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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. “And so the way that I would convey an idea in a speech is going to be different from the way that I would convey the similar same idea in a book. And so for me, one of the most simple question, but I find myself asking it all the time to people, is this following question, does that make sense? Does that make sense? Or what I've sometimes found an easier way to rephrase that is this is actually, I think this is actually a useful writing act is what about that doesn't make sense?”

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

2. “Guys, do you ask? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me take your simple question and complicate it. Let's go for it because I actually think that speeches and written words are different things”

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

3. “But you don't make permanent decisions based on one reaction. And I do that myself now in my own stuff. So if I say something and it doesn't work the first time, I don't abandon it then. I make a note of that and then I try it again because sometimes different audiences, different contexts, different things, it can work. But I would do that. It was just sort of, you know, and here's the thing. I don't want to make this sound like I use the word forensic to talk about what compliment is doing. Mine was less forensic. It was more hygienic. It was to me, it's like, that's just like good staff hygiene. You know what I mean? I wrote a speech and this dude is delivering it. I should pay attention to like how it's going, you know. And if I do that, if I do that, I'm going to do better next time and he's going to do better next time.”

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

4. “Line, or he ad libbed a new version of the line. That was actually very helpful to me in terms of just dealing with my boss. Because again, what you're trying to do in writing a speech for somebody else is that you're trying to make that person sound like the best version of him or herself. And so it could be that the way I phrase something didn't sound like him, but he knew what I meant and he was able to phrase it in his own words. And that actually was helpful for me in terms of doing the tactical craft of my job. But so I would have the text with me. And let's say there was a joke. I would say, I mean, it basically would like plus it, I mean, seriously, like plus and minus and say, hey, that joke worked. That joke didn't work. That line worked. That line didn't work. One of the things that it taught me was also is that you don't go based on, I'm getting the weeds here a little bit.”

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

5. “What I would often be doing would be I would have, okay, so it was a speech where I had a written text, which is not always the case. In some cases for less significant things, it would be, say, a conversation, some talking points and some things like that. But let's say for a speech that was actually delivered, that is a speech that was written out and then delivered behind a podium. I would almost always have the actual physical text of the speech and I would mark up that physical text of it. In some cases, because it was helpful for me in terms of just relating to my own boss, let's say that he skipped a paragraph. Hmm, I wonder why I skipped that paragraph, you know, maybe ask him about that, or maybe I could even figure out why you skipped that. He didn't even bother reading a paragraph or he skipped.”

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

6. “Before a live audience, we would be getting feedback on our conversation that I think would be really useful and interesting. And when you do things that are asynchronous, as we're doing now, or writing a book, which is asynchronous, you get that feedback much later. And so the feedback is less meaningful. So if I write something and someone says, you wrote this passage here, I just don't get it. That's sort of a bummer for me because I don't have time to cure it. But if I say something before an audience and I get a bunch of blank looks, I immediately know, wow, okay, I didn't explain that very well. I got to go back next time around and explain it better.”

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

7. “Giving talks is seeing the audience's reaction and figuring out what's good and what isn't. So if I come up with, hey, I got this killer line I just thought of this is going to totally rule. And then I deliver it. And it's like, whoa, that bombed. And in my head, I don't feel like, oh, I'm so sad that it bombed. But in the back of my head, I'm like, huh, that bomb, that's so interesting. I got to make a note of that.”

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

8. “An interesting idea. That's an interesting idea. I mean, they do cutaways on those kinds of things, but the cutaways don't show people being bored. Right, right, exactly. That's actually more revealing than anything else. And I'll tell you from a speech giver's point of view, and it's interesting you raised this, Tim, because I haven't really thought a huge amount about it myself. But one of the things that I enjoy most about”

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

9. “This could happen seriously. We could have cut it out there. And so seeing audiences react just gave me, I mean, it's hard to, it's almost like, let me think of an analogy here. Okay, I mean, this is an imperfect analogy, but it's almost like I'm going to go basically walk up and down the streets of Santiago, Chile for a couple of years. I'm not going to do any talking, but I'm going to listen to everybody else talking. And it's like, whoa, you can learn some Spanish that way. It's not going to be, you're not going to be perfectly Spanish, but you have a huge advantage of someone if you do that and then go and say, hey, I think I'm going to learn how to speak Spanish.”

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

10. “Seeing what worked and what worked and what didn't. And that, I think, completely left an imprint on me. Again, I had this before I went out on doing it myself. I spent as much time as any human being could have done, like watching speeches being given, but I always would watch when any of my bosses would give a speech. I would actually watch the audience rather than my boss. to see because that's how I learned how to get better at it. Hey, that line works. Hey, that line's a dud. Hey, they're spacing out here. Hey, this person over here looks confused. Wow, this went on too long. Wow, this could have gone on a little, well, I've never had experience. It could have gone on longer, but this could have...”

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

11. “Yeah, I mean, it depends. I mean, actually, that experience writing speeches was actually extraordinarily useful in going out and being a writer and then going out and talking about what I've written about. I mean, it's extraordinarily useful. I mean, if for no other reason, Tim, it was because, you know, I spent a lot of time as a speech writer watching audiences react.”

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

12. “Me that when I left that job, If you had told me 10 years earlier, you're going to have this job and you're going to leave it because you're tired of politics. I would have been very, very surprised.”

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

13. “Pumped when something I wrote made it onto the quote unquote evening news. I haven't watched the evening news for 19 years. We weren't dealing with social media. The world was very, very, very partisan then, but nothing like the way it is now. So I remember devoting a couple of days in my office to some subpoena that was given to Gore's office for finding some document about some nonsense thing. And I'm like, and I'm like really concerned about that because I didn't do anything wrong, but it's like, oh my God, if I have an email that mentions X, Y, or Z and I don't find it and then someone else finds it, like I'm going to have to hire a lawyer. And I didn't sign up for this garbage. So I finally decided to, again, this thing that I thought I was deeply, deeply interested in once I actually experienced it, I found myself far less interested in it than I would have suspected. If you had told”

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

14. “It was really quite remarkable. The other thing is that I also felt like a lot of the people who were good people that they were so interested, they were so absorbed in the mechanics of things that I felt like I was losing sight over like what were we doing here in the first place. What do we actually believe in that the, and there was so much short-termism, so much short-term insane kind of posturing and, oh, let's get this slight advantage over the day. And it was like, what's the point? What's the point of all this? I'm working really, really hard. And I'm not sure this is, I'm not sure we're actually doing that much. And here's the scary part. It's like, that was 20 years ago. In retrospect, those are the good old days, right? I mean, we were, I mean, I'm old enough. I did this long enough ago where I would be, I'd be.”

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

15. “Like, hmm, it's not the species of Reich or Gore I don't like. It's the genus of politics that is actually bringing me down. And so among the things that I didn't like, let's go back to the BS. There was an enormous amount of time spent basically in the air, in almost everything that was going on within the boundaries of the law, obviously, concern for basically pandering and fundraising.”

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

16. “There were a few things. First of all, the amount of BS that was involved was startling to me. I expected some, but if you do a pie chart of BS and not BS, the BS slicing is extraordinarily large, larger than you would, larger than you would imagine on a number of different dimensions. And here's the thing, Tim. I freaking lucked out too in who I was working for because my last two jobs, I worked for Al Gore, who's a very smart guy and a very good guy all around. And before that, I worked for the then Labor Secretary. I was a speechwriter for the then Labor Secretary, a guy named Robert Reich, who's a very smart guy and a good guy. So I had basically the best kinds of bosses you could possibly have. And so that was another indication. Like, I got the best bosses you could possibly have. And I still.”

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

17. “Not sure this is my thing. I thought this is my thing, but I'm discovering that this is not my thing. And it was even worse is that if I project out even further and look at, say, what I'm going to be like or what I'm going to be doing in 10 years or 20 years, I really don't like that picture because I see some of those people around me.”

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

18. “And it ended up being something that I had a certain affinity for. And it's something that a lot of other people did not. And so just in the supply and demand of who has to do what, that's what I ended up doing. And I enjoyed it. I did it on political campaigns. I did it for a cabinet secretary. And then I ended up doing it for the vice president. The trouble was that when I had spent all these years in the belly of the beast, you know, it's sort of like, wow, I really want to work in politics. And all of a sudden, in a pretty kind of half-assed way, I was at a pretty good gig in the belly of the beast. I realized, hey.”

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

19. “You'll be asked to do it again. And that's pretty much what happened to me, that someone at some point asked me to write a speech and I did it and it was okay. And then they said, hey, that's okay. You want to do it again? And I did it again. And then I did it a third time. And all of a sudden, that was my job.”

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

20. “A couple of reasons. Number one is that I thought it was a venue for achieving something in the world and making a contribution to the world. The other thing is that I found the actual practice of it quite exciting and interesting in the way that sports is exciting and interesting. So it was a combo platter for me. And I'd been interested in it for many, many years. And I said, okay, this is what I want to do. So I got out of law school and I started working on political campaigns, which at the time I liked because political campaigns are totally interesting. I mean, again, it's like a sport in that there's a beginning and there's an end and there's a very clear outcome. And it's exciting and you're making decisions on the fly. And I find political campaigns more than other kinds of organizations and institutions fairly meritocratic because there's so much going on. It's so much crazy stuff happening that if you can do something, you will continue.”

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

21. “Well, when I graduated from law school, I was actually very keenly interested in politics. It was probably my deepest interest at the time. And I said, you know what, I'm going to go work in politics. Why was it interesting?”

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

22. “Happened, but it's also, I think that as I've gone older and gotten more experienced, I've actually become much more aware of the importance of intellectual humility. And when I think of when I was younger, I feel like, well, I know what law school is like. How do you know? Well, I just know because I thought about it once. And so I know. I know what lawyers do because I met somebody who was a lawyer. I know what lawyers do. And so there's a degree of arrogance in that of thinking that you know something when you actually don't. And so if you approach all kinds of decisions with a degree of intellectual humility and ask yourself, what don't I know about this? Where are my blind spots? Then I think you end up making better decisions.”

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

23. “So I'll give you an example of it. So again, we're not talking rocket science here. We're talking basically, hey, act like a reasonably intelligent grown-up is what I'm, you know, is basically what I'm doing here. But let's go back to the Japan thing. So I got a fellowship to go to Japan and I went with my wife and her kids, as I mentioned. But before I did that, I talked to six different people who had the same fellowship before I accepted, six different people who had the same fellowship, what it was like for their kids, what the work was like, what the living was like before I made the decision. Now, again, that is not a monumental intellectual breakthrough, but it's something that I didn't do when I was much younger.”

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

24. “I mean, I'm embarrassed to say that, but that's absolutely the case. I went to law school, having never sat in on a law school class. I mean, it's unbelievable to me in retrospect. And so had I done those kinds of things, I might have approached it more skeptically. But I didn't do those things. And so, and because that ended up being an incredibly expensive decision, even though it led to some, you know, it basically, I mean, it led to the most positive thing in my life, which is my wife, even though it led to something positive. It was a terrible decision. So now I'm sort of a surrogation ideologue. It's like I believe in surrogation for everything.”

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

25. “Well, here's the thing. Okay, no, here's what it did. Here's what it did. Here's the thing. Okay, so there's this principle in social science. It has a fancy name, but it is something that we all do and something that we should do is the principle of surrogation. How do you make decisions? You use the principle of surrogation. And surrogation basically means find someone like you who made this decision and see what happened to him or her. That is, find out what it's really like. Again, this is a totally fantified way of something that is very comensensical. Should I go to this restaurant? Well, let me check the Yelp reviews of 47 other people who've gone to this restaurant. And what I did, it's amazing to meet Tim when I think about this. And it's advice that I give to my own kids as well. I went to law school literally having never spent a day, not a day, 10 minutes talking to a lawyer about what she did.”

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

26. “You hire somebody else to do that. You know, it's like, you know, it's like, I mean, it takes skill to like plunge a toilet or, you know, that kind of thing or mow a gigantic backyard. I mean, it takes skill to do that. It's just that, you know what? It's really not my thing. And so what I'd rather do is do something else and then pay someone else to do that kind of dirty work. And yet I found myself stuck. And because I was risk averse, I did leave for a little while, actually. I dropped out for a little while, but I came back. And so I went to law school. It wasn't, accumulated massive, massive, massive, massive student loans. But I was very fortunate in two dimensions in my law school trajectory. One was that my school had ahead of its time loan payback program key to salary. So if you made less than a certain amount.”

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

27. “Which Oh my God. This is one area where I want to thank fate for her grace and kindness. Here's the thing. I went to law school and I went to law school largely because I was a middle class kid from the middle of America. And that's kind of what you did. And once I sort of saw the inside, and it was a terrible decision and actually helped me figure out how to make better decisions. It gave me some actually really good advice on how to make better decisions. But I basically went to law school without knowing what lawyers did or even what law school was. It was just something I did because that's what I was supposed to do. I found out I didn't really like it very much. And once I found out what lawyers actually did and God bless the lawyers listening to this, but once I found out what lawyers actually did, I was like, oh.”

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

28. “This is like a deposition now. What do you have like exhibit A? Am I going to say something 30 years ago that you're going to make me pay for right now?”

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

29. “That's exactly right. Now, Kevin has say that. And I actually think it's a good book. We did reasonably well with it. It didn't blow off the doors. I think I was, you know, this is a common thing that happens in life and in investing in entrepreneurship and publishing and anything is that you could be right too early. I think that's what it was that I actually think that this format of graphic novels and comics having a more expansive reach in the United States is probably going to happen. I might have been, as they would say, in the world of politics. I might have been a little ahead of the voters.”

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

30. “In manga form that reveals the six essential lessons of any satisfying productive career through the story of a hapless young accountant named Johnny Bunko.”

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

31. “Yes, indeed. That was one of my best ideas that didn't go anywhere. So that was a book called The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. And as you say, Tim, it was written in the Japanese comic format known as manga. And as you know, as a Japanophile, in Japan, manga, the comic format, is much more versatile and more widely used than it is here in the United States. So you have grown-ups reading comics, and they can be things about financial advice, things about love life, things about history. And so I did a fellowship in Japan with my wife and our three kids where I studied the manga industry. And I came back and said, you know what? I think it's time for manga to broaden its reach here in the United States of America. So I wrote a book called The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. And it's a graphic novel.”

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