follows.”

— Daniel H. Pink

67. “Experimentalists never know when their work is finished.”

— Daniel H. Pink

68. “It’s a question we all ask ourselves. What have we done lately? It rattles us each birthday.”

— Daniel H. Pink

69. “Tens of millions of people have iPods, whereas eight years ago, they didn’t know they were missing them.”

— Daniel H. Pink

70. “My generation’s parents told their children, ‘Become an accountant, a lawyer, or an engineer; that will give you a solid foothold in the middle class.’ But these jobs are now being sent overseas. So in order to make it today, you have to do work that’s hard to outsource, hard to automate.”

— Daniel H. Pink

71. “We live in a world of breathtaking material plenty. That has freed hundreds of millions of people from day-to-day struggles and liberated us to pursue more significant desires: purpose, transcendence, and spiritual fulfillment.”

— Daniel H. Pink

72. “Hire good people, and leave them alone.”

— Daniel H. Pink

73. “Studying design has made me a much, much more astute observer of this aspect of business. And I’m working mightily to improve my empathic skills. I’ve dramatically improved my ability to read facial expressions – and I’m trying to be a better, more attentive listener.”

— Daniel H. Pink

74. “We’re designed to be active and engaged. And we know that the richest experiences in our lives aren’t when we’re clamoring for validation from others, but when we’re listening to our own voice-doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause larger than ourselves.”

— Daniel H. Pink

75. “In the past thirty years we have learned more about the workings of the human brain than in all of previous history.”

— Daniel H. Pink

76. “Now it’s easy for someone to set up a storefront and reach the entire world in very modest ways. So these technologies that we thought would dis-intermediate traditional sellers gave more people the tools to be sellers. It also changed the balance of power between sellers and buyers.”

— Daniel H. Pink

77. “A lot of times when you have very short-term goals with a high payoff, nasty things can happen. In particular, a lot of people will take the low road there. They’ll become myopic. They’ll crowd out the longer-term interests of the organization or even of themselves.”

— Daniel H. Pink

78. “I tend to pull nuggets out of many books – rather than having a handful of books that serve as guiding lights.”

— Daniel H. Pink

79. “If we know what we truly regret, we know what we truly value.”

— Daniel H. Pink

80. “There’s an idea out there that salespeople have actually been obliterated by the Internet, which is just not supported by the facts.”

— Daniel H. Pink

81. “Here’s Ohga: “At Sony, we assume that all products of our competitors have basically the same technology, price, performance, and features. Design is the only thing that differentiates one product from another in the marketplace.”

— Daniel H. Pink

82. “Pitches that rhyme are more sublime.”

— Daniel H. Pink

83. “Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks prearranged. This is because they accept all offers made.”9.”

— Daniel H. Pink

84. “Each of us has a “chronotype” – a personal pattern of circadian rhythms that influences our physiology and psychology.”

— Daniel H. Pink

85. “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story. – ORSON WELLES.”

— Daniel H. Pink

86. “Management isn’t about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices,” he told me. It’s about creating conditions for people to do their best work.”

— Daniel H. Pink

87. “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.”

— Daniel H. Pink

88. “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.”

— Daniel H. Pink

89. “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.”

— Daniel H. Pink

90. “Why reach for something you can never fully attain? But it’s also a source of allure. Why not reach for it? The joy is in the pursuit more than the realization. In the end, mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.”

— Daniel H. Pink

91. “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.”

— Daniel H. Pink

92. “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.”

— Daniel H. Pink

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

— Daniel H. Pink

94. “Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.” – PAOLA ANTONELLI, curator of architecture and design, Museum of Modern Art.”

— Daniel H. Pink

95. “Every circumstance in which we try to move others by definition involves another human being. Yet in the name of professionalism, we often neglect the human element and adopt a stance that’s abstract and distant.”

— Daniel H. Pink

96. “Design – that is, utility enhanced by significance – has become an essential aptitude for personal fulfillment and professional success.”

— Daniel H. Pink

97. “Vigilance breaks prevent deadly mistakes. Restorative breaks enhance performance. Lunches and naps help us elude the trough and get more and better work done in the afternoon. A growing body of science makes it clear: Breaks are not a sign of sloth but a sign of strength.”

— Daniel H. Pink

98. “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.”

— Daniel H. Pink

99. “Rewards do not undermine people’s intrinsic motivation for dull tasks because there is little or no intrinsic motivation to be undermined.”

— Daniel H. Pink

100. “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.”

— Daniel H. Pink