A Writer's Mind
Writer Daniel Pink on how to write a book that’s everything it needs to be and not one thing more, the importance of embracing feedback from the right people, and the good bibliophilic fortune that came his way early in life.
Episode Notes
On this episode of the Breakthrough Builders Podcast, Jesse is joined by the writer Daniel H. Pink. Dan and Jesse have a far-reaching conversation that touches upon:
The formative role of reading in Dan’s childhood, and the importance and randomness of having access to great libraries as a son of the State of Ohio (4:33)
How Dan becomes so enthralled with a subject that he chooses to write a book on it (which he’s now done 7 times!) (6:35)
The high regard in which Dan holds the structure of a book, and the high bar he sets for himself in continually revising his initial structural hypotheses as he writes (8:53)
How Dan developed a writing style that’s intellectually coherent and wonderfully accessible (11:01)
The importance of cross-disciplinary thinking in today’s world (14:08)
How Dan asks the right questions in his research to obtain valuable and insightful responses (15:50)
The importance of constantly pushing to get feedback from people who have “taste and judgment” – and who will also be radically candid with their feedback (18:06)
The “wide diet” of reading that Dan recommends if one is interested in growing and improving as a writer (20:07)
Reflections on the applicability of the theses of three of his books – A Whole New Mind (2005), Drive (2009), and The Power of Regret (2022) – to our world today (21:28)
The distinction and relationship between “Big P” and “Little P” Purpose in our lives, and how Dan sees “Thinking as a form of Doing and Doing as a form of Thinking” (25:34)
Regret as a specific case of the more general case of the need to embrace paradox in our lives (27:59)
Dan and Jesse also discuss Dan’s favorite Ohio sports memory, the authors he admires most, what he sees as his biggest professional breakthrough (hint: it’s not what you think), and his view on who really won the Toledo War.
Guest Bio
Daniel H. Pink is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including his latest, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. His other books include the New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind — as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human. Dan’s books have won multiple awards, have been translated into 42 languages, and have sold millions of copies around the world. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.
Helpful Links
TED Talk “The Puzzle of Motivation,” viewed over 28 million times
Dan on the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax Sheppard and Monica Padman - March 2022
Dan speaking about the 4 kinds of regret and what they teach us about ourselves (in light of his worldwide study on regret and his latest book)
The Worldwide Regret Study, insights from which formed the foundation of Dan’s latest book
The Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, which came up no fewer than three times in 30 minutes in Dan’s conversation with Jesse
+ Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Daniel Pink: Constant access to libraries was one of the most formative things in my childhood. Writing a book does not get easier, it gets a little bit less uncertain, but it does not get any easier. And arguably, it might get harder because the more experience you have, both as a writer and as a reader, the more you realize what is good and what is not and that requires a lot more work. Every single book that I've done, I've gone in with a structure and have in most cases, significantly reconfigured that structure when I realized that initial structure wouldn't stand. So structure is something that's important to me. Sometimes we get the sequence wrong. We say, "Okay, I'm going to figure out my purpose and then I'm going to do stuff." When, in fact, doing stuff is a way to figure out your purpose, we tend to think we need to figure stuff out and then act. What we don't realize is sometimes acting is a way to figure stuff out that doing is a form of thinking and thinking is a form of doing and vice versa.
[00:01:10] Jesse Purewal: From Qualtrics Studios, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts, and ideas, feel some of the world's most amazing products, brands, and experiences. Have you ever picked up a book about something that intrigues you or interests you? Only to find after a few chapters that the allure of the subject is lost in a thicket of complexity. You might have learned something, but it probably didn't make for a great read and you're certainly not going to recommend that book to anyone. But there's another different kind of book, one with a simple and straightforward structure with relatable themes and memorable examples, grounded deeply in research and insight, but told as a story that inspires and compels. That kind of book at that way of telling stories is pretty rare. But today's guest on the show, the writer Dan Pink has done it, not just once or twice, he's written seven books.
You might have read one or more of them. Just to name a few, A Whole New Mind, To Sell is Human, Drive or his latest book just published this past February, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. In a time when cutting through the clutter to truly connect with an audience has perhaps never been more difficult, I wanted to talk to Dan about how he conceives of, iterates and builds stories. How he cultivates a deep interest in a subject, such that it compels him to learn about it and write a book about it. How he hones and continually improves his skills as a writer. How he asks the right questions to get to the most helpful insights. The importance he sees of multidisciplinary thinking and becoming a good storyteller and his reflections on the applicability of lessons from all of his books on the current moment. As you'll hear in this episode, Dan is every bit as grounded and inspiring of a conversationalist as he is a writer. So without further ado, fellow Ohioan and Northwestern alum, Daniel H. Pink. Daniel Pink, thanks for joining me on the show.
[00:03:19] Daniel Pink: Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be with you, Jesse.
[00:03:22] Jesse Purewal: Let me just start off by saying, for people who are fans of the show, they'll know that episode one, November 2020 was Robert Chatwani, who's the CMO, the chief marketing officer at Atlassian. Now I asked Robert at the end of the show, what advice do you have for builders out there? And his response essentially was, "I think Daniel Pink had it right, autonomy, mastery, and purpose." You've got to find places and spots in your career where those elements, where that alchemy is in play. So in some ways, this is both the sequel to episode one and it's also a conversation I've been looking forward to having for some time.
[00:03:55] Daniel Pink: I'm a fan of Atlassian. I've written about them a couple of times. They've taken a very interesting approach to a whole variety of things from how they deal with sales, to how they configure motivation, to how they work with teams, to a whole variety. I think that's one of the secrets of their success.
[00:04:10] Jesse Purewal: Well, Dan Pink, how do you frame who you are and what is your place in the world?
[00:04:14] Daniel Pink: How do I frame who I am? I'm not sure I frame who I am. If you were to sit down next to me on an airplane or a bus or something like that, and you were to ask me, what do I do? I would say, I'm a writer. That's how I describe myself.
[00:04:26] Jesse Purewal: And if I'd been around Columbus, Ohio, when you were young and I'd bumped into 11 or 12 year old, Dan, who's the guy I would've met?
[00:04:33] Daniel Pink: That person at 11 and 12 was a reader. And I think that played a big role. The great state of Ohio has one of the best public library systems in the United States of America. And it has to do with a quirk of how libraries are financed in Ohio. There's a dedicated source of revenue for libraries, which is one reason why libraries in Ohio are excellent. And if you think about the randomness of life, my hunch is that had I not grown up in Ohio, I might not have become a writer. If I had grown up in a place that didn't have a robust public library system, that didn't have a local public library that I could walk to when I was 11 and 12 years old and hang out for a few hours and read, I think the odds are decent that I would not have become a writer. I think the experience of constant access to libraries was one of the most formative things in my childhood.
[00:05:24] Jesse Purewal: I love that reflection. Absolutely have some of those similar memories of, it wasn't like you had to go to the library. You wanted to go. It was a place that beckoned, smelled a certain way, it felt a certain way, everything about it.
[00:05:37] Daniel Pink: Totally. And that what was true in Columbus is true in Toledo or as we call your city in central Ohio, Totellydo.
[00:05:45] Jesse Purewal: Totellydo. Well, listen, as legend has it, the Toledo War happened. Toledo went to Ohio and the upper peninsula got given as a compensatory gift to Michigan. So you could decide who you think won the Toledo War based on that.
[00:06:00] Daniel Pink: I will take Toledos. I will take Toledo any day of the week.
[00:06:04] Jesse Purewal: Yes. I love it.
[00:06:05] Daniel Pink: I will take class manufacturing and a minor league team called the Mud Hens, any day of the week.
[00:06:11] Jesse Purewal: Dan, I want to understand how you personally become so smitten with the topic that it becomes an unquenchable thirst to study it, to learn about it, to write about it and then even perhaps to go kind of on the speaking tour about it. How does a single theme like drive or right brain-ness or regret rise to the level of something that can take the time, the attention, the focus, the energy that you've got to give it.
[00:06:35] Daniel Pink: It's a really good question and I'm not sure I know the answer to that. I think the fact that needs to happen is essential in any kind of writing, because writing a book is so difficult that you have to pick a topic that you feel that way about. A topic that you have that as you put it, Jesse, that unquenchable thirst. That you find endlessly fascinating, not only in the moment you're working on it, but subsequently. Now how that happens, I'm not sure. It could be one of those things that you know it when you see it. If I had to unpack it and here I'm totally guessing. Seriously, I'm just totally making this up and guessing is that some of it has to do with the fact that there are issues involved in it that are unresolved or that the popular conception of this set of ideas is completely off from what the truth of the idea is. For me, I like stuff that has a practical element to it.
So I'm less likely to get enamored of, say quantum physics, because it's hard for me to see, what is the, Schrödinger's cat is dead and it's alive. What does a regular human being do with that inside? I think it's kind of interesting, but what does somebody do with that? So I think that it has a practical element to it, that it's an idea that lands and has an effect on the real lives of real people, is probably important to me too.
[00:07:58] Jesse Purewal: Let me ask you about the writing style that you've got. You write in a way that's simultaneously super accessible and also very intellectually coherent from what I find. You're not having to read the book twice to get it, but you want to read the book twice to go back to it. And so I just wonder how you get to that style. Has that always been there? Did you read certain authors that inspired you? Did you experiment with different styles? How do you write in precisely that way?
[00:08:27] Daniel Pink: Three ways: practice, practice, practice. I appreciate you're saying that, Jesse and that's what I aim for. I aim for clarity. I aim for crispness. I aim for concision, but that takes an enormous amount of work. It takes an enormous amount of work figuring stuff out. It takes an enormous amount of work writing and rewriting and rewriting and editing and cutting and throwing stuff out. I am somewhat obsessive about a couple of things when it comes to writing. I'm obsessive about structure. Structure to me and the kind of books that I write is everything. I see too many books that don't have a coherent structure and therefore they're not coherent books. So for me, figuring out the structure of a book is profoundly important and helps me realize the ideas that I'm trying to convey. And it takes me a long time to figure out the structure. Every single book that I've done, I've gone in with a structure and have in most cases, significantly reconfigured that structure when I realize that initial structure wouldn't stand. So structure is something that's important to me.
[00:09:34] Jesse Purewal: So you're approaching a little bit like bringing the scientific method to writing. What I'm left with as a reader is this incredibly coherent structure. But what I also crave as someone who likes to think in the crosshairs of art and science is wonder how many turns it took to get to this precision of structure. It's science and it also is art because you're appealing to someone's desire and making me smile a little bit as I go through it, at the same time that you're sort of appealing to my left brain.
[00:10:03] Daniel Pink: Maybe it is a form of engineering, an engineering that is beautiful. Engineering is applied science and then engineering at its best is beautiful so maybe that's it. The other thing that I'm obsessive about is getting rid of extraneous things, making sure that there is no fluff and I do that in a couple of ways. So for instance, in this latest book about regret, I spent about a month of reading the research on brain development and regret. What is the age at which children especially begin to develop regret? How does it all work? I have a giant file, folder of research papers and it's tough sledding, some of that reading. And then when I finally got to writing it, I realized that basically everything a reader needed to know, I could explain in one paragraph. Now that's irritating because I spent all this time. The only thing worse than writing it in one paragraph, would've been writing it in five pages and torturing readers.
And so you have to be able to say what doesn't belong. You have to be able to cut and cut and cut and cut and cut. Another thing that I do, which is a sign of my obsessiveness is that every book that I've written, I have sat in this office where I'm talking to you and read the book, pieces of it, multiple times out loud to my wife, sometimes into a tape recorder but often to my wife. What's more, is that for every book, all seven, my wife has sat in the office and read my pages aloud to me. When I hear it, I realize what's extraneous, what's not. What's murky, what's not. Nearly every nonfiction book that I read, I feel is too long because there's too much fluff. It's not quite crisp and concise and pointed enough.
[00:11:44] Jesse Purewal: What your anecdote about sitting down and having to wade through the water, some of that heavy sledding. Reminds me of the Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. quote, "I would not give a fig or the simplicity, this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity." And as a brand person, we're always wrestling with that. That idea of why can't you just do it? Why can't you just get to that? And well, that's the whole thing. The beauty is that you got to it. The destination is interesting, but the journey it's wrought with all kinds of adventure and peril and madness and joy and sometimes moments of great euphoria, you got to do the work though. I used to think there's no substitute for doing the work to get to both the structure and the lack of fluff that you're talking to.
[00:12:33] Daniel Pink: Absolutely, absolutely. Amen. I'll be your hallelujah chorus for that one. The best brands are simple. They're simple in their iconography, in their identity, their visual identity. And they're simple in the promise that they hold out to perspective customers and fans.
[00:12:49] Jesse Purewal: So if you are a fan of structure, how should I think about analogy in the structure? When you analogize regret, in that most recent book to a photographic negative of the good life, which is both memorable and clear. Or when you write about the importance of being adept at analogy, like you do in A Whole New Mind, when you talk about having a sense of symphony. Why, as a species, are our brain so wired to understand analogy and why do you find it such an effective tool?
[00:13:18] Daniel Pink: It lets the light in. Now why do our brains reason analogically? There's some interesting research on that. It was an adaptive advantage in evolution because the people who could reason analogically were able to create better tools. The people who could reason analogically were able to go to new territories and say, "This doesn't look like where we came from, but it's a little like it in this way, and therefore we can do X, Y, and Z." It's a reductionist argument. But the reason it exists is because it had, at some point in our species, adaptive advantage. But I also think that a lot of the people and you see a lot of research on this as well, on the importance of transdisciplinary thinking. The ability to cross borders, the ability to be as they sometimes say, T-shaped. Where you have the vertical part of the T, which is depth, but you also have some breath.
Michelle Ruth Bernstein has research on Nobel Prize winners and how Nobel Prize winners are unusually, and here's the 50 cent word, polymathic. Nobel Prize winners, compared to regular scientists, much more likely to be poets, much more likely to be musicians, much more likely to be painters. Some of them are actually more likely than you would think, to not have studied the physical sciences, the biological sciences early in their life. Maybe they studied economics or they studied literature or something like that. And so they can move more readily across boundaries and see the connections between those two things.
And I think that, especially in the world we're in right now, that can be a superpower. In the world of auto manufacturing in 1970, it was specialization. This is what you do, you turn the same screw the same way, whatever. You specialize in one kind of thing. There's a little bit of a tension between depth and range. And I think, ideally, do you want range or do you want depth? And I think the answer is yes. And here, maybe this is where Schrödinger's cat comes in. Is the cat death or alive? Yes. So maybe quantum physics actually does pay off somewhere along the way.
[00:15:11] Jesse Purewal: Yes. Like my question to you at the top. And you're like, "I would say I'm a writer." Well, there's a certain depth there, but boy, there's a breath there. Let me ask you about the way that you ask questions and listen in your research, you get to a lot of interesting and insightful conclusions in the work that you do, whether it's about motivation or thought or regret. What's your formula for asking the right questions, developing the right kind of empathy for the audience that you're connecting with? To reveal something that's accurate and interesting and new.
[00:15:45] Daniel Pink: I mean, I think that's important for brands. It's important for market research. So I'll give you an example of that. So one of the things that I did for this batch of research and regret is that I did a very large quantitative survey, the largest public opinion survey ever conducted of American attitudes about regret. Even enlisting a firm called Qualtrics that you might have heard of to help me out in assembling the panels for that and using the software created by said company as well to do the collection and the analysis. And when I asked about regret, I didn't say, this is a survey about regret. I said, thank you for completing this survey. And when I asked the question about regret, I said, how often do you look back on your life and wish you had done things differently? So I asked a question exactly to your point about regret, but without using the R word in part to bypass the no regrets fog machine, and also to not create, to use your word, that viscerality that might put up defenses to talking about it.
[00:16:45] Jesse Purewal: Every author, Dan, that I've had on the show and most authors I know talk about how much work it is to get a book out. They know it's going to be a lot of work going in, but how much work it is and the kind of work that it is, still seems to catch at least first time authors by surprise. You've now done this seven times, does it somehow get easier with practice or do you continue to have to find new fuel for each fire? How does that feel?
[00:17:12] Daniel Pink: Writing a book does not get easier. It gets a little bit less uncertain, but it does not get any easier. And arguably it might get harder because the more experience you have, both as a writer and as a reader, the more you realize what is good and what is not. And to read something that isn't good, which I do all the time of my own stuff is painful. And you have to say, "Oh my God, I can't, that's not good enough. I can't get that out there. I have to do something better." And that requires a lot more work. If you're ignorant about what is good and what is not good it's easier.
[00:17:46] Jesse Purewal: Where do you need to go seek that inspiration or that extra input or that, "God, I don't know. I think this is pretty good. It's probably 95%. Who's going to help me take it that next five?"
[00:17:56] Daniel Pink: Really, really important question. You have two problems here in seeking that kind of counsel. Sometimes other people don't know what is good and what is bad. You have to seek out the counsel of people who have taste and judgment and that is not everyone. It really is not everyone. What's more, there are people who have taste and judgment, who sometimes are uncomfortable saying, "That stinks. That's not good enough." And so you want people with taste and with the moxie to tell you when you're being an idiot. Now, that first one is a rare quality, but people have it. I think the second one can be encouraged. And I try to encourage that in the people whom I work with to say, "What's the single biggest problem with this? Or what advice do you have for fixing this?" Or even early in a [inaudible] I'm thinking about some TV work that I did because TV is hard, it's demanding, it's physically grueling.
And so sometimes you do a take after take, it's not working and that the naturally empathetic view of that is for people to say, "You're doing great. You're doing great. You're doing great." And I finally had to say to people, "Please don't tell me I'm doing great when I'm not doing great. All right, what I've been doing now has not been great." What would be more helpful is to say, "Hey, here's one thing that you can do better." I mean, try not to be an asshole about it, but try to explain. It's like, I don't need to be bucked up. The way to buck me up is to give me honest feedback that helps me get better. And once people hear that, once or twice, they're like, "Oh, you're one of those. Got it." And you have a different kind of relationship.
[00:19:38] Jesse Purewal: Love that. What is the cross training for being a writer? When I was running marathons, the coaching was always, you do a certain amount of long runs, but you also got to go on your bike. You should be on a rowing machine. You should sort of work at, what's the cross training, if that's an apt analogy for improving as a writer or just being able to stay consistent with how you show up as a writer?
[00:20:00] Daniel Pink: It's not quite cross training, but to push this analogy, I think part of it is your diet. And so I think that you have to have a wide ranging media diet. So if you're a writer, you shouldn't read only books, you should read newspapers, you should read magazine articles. You should read a few things online. I think that it helps to be a writer to watch certain kinds of television because television has in many cases has thought through very systematically, a kind of structure of acts and whatnot. I actually love reading plays, in part because plays have a structure built in and I get to see that. Plays are also very, very concise. You have to find other ways to do the exposition rather than having the character say everything. "Hi, I'm a 48 year old man, who's down on my luck."
You want to have other ways to do the exposition. So I think that having a wide diet is really important. I find that socializing ideas is actually helpful in being a writer. So if someone says, I mean, sometimes they don't feel like talking about it, but a lot of times someone says, "What are you working on?" I say, "Well, I'll tell you what I'm working on and here's where I'm stuck. Maybe you can help me figure. I'm just like, in socially, maybe you can help me figure it out." And so when you put the ideas out there and actually try to talk about them, that can be, I think, a form of cross training or even take questions early in the process from people who have questions about it. I think that can be a form of cross-training too.
[00:21:28] Jesse Purewal: Let me ask you a couple things on some specific books. I'm going to go all the way back to 2005 with A Whole New Mind: Why Right-brainers Will Rule the Future, about the power of right brain thinking. In some ways, I would say the things that you wrote about, like this [inaudible] abundance, Asia and automation, or the six senses that you had, everything from design up through meaning. They feel like they're as salient or even more salient here in 2022. There's the sense that the book was prescient or perhaps timeless. If you were to rewrite A Whole New Mind, with a 2022 lens, looking ahead to, say the next decade or two, what do you think would be new or different?
[00:22:10] Daniel Pink: Well, first of all, I would use the phrase [inaudible] for it definitely, to borrow from you.
[00:22:19] Jesse Purewal: Guilty as charged.
[00:22:20] Daniel Pink: So the [inaudible] were Asia, automation and abundance. Abundance, meaning we have such incredible levels of material wellbeing that you have to create something profoundly new. In order to break through in a marketplace, that incremental changes in products and services are going to be less valuable than step changes and products and services. And coming up with entirely new categories, giving the world something I didn't know it was missing. Asia was really about the outsourcing of routine white collar work, which has been significant, but not as powerful yet. I think that this pandemic might be an accelerator in that because we've seen how easy it is to do things remotely. But the final one, automation is something that it might have gotten a little bit sold short in a way. What I had suggested in that book is that automation would only cover these more kind of left brain logical, linear, rule based processes.
And what we see now are the first stirrings of artificial intelligence that can say, write an essay. Artificial intelligence that can compose a piece of music. Artificial intelligence that can create a work of abstract art and that happened at a far faster pace than I ever imagined. So I would probably put a greater emphasis on that. That said, I think that the underlying thesis holds up, which is essentially that what we need to do today to survive in the economy is use skills and abilities, capabilities that augment machine intelligence rather than compete with machine intelligence and use the advances in machine intelligence to liberate our fundamentally human capacities, like invention, creativity, big picture thinking, empathy, service, and those kinds of things.
[00:24:08] Jesse Purewal: So in Drive, you talk about the three elements of autonomy, mastery and purpose. What reflection do you have on the way that those three elements have either become more important or shifted in their alchemy or have otherwise changed in kind of a post pandemic world of work?
[00:24:26] Daniel Pink: I think post pandemic autonomy has become even more important because what we had is in that book, I talked about letting people work from wherever they wanted. In my book [inaudible] a hundred years ago, I talked about the rise of remote work, people working at home. And there was a chorus of sorts that said no way, can't happen. We can't trust people to do that. That's not going to work technologically and people will just shirk. Then we had a two year international experiment with that and it worked. And so I think that's a very difficult egg to unscramble. And so I think that autonomy has become much more important. Autonomy over where people work, autonomy over when people work, the ability to configure their hours. At some extent, the ability to configure their tasks and so forth. So I think autonomy has become much, much, much more important.
The other two, I think have remained in importance, human beings on mastery, human beings want to make progress. Human beings want to get better at stuff. It's part of who we are. And if that's part of who we are, then it should be part of who we are in the workplace. So I think that has remained as potent a motivator. And then purpose, I think has grown, although I think about purpose differently than I did in that book. I think about purpose now as two things, rather than one thing. I wrote a lot about what I now like to call capital P purpose, which is big transcendent purpose. I'm solving the climate crisis, I'm feeding the hungry. And that's important, but I think there's another kind of purpose that I like to call small p purpose, lowercase p purpose. We're just simply making a contribution.
Am I helping a teammate, get a project out the door? Am I helping a customer resolve its issue and all of those? So, I have a more nuanced view of purpose than I now than I did when I wrote that book. But once again, if there's a change, it's that it's over folks out there on autonomy, man. You got to actually default to autonomy and start with it. Doesn't mean that everybody deserves autonomy and everybody can handle it, but most people can. Most people do deserve it and most people can handle it and that's where you have to start.
[00:26:25] Jesse Purewal: And there's a really good way to frame it in the sense that we don't always have to know our calling to be able to take the next step forward in our careers and in our lives.
[00:26:31] Daniel Pink: I think the last thing you said, Jesse, is actually pretty profound. Sometimes we get the sequence wrong. We say, "Okay, I'm going to figure out my purpose and then I'm going to do stuff." When, in fact, doing stuff is a way to figure out your purpose. We tend to think we need to figure stuff out and then act. What we don't realize is sometimes acting is a way to figure stuff out, that doing is a form of thinking and thinking is a form of doing and vice versa. So we're back to Schrödinger's cat, which is more important thinking or doing. Yes.
[00:26:59] Jesse Purewal: I had this exact talk last week at Berkeley at the hospital where I said, "Listen, I would implore you to get out the piece of paper and articulate everything you can to yourself about what you believe your purpose is." But in order to do that, what I would ask you to do is also think about your life as a series of clues. Because if you don't follow the clues, you'll never get to the purpose.
[00:27:21] Daniel Pink: I mean, I sometimes think about this in terms of, don't ask yourself what your passion is, but ask yourself, what do you do? What do you do as a matter of who you are when nobody's watching, because you like it. And there are clues there to take this full circle. There's a clue in the fact that not all 11 year old boys would regularly walk to the library and hang out in the library for several hours. I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm saying it's a thing. It's a clue. If you were to say to me, "Hey, was going to the library and reading stuff your passion?" I would say, "I don't know, I'm 11." It's a stupid question, but is that what you do? "Yeah, that's what I do."
[00:27:59] Jesse Purewal: You write about how it's not just that regret presents us something useful. It's actually that without regret, we don't have the inputs or the motivation we need to actually function as human beings. So if I abstract that lesson, we've got to be comfortable with paradox in our lives if we're going to thrive. At least if I think of regret as a paradox, it's like, "Why would I want to have regrets?" Do you see it the same way that learning to deal with regret in a healthy way is in some sense, a test case of the broader ability to live within and thrive within the boundaries of paradox?
[00:28:31] Daniel Pink: Maybe. And it's an interesting question. And again, I'm not joking around now. It goes back to Schrödinger's cat. They're paradoxes or inconsistencies or parent contradictions in quantum physics. Is that particle here or there? Yes. It's in both places at the same time. And I think you see that to some extent with certain aspects of human behavior, which is that, are human beings innately selfish, or are they innately generous? And the answer is yes, they're both. And so when it comes to regret, I think the paradox is somewhat different in that we tend to associate things that are aversive, painful and unpleasant, as something to be avoided and something that is inherently harmful. But what I've found in this book is that regret, this misunderstood emotion, clarifies what we value, as I said earlier, and instructs us on how to live better.
Now, everybody wants that clarification about what they value and everybody wants instruction on how to do better. They don't want the pain and discomfort that comes with regret, but it doesn't work that way. It's a combo platter. You got to have both. And in fact, the discomfort is integral to the clarification. The discomfort is integral to the instruction and so I think that's the paradox there. That's something that is aversive and unpleasant is profoundly useful. I think that's hard for some people to get their minds around. So there's some interesting recent research from my yellow [inaudible] at the University of Chicago, showing that people learn better when they actually seek discomfort. That is, "I'm going to learn how to play the guitar and I'm going to try to be uncomfortable doing it." She did it with improv and some acting classes.
I'm going to take an improv class and acting class and I'm going to seek and invite the discomfort. And when people do that, they learn more. But again, it's not our instinct to seek discomfort, so that itself is a paradox. But discomfort is a source of learning and yet we're not naturally inclined to seek discomfort, but we should be.
[00:30:33] Jesse Purewal: Let me just ask you at the end of The Power of Regret, your most recent book. You write that you personally have a regret around maybe not taking as many entrepreneurial or creative risks as one could have in your shoes. Any glimpse you would offer us on the show about what maybe in the offing for Dan Pink, in light of that reflection?
[00:30:55] Daniel Pink: I would love to offer you a glimpse, but there is no glimpse to be had because there is nothing to be glimpsed. It's just that in coed sense that, at having written books for a long time, maybe there is another challenge out there that I should pursue at a point in my life when I have suddenly mileage on me and I have plenty to look back on, but I also have, knock wood, plenty ahead of me. And so I don't want the me of 15 years from now to be pissed that I didn't start an online rutabaga company or that I didn't play the role of Hamlet in a hip-hop musical in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
[00:31:35] Jesse Purewal: I like that one, Sheboygan, unexpected. Well, let me do a quick lightning round with you, Dan, and then we'll let you go. Give me your favorite Ohio sports memory.
[00:31:44] Daniel Pink: What a great question. My favorite Ohio sports memory. I have one that's not a single game, but that is a sort of a broader, would that do?
[00:31:53] Jesse Purewal: A hundred percent.
[00:31:54] Daniel Pink: So my favorite Ohio sports memory is late Saturday mornings in the fall, going down to the Horseshoe, Ohio stadium, and my brother and I sitting in a stadium of 100,000 insane people watching the Ohio State Buckeyes play football. There's something about being in a crowd that large and that intense, that is unforgettable.
[00:32:20] Jesse Purewal: Tell me the time of day when you are at your writing best, if such a thing exists for you.
[00:32:26] Daniel Pink: I do my best writing in the morning. I usually come into my office at about 8:30 or so, and I try to crank hard until 12:30 or so.
[00:32:35] Jesse Purewal: Who's an author that you admire deeply or who has had a big influence on you?
[00:32:40] Daniel Pink: So many, one of them would be John McPhee. And the reason I say that is that I got to him early in part because of a librarian, truly. A librarian who noticed that this little guy was reading a lot of books about sports and who said, "Hey, wait a second. I see you like sports. There's another way to write about sports." And so she showed me A Sense of Where You Are about Bill Bradley and then Levels of the Game about tennis. In a weird way, George Orwell, because George Orwell's essays are such paragons of clarity and sharpness. Also his fiction, particularly these two iconic works have stood up so well. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable that Animal Farm and 1984 remained so deeply, deeply relevant to this day.
[00:33:32] Jesse Purewal: Last one for you is what would you regard as your biggest breakthrough?
[00:33:37] Daniel Pink: I think my biggest breakthrough was maybe 25 years ago when I decided to leave a regular job to go work for myself. I think that was one of the smarter decisions that I made and it changed the course of my professional life, largely for the better. I think I would've been unhappy continuing to be an employee doing anything. And I also wonder whether I would've been unhappy sort of being in charge of something. I think doing my own one man band thing has been really satisfying and was I think a pretty good reflection of who I am and how I'm wired.
[00:34:14] Jesse Purewal: I love hearing that. Thank you for being so transparent and having some fun in this conversation and from one Ohio alum, Northwestern, alum, sports fan, all the things to another. Thank you once again.
[00:34:26] Daniel Pink: What a great American you are, Jesse. You have the Ohio, you have the Buckeye blood coursing through your body. You have the purple pride coursing through your heart. It's fantastic.
[00:34:36] Jesse Purewal: All right, my friend, be well, thanks for the conversation.
[00:34:39] Daniel Pink: Cheers.
[00:34:40] Jesse Purewal: Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and a review and tell a friend. Breakthrough Builders is a Qualtrics Studios original, hosted and executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. An awesome team of people puts this show together, including our show writer, Todd Bagnull, and our head of social media, Chelsea Hunersen. From StudioPod Media in San Francisco, our show coordinator is Nicole Genova. Editing and music are by producer Sterling Shore and executive producer Katie Sunku Wood, with sound engineering by Ryan Crowther. At VaynerTalent in New York, Samantha Heapps, Hanna Park and Yvonne Lynn provide publicity and promotional support. The show's designers are Baron Santiago and Vinsuka Chindavijak. Our website is by Gregory Hedon, photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Ben Hawken, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.