Top 180 Daniel H. Pink Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “Mastery of design, empathy, play, and other seemingly “soft” aptitudes is now the main way for individuals and firms to stand out in a crowded marketplace.”

— Daniel H. Pink

104. “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.”

— Daniel H. Pink

105. “I call time-outs like these “vigilance breaks” – brief pauses before high-stakes encounters to review instructions and guard against error.”

— Daniel H. Pink

106. “Breaks are not a sign of sloth but a sign of strength.”

— Daniel H. Pink

107. “By neglecting the ingredients of genuine motivation – autonomy, mastery, and purpose – they limit what each of us can achieve.”

— Daniel H. Pink

108. “This is what it means to serve: improving another’s life and, in turn, improving the world.”

— Daniel H. Pink

109. “We know – if we’ve spent time with young children or remember ourselves at our best – that we’re not destined to be passive and compliant. 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

110. “In the new world of sales, being able to ask the right questions is more valuable than producing the right answers. Unfortunately, our schools often have the opposite emphasis. They teach us how to answer, but not how to ask.”

— Daniel H. Pink

111. “Being a professional,” Julius Erving once said, “is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.”

— Daniel H. Pink

112. “The less evidence of extrinsic motivation during art school, the more success in professional art both several years after graduation and nearly twenty years later.”

— Daniel H. Pink

113. “Bezos includes one more chair that remains empty. It’s there to remind those assembled who’s really the most important person in the room: the customer.”

— Daniel H. Pink

114. “Empathy is an essential part of living a life of meaning.”

— Daniel H. Pink

115. “People born in the fall and winter are more likely to be larks;.”

— Daniel H. Pink

116. “Temporal landmarks slow our thinking, allowing us to deliberate at a higher level and make better decisions.”

— Daniel H. Pink

117. “We often understand something better when we see it in comparison with something else than when we see it in isolation.”

— Daniel H. Pink

118. “The best predictor of success, the researchers found, was the prospective cadets’ ratings on a noncognitive, nonphysical trait known as “grit.”

— Daniel H. Pink

119. “E-mail response time is the single best predictor of whether employees are satisfied with their boss, according to research by Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociologist who is now a principal researcher for Microsoft Research. The longer it takes for a boss to respond to their e-mails, the less satisfied people are with their leader.1.”

— Daniel H. Pink

120. “Jobs that offer autonomy but little challenge bore us.”

— Daniel H. Pink

121. “Despite its greater sophistication and higher aspirations, Motivation 2.0 still wasn’t exactly ennobling. It suggested that, in the end, human beings aren’t much different from livestock – that the way to get us moving in the right direction is by dangling a crunchier carrot or wielding a sharper stick. But what this operating system lacked in enlightenment, it made up for in effectiveness. It worked well – extremely well. Until it didn’t. As.”

— Daniel H. Pink

122. “And the first step in bulldozing these obstacles is to enumerate them. As Peters puts it, “What you decide not to do is probably more important than what you decide to do.”

— Daniel H. Pink

123. “In the middle, we relax our standards, perhaps because others relax their assessments.”

— Daniel H. Pink

124. “The Power of Breaks, the Promise of Lunch, and the Case for a Modern Siesta.”

— Daniel H. Pink

125. “Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others – sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on – can sometimes have dangerous side effects.”

— Daniel H. Pink

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

— Daniel H. Pink

127. “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.”

— Daniel H. Pink

128. “Does your boss allow you to do your best work?”

— Daniel H. Pink

129. “He preserved the union and freed the slaves.”

— Daniel H. Pink

130. “Motivation is deeply personal and only you know what words or images will resonate with you.”

— Daniel H. Pink

131. “The most successful people, the evidence shows, often aren’t directly pursuing conventional notions of success. 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.”

— Daniel H. Pink

132. “If you believed in the “mediocrity of the masses,” as he put it, then mediocrity became the ceiling on what you could achieve.”

— Daniel H. Pink

133. “Afternoons are the Bermuda Triangles of our days. Across many domains, the trough represents a danger zone for productivity, ethics, and health.”

— Daniel H. Pink

134. “Jobs that are demanding but don’t offer autonomy burn us out.”

— Daniel H. Pink

135. “What an individual does day to day on the job now must stretch across functional boundaries. Designers analyze. Analysts design. Marketers create. Creators market.”

— Daniel H. Pink

136. “Now, once a quarter, the company sets aside an entire day when its engineers can work on any software problem they want – only this time, “to get them out of the day to day,” it must be something that’s not part of their regular job.”

— Daniel H. Pink

137. “Montessori Schools. Dr. Maria Montessori developed the Montessori method of teaching in the early 1900s after observing children’s natural curiosity and innate desire to learn.”

— Daniel H. Pink

138. “99 percent of us cannot multitask.”

— Daniel H. Pink

139. “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.”

— Daniel H. Pink

140. “We’ve always taken the position that money is only something you can lose on,” Cannon-Brookes told me. “If you don’t pay enough, you can lose people. But beyond that, money is not a motivator.”

— Daniel H. Pink

141. “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.”

— Daniel H. Pink

142. “That sleepless guy wasn’t a hero. He was a fool.”

— Daniel H. Pink

143. “For routine tasks, which aren’t very interesting and don’t demand much creative thinking, rewards can provide a small motivational booster shot without the harmful side effects.”

— Daniel H. Pink

144. “There’s no going back. Pay your son to take out the trash – and you’ve pretty much guaranteed the kid will never do it again for free.”

— Daniel H. Pink

145. “The longer it takes for a boss to respond to their e-mails, the less satisfied people are with their leader.”

— Daniel H. Pink

146. “Wikipedia’s triumph seems to defy the laws of behavioral physics.”

— Daniel H. Pink

147. “Meanwhile, instead of restraining negative behavior, rewards and punishments can often set it loose – and give rise to cheating, addiction, and dangerously myopic thinking.”

— Daniel H. Pink

148. “Today, the defining skills of the previous era – the “left brain” capabilities that powered the Information Age – are necessary but no longer sufficient. And the capabilities we once disdained or thought frivolous – the “right-brain” qualities of inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness, and meaning – increasingly will determine who flourishes and who flounders.”

— Daniel H. Pink

149. “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.”

— Daniel H. Pink

150. “This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.”

— Daniel H. Pink