Looking for the best and inspirational Daniel Pink quotes?
Daniel Pink is an American author and speechwriter. He is the author of six provocative books about work, business, and psychology. His two most famous books are Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others.
In his book Drive, Dr. Pink argues that three basic desires drive all human beings: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. This motivates people to do their best work—and it can even lead them into fulfilling careers that give them a sense of significance in their lives.
He shows how we need different “drives” at other moments in our lives as children or parents or workers—and how each drive makes us temporarily happy in a different way.
Take a look at his most inspiring quotes on leadership and management to awaken your mindset and achieve life goals.
Top 25 Most Inspirational Daniel Pink Quotes
1. “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 Pink
2. “What’s important now are the characteristics of the brain’s right hemisphere: artistry, empathy, inventiveness, big-picture thinking. These skills have become first among equals in a whole range of business fields.” ― Daniel Pink
3. “The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table.” ― Daniel Pink
4. “Questions are often more effective than statements in moving others.” ― Daniel Pink
5. “When the reward is the activity itself — deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one’s best — there are no shortcuts.” ― Daniel Pink
6. “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 Pink
7. “If you need me to motivate you, I probably don’t want to hire you.” ― Daniel Pink
8. “Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another.” ― Daniel Pink
9. “Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.” ― Daniel Pink
10. “Anytime you’re tempted to upsell someone else, stop what you’re doing and upserve instead.” ― Daniel Pink
11. “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 Pink
12. “Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one’s sights and pushing toward the horizon.” ― Daniel Pink
13. “To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources — not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end.” ― Daniel Pink
14. “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 Pink
15. “People at work are thirsting for context, yearning to know that what they do contributes to a larger whole.” ― Daniel Pink
16. “Change is inevitable, and when it happens, the wisest response is not to wail or whine but to suck it up and deal with it.” ― Daniel Pink
17. “The ability to take another perspective has become one of the keys to both sales and non-sales selling. And the social science research on perspective-taking yields some important lessons for all of us.” ― Daniel Pink
18. “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 Pink
19. “We should focus our efforts on creating environments for our innate psychological needs to flourish.” ― Daniel Pink
20. “Especially for fostering creative, conceptual work, the best way to use money as a motivator is to take the issue of money off the table so people concentrate on the work.” ― Daniel Pink
21. “If you understand the independent worker, the self-employed professional, the freelancer, the e-lancer, the temp, you understand how work and business in the U.S. operate today.” ― Daniel Pink
22. “One of the best predictors of ultimate success in either sales or non-sales selling isn’t natural talent or even industry expertise, but how you explain your failures and rejections.” ― Daniel Pink
23. “The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table.” ― Daniel Pink
24. “The course of human history has always moved in the direction of greater freedom.” ― Daniel Pink
25. “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 Pink
