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Daniel Pink

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2018-03-25
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2018-03-25
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  1. “Yeah, no, no. Actually, fortunately, you're right. Fortunately, he was not the only one who said that. So I abandon and actually ended up abandoning that idea in part because he was another brick-in-the-wall of people saying, no, no, no.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “For a book. And Kevin was one of the people who said, that's not a very good idea. And unfortunately, he was not the only one who said that. More fortunately.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Allows me to figure out is there a there? Is this something I really want to work on? I think a lot of things sound really good when you're just shooting the breeze. They sound less good if you have to say, can I explain this idea? Who's going to buy it? Why it's cool, why it's original, why no one else is doing it. Can I explain that in a coherent written document? That's a tougher order. And so not everything lends itself to that. And I will bounce ideas out of people. So I had, so actually, it's funny, you mentioned Kevin at the beginning of the show. I had this one idea where I went out and I went to, I made the pilgrimage to, what is it, what do you call his town, Pacifica? Pacifica. Yeah, and made the pilgrimage to Kevin's house and said, I got an idea. I want to run past you.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Me to surface any decent ideas. So I'll revisit those ideas. And then I'll call. And what often happens when I call is that a few ideas end up disstaying there over and over again every six months cycle. And then when I get to this point now, I will go back to all of those files and look more carefully and say, hey, I sort of have my mind's eye right now three possible projects. And so I'll then more heavily vet those projects, read a lot more, talk to people, bounce ideas off of people. And I like bouncing ideas off of people about which more in a moment. And then when it comes time to write a book, I will actually write a book proposal, even if I have the deal already done. So I have a two-book deal. I have to write another book, but I'll still write a proposal for this next book, maybe 40-page proposal, which allows”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Oh, yeah, no, no. I'm a GTD devotee. I'm not hardcore. I'm not orthodox, but I'm not reform either. I'm sort of like in the middle. And so anyway, I have these paper files with labels. And so when I read stuff or make notes of myself, I throw stuff in those files. I use Evernote and I also use Dropbox. And I just throw ideas in there. And then what I do is every six months or so, I go through those ideas of like, hey, this would be a cool television show to do. Hey, this would be a cool article, all right? Hey, this would be a cool book to write. And as I look at those ideas, maybe revisiting them every six months or so, I realize that most of them are just god-awful ideas. One of my beliefs about the human brain is that, or creativity is that in order to have good ideas, you have to have a lot of ideas. And so I have a lot of bad ideas, which I think is the only way.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “So, what I do is I have, I'm a sort of a, I use, I'll give you my mechanisms here. So I use, believe it or not, I use a lot of paper folders and I have a labeler. I use paper folders and a labeler to label my folders because I was like a getting things done guy before getting things done was cool I met David Allen in 1997. And I bought a labeler shortly after that.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I sort of go in cycle. So I'm actually heading to that cycle right now. So I've spent a lot of time writing this book and try to make it as good a book as I can in terms of actually spreading the word about it. I try to do that with the cliche, not leaving anything on the sidelines of doing everything I possibly can, being everywhere, being strategic about it all, trying new stuff, trying cool stuff, trying to get some momentum behind the book. And then when that sort of white hot center dissipates and the book, we hope has some momentum of its own, then I'll go back and figure out the next project, whatever that project might be. And the way I do that is I know this will shock you, Tim, in a slow, laborious way.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Yeah, when I'm writing a book, yeah, because I'm also a momentum player. So for me, writing every day is hugely important when I'm working on a book or working on a log article. So I try to do that every single day, like seven days a week.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “No, no, no. And so I'm not, you know, so I want that to be a little bit more iterative. And then I actually end up exercising later. I end up exercising later in the day and in the early evening because I find that that works best for me.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Yeah. Well, here's the thing. I'm slow in basically, I'm basically slow in every domain of my life. I'm like just, I'm a slow runner. I'm a slow reader. I'm a slow writer. I really heavily scrutinize my 23andMe report to see if I had some kind of like tortoise gene in me somewhere that somehow one of my ancestors in Latvia somehow mated with a tortoise at some point. And so,”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “I really think so. Because once they introduce that, I bought them all. And they go, oh my God, there's such demand for these hard-boiled eggs. So I actually say to my wife, I eat so many eggs is ridiculous. So I don't have a cholesterol problem fortunately. So heart-boiled eggs or peanut butter. And then what I do is when I'm in my writing day, and this is actually something I did better having read this book, when I'm on writing days, I will go to my office, which again is behind my house, and I will not bring my phone with me. I will not turn on my email, and I will give myself a quota. And that quota is usually, is a word count. So call it 700 words. I'm a fairly slow writer. So you got these people out there who are like, I got 3,000 words a day. And it's like, I don't think I've ever done that. And so”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “You know what? I probably eat more hard-boiled eggs than almost any other person in America I am keeping the hard boiled egg industry in business. I think I'm single-handedly responsible for the advent of hard-boiled eggs for sale and individually wrapped packages and airports”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “I don't have the detailed routines that you have written about that you actually have experimented with and things like journaling and meditation or anything like that. Here's what I do. I wake up, all right. I take a shower. A shower helps me wake up. So I take a shower. I go downstairs and I feel better if I see a member of my family. So whoever happens to be awake. I have two kids in college now, so I don't see them. But I have another kid who's still around. So I see him. I see my wife. And I like to have some protein for breakfast. If that's a ritual and caffeine. Protein and caffeine are my preferred breakfast.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “To fix. And it's something that at the unit of one, individuals can be a lot more systematic and intentional about moving the right work into the right time slots.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “And so, what we should be doing is, and what we're not doing is we should be making our win decisions in a strategic way rather than in the lazy haphazard way with which we tend to make our win decisions. And so, and you see this most glaringly, and this is my rant of the year, is you see this most glaringly with meetings in organizations. When we schedule meetings in organizations, the only criterion we use is availability. That's it. Who's available? We don't say what kind of meeting is this? Is this a meeting where people have to be analytical? What kind of meeting is this? Is this about travel voucher policies? What kind of meeting is this? Are we brainstorming? Who's going to be there? Are they going to be morning people? Are they going to be intermediate people? Are they going to be evening people? We don't even ask those questions. We just say, who's available? And it's causing, it's one of the easiest things organizational.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “And what the research tells us also is this. I mean, is that time of day explains about 20% of the variance in how people perform on cognitive tasks? So if you think about that, that's a big deal. Like we can explain the variant, like if Fred, if we have two people, you know, Maria and Sally, and they perform differently on cognitive tasks, how do we explain that? We say, how do we explain that variance and how people perform, you know, Maria, Sally, and 18,000 other people perform on cognitive tasks? We say, oh, some people are smarter than other people. Some people are more conscientious than other people. Some people have more social advantage than other people. But what the research is telling us that 20% of that variance is time of day.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “And so it's really important to think about that combo platter here. That is, you have higher mood but less vigilance. That makes it a good time for things like brainstorming, for things like insight work, where if you're too locked down and focused, you're not going to be that creative. And so that degree of looseness coupled with the elevated mood makes that recovery stage better for what are called insight problems, brainstorming, things that require iteration. And so what we see is that if we recognize that our cognitive abilities don't stay the same over the course of a day, that they change in predictable ways and that what we do, that when we do something depends on what we're doing, we should be moving our analytic work to the peak, our administrative work to the trough, and our insight and creative work to the recovery. And that's that.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “To drive is 4 to 6 a.m. The second most dangerous time is 2 to 4 p.m. During that midday trough, we should be doing more of our administrative work. We should be answering our routine emails. I mean, you've talked in the past, Tim, about batching. We should be batching our routine emails and answering them during the trough. We should be filling out our TPS report. We should be filling out our expense report, whatever. That kind of stuff that we have to do during the course of a day that doesn't require a lot of major cognitive power. Now, the recovery period, again, because this peak trough recovery is a pattern of mood that also is a pattern of performance. The recovery period is actually really, really interesting. During the recovery period, we have elevated mood. Our mood is better than during the trough, but we're less vigilant than during the peak.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Change during the day, and they can change in some dramatic ways, and they can change in predictable ways. Which again, for most of us, is the morning. For night owls, it's later in the day. What we know about the peak is that the peak is when we are most vigilant. And what does vigilance mean? Vigilance means we're able to bat away distractions. And so when we're vigilant and can bat away distractions, that makes it the best time for analytic work, work that requires heads down, focus, writing a report, analyzing data, that kind of work. Piles of research tell us that we should be doing our analytic work during the peak, the trough. That's the early afternoon and early to mid-afternoon. As you mentioned from the data on healthcare, a lot of bad stuff happened then. I mean, you have standardized test scores for students go down in the afternoon. You have, if you look at auto accidents, once you control for cars on the road, obviously there are going to be more accidents when there are more cars on the road. But once you control for that, the most dangerous time.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Oh my God. Oh my gosh, there's so much stuff. I mean, the good news about that is that when I did finally wrestle the research to the ground and figure out how to structure it, it yielded so many great, great takeaways for readers. So take a step back. What we know from a mountain of research took me a while to figure this out was that we tend to move through the day in three stages, a peak, a trough, a recovery, peak trough recovery. Now, most of us move through the day in that order. People who are night owls, people who have an evening chronotype, they move through the day in the reverse order, recovery trough peak. The most important thing, and this is, I wish somebody had told me this before I was 50 rather than once I was 50, right? Is that our cognitive abilities do not remain the same throughout the day? Our cognitive abilities”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “But when you have more questions than you have, when you don't know the shape yet and you still have a lot of questions, what happens is I'm going to do the research. Now I'm going to try to write down something about it. Crap. You know what? Now that I write it, I realize I'm missing a whole thing here and I got to do more research. So let me go back and do that. So it's less of this kind of happy march from happy jump from here. I'm going to go from this lily pad to that lily pad and happily jump from each one to another like a lighted frog.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Exactly, very, very hard. And that's hard, right? Exactly. You're so right about that. That's hard to do too. And a lot of people, I mean, you know as a writer, it's messier than that. There's this notion that I'm going to do my research. And then when my research is done, I'm going to do my writing, all right? And so it never works that way.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Or on a whiteboard that I have in my office. But I went through many, many, many iterations. And on that, I have a somewhat social view of that. And that what I'll do is I'll run it past people to see what they think and say, hey, what do you think if I organize the book that way? Does that make any sense? Or what about that doesn't make sense? Or what am I missing here? Or what's the weak spot there? But it took me a long time to find the shape of this book that coupled with the fact that the amount of research was so massive. It was actually the hardest book I've had to write.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Because for a couple of reasons. Number one, the material didn't organize itself cleanly in that way. Number two, that struck me more as a handbook, like a farmer's almanac rather than an intelligent book of science journalism with takeaways. And more important, that's not a book I would want to read. So I abandoned that. But did I really abandon it? Because I actually ended up writing a whole chapter in this book about the day. So I ended up cleaving off some of that and keeping it for other things. And so it took me a long time to find the shape. And the way I find the shape is I basically write it down on either what I call big ass stickies is giant post-it notes or”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “When I say an outline, it's relatively short, just like one or two pages. Nothing too comprehensive. I guess outline is, well, it's partly the right word because I'm a The hour, the day, the week, the month, the year, the lifetime. And that's a really bad way to do it. But I ended up.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Words, and then I would read it again, and I would read it a third time. So very painstaking. And then also because I didn't have a theory of the case, I just had questions rather than even a kind of skeleton or a shape of what I wanted to write. I had to figure that out. So I probably did, I don't know, 17, 18 different outlines of that book. So that was, you would think it would get easier, but it actually got harder.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Exist. And then I started looking at the research and I realized that across all of these domains of research, literally dozens and dozens, from the hard sciences, the molecular biology to endocrinology to the social sciences of economics and social psychology to many, many domains. These scholars are asking very, very similar questions. What's the effect of time of day on what we do and how we do it? How do beginnings affect us? How do midpoints affect us? How do endings affect us? And so I went in saying, wow. How do I make better timing decisions myself? But I didn't have a theory of the case. And so the volume of research for this one was so monumental. There were so many studies out there and there were so many different, in so many different fields and fields that like molecular biology is not a subject that is at my fingertips. All right. I spent so much time. I mean, I basically would read those papers. I would read them through and I would write down all the words that I didn't know the meaning of. And then I would look up those.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “I think it was the last one, the last book that I wrote. Believe it or not, you would think it would get easier over time, but it didn't. So this last book went about science atomic. That was the most difficult book to write. Partly because I went into that book with, so I started writing a whole new mind having done some research and saying, hey, I think there's something going on here. Like, I think we're moving to this world, you know, and sort of I had a theory of the case. With Drive, I had a book about motivation. I looked at a lot of the research in motivation. I said, well, wait a second. People are missing like a huge story here with when I went in totally with questions rather than with any kind of theory of the case. I basically said, hey, I'm making all kinds of timing decisions in my own life. I'm making them in a totally half-assed way. I'd like to make them in a better way. Could somebody please give me some guidance? And I started looking around for guidance and it didn't.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Readers could detect the through line. Maybe they're seeing something that I'm not. But if there's a through line, it's visible only retrospectively. It's not something that was intentional”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “And as you know, Tim, I mean, writing a book is so difficult, it's so hard, it's so time consuming that if you're not in love with the idea, if you don't love working on it, it's going to be miserable for you. So I just picked the next topic based on what I'm really interested in and what I want to spend a couple of years, a few years working on. So I think it's possible that people can detect a through Lyme.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “I think it just came out at the wrong, I think it came out at the wrong time. I'm sure it came out slightly earlier. And so on that, so to me, how well a book does, there's so much randomness in that. I try not to lose any sleep over it. In terms of actual, is there a through line among all the books? That's an interesting question. And I can say from the creation point of view, there is absolutely not a through line. There is no intentional through line through these kinds of books. It's not as if I have mapped out somewhere on a whiteboard here in pink ink world headquarters in Washington, D.C. this grand scheme to create the pink ovre in a certain fashion and a certain timetable with certain things covered like that. Far from it. I just go from one thing to another. I just like figure out what I'm going to do next.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “I don't know. I mean, I think that when it comes to actual performance of things, like how well a book does, that's something that's not fully, I mean, you know this. I mean, any writer knows this. That's not something that's fully in our control. And I'm actually more or less okay on that. I mean, it's disappointing when something doesn't do as well as you want. But to me, my criteria is, did I write the best book I possibly could write? And once you put it out there, there's so many other variables you just don't know whether it's going to take or whether it's not going to take. So, I mean, I wrote a book, you know, my very first book was a book called Free Agent Nation. That was not a bou. That did okay, but it was not a monumental hit. It should have been because I think I was right. But for whatever reason, I think it came out.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “Oh, because I looked at my brain. I was thinking my brain would be special. It looked like every other brain I'd seen. Like I couldn't pick my own brain out of a lineup. So that's what it was. I mean, it's sort of, I shouldn't say disappointing. It's humbling, you know, like the idea that here's my, I got this brain in my head, all right, and leaving aside the thorny issue of where does the brain end and the mind begin or vice versa. My brain is largely responsible for who I am. And yet when I see a picture of it, it's completely unremarkable and looks like every other brain that's being scanned that day. There's something kind of weird and humbling about that. Disappointing too. I don't know. I was expecting my brain would be cooler or something like that.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “By computers and now smart And so that's the argument in that book. And it's an argument I think that people resonated to because they were seeing inklings in their own life and they needed a way to describe it, categorize it, put words on it.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Ability is more characteristic of the right hemisphere of the brain, artistry, empathy, inventiveness, big picture thinking, those abilities are now the first among equals. And the reason for that is that is a very hard-headed reason, that those kinds of abilities are easy to outsource, easy to automate, that the left hemisphere ability, sorry, the left hemisphere abilities, the SAT spreadsheet abilities are easy to outsource, easy to automate, and less valuable in iterating something new, in dealing with the demands for new that comes from an abundant world. And so actually, maybe another reason that took is that I basically came to a soft-hearted conclusion in a hard-headed way. There was a very clear economic argument for that. You know, the three A's, Asia Automation Abundance, reductive left brain work can be done cheaper overseas. The other A, automation, it can be done faster.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Of tasks, tasks that are about understanding context, about synthesis, and about simultaneous processing. And so that division of labor in the brain, I think, offers a very powerful metaphor for understanding what I thought was going on in the world of work, and it continues to go on in the world of work. But actually, to make sure I got the underlying science right in a tearing a page from the Tim Ferris playbook, I actually went to the National Institutes of Health to get my own brain scanned, see my own brain in action, which ended up being profoundly disappointing experience. But that's another story for another day. And so basically the idea here is this, that the abilities that used to be the most valuable in the economy, characteristic, it's a metaphor, characteristic of the left hemisphere, logical, linear, sequential, analytical spreadsheet SAT abilities. Those abilities are still necessary, but they're no longer sufficient.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say. I think a reason that it took is that it was fairly original idea conveyed in a way that was easy to understand and also had the advantage of probably being more right than wrong. So the idea in that book is the following, that I was arguing then, I still believe it today, that the structure of our brain offers a metaphor for describing the future of work. And all your listeners know there's been a lot of stuff written about left brain and right brain over the years. Most of it's just total garbage. But one of the what we know about our brains is that they're actually somewhat efficient. And then over time, they've divided up tasks. So the left hemisphere specializes in one set of tasks, tasks that are logical, linear, sequential, analytical. The right hemisphere specializes in different”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “People for important things. Because human beings only have two responses to control. They comply or they defy. That's a history of humankind, is basically. Human beings either complying or defying with control. And so we need to abandon control as a motivator and look for ways for people to summon their own autonomous motivation for doing things.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “I mean, you could use it for going to the gym or going to workout. How ready are you? How excited are you about, how motivated are you to work out right now? I'm a two, all right? Well, I say that to myself, well, why aren't you a one? Well, I know that probably I'll feel better if I work out right on it if I don't work out. I know that actually if I don't do this aerobic exercise today, I'm probably going to might not have a chance to do it tomorrow, which means I'm going to feel like crap. And so you can turn it on yourself as well. It's all about those surfaces. One of the things that we've done in terms in management and parenting and all other realms of life is that we have overdosed on control. And control is not an effective way to motivate.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “For it through questions rather than through dictates. And it can be a very, very powerful technique. You can also turn it inward. You know, you say, well, how ready are you, Dan, to finish this chapter? Oh, God, I'm like a three. Then you say, well, Dan, why aren't you a two? Oh, you know, and so anything you can do to help people surface their own reasons for doing something makes them more likely to commit to the behavior more likely to follow through on the behavior.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “A lower number. And that always wakes people out. So he says, I'm a three out of 10 in terms of my desire to do this thing. And you say, instead of saying, yo, my God, you should be a non. What are you crazy? You lazy ass. You say, oh, why didn't you pick a lower number? And what's interesting about that is that what it does to Bob is that Bob has to now say why he's not a two. And so he begins saying things like, well, you know, if I don't study for this test, I'm probably going to bomb the next test. If I don't master this material, it's going to be harder to go into later on. If I don't do well in this test, you might hassle me. And so what happens is that Bob begins articulating his own autonomous, intrinsically motivated reasons for doing something. And that's the key. And what we know from a mountain of social science research is that when people have their own reasons for doing something, they're more likely to endorse the behavior and they're more likely to carry it out. And so this becomes a way to surface Bob's own motivation.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Hey, Bob, I see you're not studying for your algebra test. Let me ask you a question. I see you have an algebra test tomorrow. On a scale of 1 to 10, how ready are you to study for your algebra test? How ready are you to start studying for your algebra test? All right. How much do you want to start studying for your algebra test? And Bob is totally unmotivated by it. Bob might say, I'm a three, right? A three out of ten. Now, again, our reaction as bosses, as parents, as people and figures of authority is to say, what do you mean you're a three? You should be a nine. But instead, you're more chill than that. And you say, okay, you're a three. Why didn't you pick?”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Yeah, so this is actually a therapeutic technique that actually I think has wider applications. And I heard about it from a fellow named Mike Pantalon, who's at Yale School of Medicine, who used it in, I think, addiction addiction treatment. And it's basically like this. So let's say that you have, let me think of a good example here of something that somebody typically isn't that keen to do. Okay, let's say let's go to algebra. Let's say you have somebody, let's say you're a parent and you have a kid who's in eighth grade and he has an algebra test and doesn't want to study for the algebra test. Isn't into it, doesn't want to do it. And so a typical reaction from parents, from anybody and authority figure is like, what the hell is wrong?”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “That's a remarkable book. I mean, I can explain it quick. So it's a story about a match between a single tennis match between Arthur Ash, who then was very young, just out of Richmond, and a guy named Clark Gravener, who was from a wealthier white guy, wealthier family in, I think it was like suburban Cleveland. And what he does is he basically describes the match, but throughout he pulls back and tells each of their stories of how they actually got to the court that day. I think it was the U.S. open match. And so he actually describes them playing a point, and then he pulls back and talks about how Arthur Ash got there. And he pulls back and talks about how Clark Gravener got there. And he does it with such elegance and such concision. It's just a joy to behold.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “I love that book. I read it again. I actually read it again about two years ago. But I read it as a kid. I got it out of the library. I spent a lot of time in libraries when I was a kid. And I don't know how some librarian or somebody told me about it because there was a, because he has that famous book about Bill Bradley, a sense of where you are. So I read that because I was a basketball fan. And then it's like, oh, I was also a tennis fan. It's like, oh, you read about tennis too? And I read that book. And I didn't, you know, at the time, I guess I was saying, wow, you can actually write about sports in a way that's kind of more interesting than just sports.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “I started reading John McPhee when I was a pretty young teenager and one of the best McPhee books I've read was a book, you might have read it called Levels of the Game. You know, I was”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Now, what's amazing to this and shows you just how incredible and awesome my wife is that I am the worst person on the planet to be read aloud to because I'm a complete pain in the ass when it comes to, especially if you're reading my words. Oh, come on, you got to read with more expression than that. Oh, come on. No, the emphasis on that word. No. My saintly wife has done this for several books now.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Out loud to my wife at various stages. What's more, I read drafts, multiple drafts of chapters, out loud to my wife in this office. But wait, there's more. My wife read every word of this book out loud to me, including drafts. Because for me, that's how I process the written word. So for me, I can tell what works in a speech because you have a large audience of people behind reacting to it in terms of written words, like I don't know. It's just like after all these years, I know what's good and what's not when it comes to written word. And I actually know what's not good, really, is what I know. And so I try to remove all the not good stuff. And the way I do that in this very laborious way is to read aloud because that helps me look at the words a different way, but also to have them read aloud to me.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “Same in the sense that you were Deeply devoted to you in a way that someone you truly love is devoted to you. So here's the thing about my books. Even though I just said speeches in written words are different, for me, I actually improved my writing by listening to it. Not because I listened to written words different from the way I listened to speeches, if that makes any sense. And so when I write books, so the latest book, I mean, you know, latest book in all the previous books, I have an office here behind my house in Washington, D.C. It's a garage, refurbished garage. And I will sit in my office. Let's talk about the latest book. Okay, just to give you an idea. So this is a book, I don't know, it's like 280 pages or something like that. I read every word of that book.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “I think that people are more likely to say, does that make sense? It's sort of out of politeness and also just out of self, oh, of course that makes sense. Oh, yeah, yeah. But sort of what about that? So I converted a little bit. What about that? What about that doesn't make sense? When you explain an idea to somebody or you're talking to an audience, I really think, I mean, maybe I'm overestimating my own abilities, but I really think you can tell by the looks on people's faces. They're all other kinds of markers of that too. So for instance, you know, especially now if you have slides, what are people taking pictures of? What slides are they taking pictures of? What things are they writing down? So I look at those kinds of cues in talks. I think writing is more difficult. And I'll tell you what I do in writing, especially books. And this is a little bit insane.”

    2018-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #305: Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT