E14 The Secrets of Perfect Timing
In this interview, New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Daniel Pink discusses how to use our understanding of cognitive ability throughout the day to optimize our performance including when to conduct creative work, strategies for presenting ideas to leadership, how to schedule administrative tasks, and when to tackle complex problems. Finally, Daniel explains how to implement optimal timing in our personal lives.
Over the course of his career, Daniel Pink has written six bestselling books including Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, To Sell Is Human, A Whole New Mind, and most recently, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. Daniel lives in Washington, D.C. where he continues to write about business and human behavior.
Daniel Pink:
Our cognitive abilities do not remain static over the course of the day. They change. The research is complicated, but the guidance is relatively simple and straightforward. We should be doing our analytic work during our peak, whenever that is. We should be doing our administrative work, work that doesn't require massive brain power during the trough. And we should be doing our insight work, this more iterative kind of things during the recovery period.
Don MacPherson:
Hello everyone. This is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses, and I'm thrilled to bring you 12 new episodes of the podcast. We all know that creativity and innovation are highly coveted in business today, and that's why we're focusing on these areas in Season 2 of the podcast. The quest to find the most creative minds is ongoing. Perhaps, however, that thinking is shortsighted. Maybe the key to unlocking our creativity is putting ourselves in the right environment, and more importantly, timing our creative endeavors correctly. Fortunately for us, we have today's guest to break it all down.
He is New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, Daniel Pink. His books include Drive, To Sell Is Human, A Whole New Mind, and When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. Daniel and I sat down in his office in Washington, DC, where we discussed his creative writing process, the importance of coordinating your creative work with the right time of day. And he shared a few tips that creatives like Ernest Hemingway and Jerry Seinfeld have used to perform their best.
Daniel, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Daniel Pink:
Don, it's great to be here.
Don MacPherson:
Your latest book is called When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. At a high level, what did you find related to timing and human performance?
Daniel Pink:
Well, I found a lot, and at the core of all of it, Don, is the following, that when we make our timing decisions in our lives, and we make a lot of timing decisions in our lives. Everything from when in the day should you do one kind of work? When in the day should you do another kind of work? When should you take a break? When should you exercise? But even beyond that, when should you start a project? When should you abandon a project that's not working? We tend to make those decisions based on intuition. We make them based on guess work. We often make them based on just the default by not even making them.
And that's the wrong way to do it because there is this rich body of science out there across many, many disciplines, literally two dozen disciplines that give us evidence, facts, data on how to make our timing decisions in a smarter, more evidence-based way. At the core of it is this following idea, which is that we think that timing is an art, but it's really much more of a science than we realize. And if you enlist a science, I really think you can make better decisions.
Don MacPherson:
In the book, you talk about peak, trough, and rebound.
Daniel Pink:
Yeah.
Don MacPherson:
This phenomenon. What does that mean? And how does being aware of it improve our chance of better decision-making?
Daniel Pink:
Well, what we know, so one aspect of timing is how we perform over the course of the day. And the day is actually a really vital unit of understanding timing. And it turns out that the day has a profound effect on both our mood and our performance. What we generally know is this; people tend to move through the day in these three stages you just mentioned; a peak, a trough, a recovery. For about 80% of us, we move through the day in more or less that order; peak early in the day, trough in the middle of the day, recovery later in the day.
About 20% of us are night owls. And night owls are very, very different. They have what we call an evening chronotype, which means that they naturally get up late, go to sleep late. For night owls, the most important thing is that they have their peak much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much later in the day, well into the evening. What we know is that our brain power doesn't remain the same over the course of the day. That's a really important point. That's the thing, for me, my biggest takeaway from the book is the revelation that our cognitive abilities do not remain static over the course of the day. They change.
And if you think about the presumptions in most organizations, we just presume that our brain power is constant over the course of the day. We make no, it's yeah, nine o'clock meeting is the same as a three o'clock meeting, it's the same as a five o'clock meeting. And it's not. So, here's what we know. During the peak, that's when we're best at analytic work, work that requires heads down focus and attention. During the trough, terrible time of day. Usually, the early afternoon and late afternoon, the early to midafternoon, huge decrements in performance there. Huge. You see it in traffic accidents, you see it in corporate performance, you see it in student test scores, you see it alarmingly all over healthcare.
Then the recovery period. The recovery period, which is the late afternoon and early evening for most of us, 80% of us is a very interesting period. Our mood is higher than it was other parts of the day, but our vigilance, our attention to detail is less. And that makes it actually a very good time for things that require some form of mental looseness, like iterating ideas, brainstorming. And essentially what the research tells us, the research is complicated, but the guidance is relatively simple and straightforward. We should be doing our analytic work during our peak, whenever that is. We should be doing our administrative work, work that doesn't require massive brain power during the trough. And we should be doing our insight work, this more iterative kind of things during the recovery period.
Don MacPherson:
And it's not just work where you can apply this, right? I think I remember reading something about scheduling a surgery.
Daniel Pink:
Oh yeah.
Don MacPherson:
You want to be the first surgery, right?
Daniel Pink:
In general, what the data tell us is that you shouldn't have surgery in the afternoon if you can avoid it. I mean, there are big, big differences there. I mean, big. So, if you look at anesthesia errors, anesthesia errors in hospitals are four times more likely at 3:00 PM than they are at 9:00 AM. That's a big, big difference. If you look at hand-washing in hospitals, huge deterioration in the afternoons. If you look at the physician prescribing unnecessary antibiotics, far, far higher in the afternoon. Again, our own cognitive abilities don't remain static over the course of the day. That's important. But as you say, absolutely, other people's cognitive abilities don't remain static over the course of the day.
I mean, you see this in judicial and jury decision-making in a pretty alarming way. As I mentioned, we talked about healthcare. You see it even in, there's some really important research by Francesca Gino at Harvard, looking at Danish standardized test scores, where in Denmark, kids are, on test day, are randomly assigned to take the test at different times a day. So, the kids who take the test in the afternoon versus the kids who take the test in the morning, the kids in the afternoon score as if they've missed two weeks of school. So, it becomes a, I think in that case, a faulty tool for making policy.
Don MacPherson:
You talked about the legal system. Can you talk a little bit about how timing or how the when of the legal system matters to people?
Daniel Pink:
If you look at the whole, many of the presumptions of our legal system, they're based on ideas about behavior that just simply aren't true. Adam Benforado at Temple University has written a brilliant book about this called Unfair. We rely in jury cases and in trials on eyewitness testimony. What we know from studies of human memory is that eyewitness testimony is worthless. It's meaningless. And yet, we rely on it to cite cases, sometimes to send people to prison or whatnot. One of the other things that you see is that the way that both jurors and judges make decisions varies based on time of day. So, there's a really interesting experiment from several years ago, where they gave jurors, experimental jurors, a set of facts. They were each about a criminal defendant.
First group, we gave them a set of facts. The defendant's name is Robert Garner. Second group, we give him the exact same set of facts. The defendant's name is Roberta Garcia. And they had to decide, is this person innocent or guilty of this crime? When the jurors deliberated in the morning, they reached the same verdict. They treated Garner and Garcia exactly the same. When they deliberated in the afternoon, they were more likely to convict Garcia and exonerate Garner. That's frightening. There's a very famous study out of, led in part by Jonathan Levav at Stanford, of Israeli judges making parole decisions. So, prisoners would come before them and the judges would decide, “Okay, you've served enough time. You've been a model of good behavior. You can now go free.” Or, “Sorry, you have to stay in jail for more years.”
So, it's a big decision about human liberty. And what this study found was that judges were more likely to award parole early in the day and immediately after they'd had a break. And so, the, I shouldn't laugh because it's terrifying, the difference, if you were the potential parolee who came in right before the judge had her break, versus potential parolee who came in right after the judge had her break, there was a 7X difference. The defendant before the break had a 10% chance of getting parole. The defendant after the break, 70% chance of getting parole. And so, again, and I think what's interesting about this, Don, is that it's not like… It's in every realm. No matter what part of our lives that we deal in, what we know from this research is that our brain power doesn't remain the same the whole day.
So, it doesn't mean like this is a massive unsolvable problem. It's actually a solvable issue because we know a little bit, we know pretty much how it changes over the course of the day. And as individuals, we can make different decisions, as executives and business can make different decisions, HR professionals can make different decisions. Institutions can make different decisions.
Don MacPherson:
Let's bring it back to work, because I think the Israeli study on the judges is really a critical one. How does that apply to work? And let's say you're going to your boss or a committee with a proposal, or you're having a performance review. Talk about the when and the strategy behind those scenarios.
Daniel Pink:
Great question. Because we can analogize from that judicial research and use some other research here. Here's a way to think about them. Whether you're trying to get investors, whether you're trying to get your boss to agree to something, when you come and you present people with an idea and try to get them to make a decision, in general, the decision makers come to that encounter with a default decision in their back pocket. And the default decision is generally no. Because having a default decision as no is low risk. Same thing with those judges. There's no risk keeping somebody in prison longer. There's a risk if you give somebody a parole and that person ends up committing a crime after being freed.
So, there's generally no risk in giving a no. the question then becomes, when are people more likely to overcome the default? And I think the research and the judges suggest that people are slightly more likely to overcome the default early in the day, during that, for most people is the peak, and immediately after breaks, because breaks are much more important than we realize. Breaks affect our performance, our cognition, our decision-making capacities much more than we realize. Now, I don't want to go crazy here. Okay? I don't think we can fully quantify it, but you might have slightly better odds getting your proposal agreed to if you pick the right time of day.
Let's say that, in general, or let's say you're a salesperson and you're coming to… It's a proposal to hire my company. And under ordinary circumstances, I have a 9% chance of getting you to say yes. And let's say I pick a better time, maybe I go up to an 11% chance of getting a yes. There's still an 89% chance I'm getting a no. I'm probably not going to get it. But here's the thing, going from that 9% to 11%, if it's something, that two percentage point increase, if it's something I'm doing a lot, that actually can make a difference.
Don MacPherson:
Performance over time. Absolutely.
Daniel Pink:
Absolutely.
Don MacPherson:
It makes a huge difference. How does stage of life fit into performance and taking action?
Daniel Pink:
There are a number of different dimensions about this. What we know is that wellbeing over time. So, if we think about like, how happy and satisfied are people over time? What researchers around the world have found, and this is a finding that is consistent, remarkably consistent across countries, across cultures and nationalities, is that there is a slight dip in wellbeing during people's midlife, 50s, late 40s into the late 50s. It isn't a midlife crisis. The midlife crisis is one of the most bogus ideas that is out there. There's no evidence for a widespread midlife crisis. But what you do see is you see a U-shaped curve of wellbeing, so that if you plot, basically, our happiness, our satisfaction, our subjective wellbeing on the vertical axis.
And all of your listeners can now draw a little chart in the air as I'm doing right now, as we sit here, the vertical axis is wellbeing, subjective wellbeing, happiness, and the horizontal axis is time, what you see is that people are generally pretty happy in their 20s, begins to decline a little bit in their 30s, declines a little bit more in their 40s. They reach their nether, the bottom part in their 50s, usually around the mid-50s. And then, over time, it starts ticking back up. So, it's like a gently slope U. And so, I think that makes a big difference in people's lives. And if you think about, and I think for HR professionals, there's a huge opportunity here.
Because what you have is you have mid-career professionals who might be entering that dip. It's not a crisis, but entering that kind of dip. And yet, what you have is you have some very high performing people. And the reasons for this are intriguing. We don't know exactly why this is happening, but we can theorize that, when you're in your 20s, you think you're going to become the CEO. You go to work for an insurance company, “I'll probably be CEO before too long.” And then, as time goes on, you realize, “Hey, only one person gets to be CEO and it's probably not gonna be me.” I think if you look at those mid-career professionals during that dip, I think there's an incredible opportunity here for somebody that doesn't exist in most firms, which is mid-career mentoring.
We do a very good job of mentoring younger, well, some places do a good job of mentoring young employees, but what we don't do is mentor people, say, in their early 50s, who might have 15 good, solid years to contribute, more 20, 25 good, solid years to contribute. We just sort of let, oh, okay, we sort of let them drift. And if we had some kind of mid-career mentoring, I think that would be really powerful. The other thing about this is that we know there are changes, in terms of stages of life, there are changes in how our, basically, in our cognition over time. What we know, and again, I'm going to draw another chart for you in the air, and all of your listeners at home can simulate it too, is let's think about… We're going to think about, on the vertical axis, basically think of it as high and low.
And on the horizontal axis, again, think about it as age. Mostly what we know in studies of intelligence is the following, that in your late teens and 20s especially, you end up being very high in…. It goes up, you go up in fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is essentially processing speed, memory, those kind of stuff, almost like those computer-like capacities. And I see it myself. I used to be able to do math extremely fast in my head. I can't do math in my head very fast anymore. Fortunately, I have an iPhone with a calculator on it. All right? And so, your processing speed goes up, but then, past your mid to late 20s, it starts going down. Not good.
However, there's another form of intelligence or other form of intelligence called crystallized intelligence. Crystallized intelligence is essentially your accumulated body of knowledge and insight that allows you to make decisions and choices based on that. Well, your crystallized intelligence starts pretty low, but in your 50s, especially 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, it gets pretty high. The other thing that happens is that measures of emotional intelligence also go up as people age. So, in general, a 20-year-old is less emotionally intelligent in general than, say, a 65-year-old or 70-year-old.
I don't think we take older workers as seriously enough because we see the decline. We think that intelligence is all about that processing speed. And that's down. That's down for me, man. My processing speed is slower than it was 30 years ago. But what we see in general, in intelligence over the stages of life is that crystallized intelligence and emotional intelligence are actually reaching their peak. And if you combine crystallized intelligence and emotional intelligence, to me, that's a form of wisdom in a way. You have like people reaching their peak of wisdom at much later stages of their life. And if they're physically healthy, they can contribute massively.
Don MacPherson:
Just one comment on that. As artificial intelligence becomes a bigger part of our life, all the experts are talking about an emotional intelligence being more important. And so, I think what you're describing is really important for executives and business leaders to understand.
Daniel Pink:
Yeah, I'll see you and raise you. I mean, I wrote a book over 10 years ago called A Whole New Mind, that basically laid out that the argument that certain kinds of metaphorically left-brain processing, logical, linear, sequential types of skills are going to be automated or outsourced. And that the skills that are going to be most in demand are going to be skills that are harder to outsource and automate, which are things like a sense of meaning, empathy, storytelling, being able to see, being able to see the big picture. For now, at least, a lot of automation and a lot of AI is very good at the fluid intelligence, at essentially processing quickly.
Don MacPherson:
We're talking with bestselling author, Daniel Pink. When we come back, we will discuss the importance of knowing when you will be your most innovative creative self.
Hi everybody. This is 12 Geniuses Podcast host, Don MacPherson. Did you know that about 12% of the world's population is over the age of 60? That's about one in eight people. By 2050, it will grow to 22%. An aging population is going to have a massive influence over the way we work, design our communities, and manage healthcare. At 12 Geniuses, we write, report, and speak about the trends shaping the way we live and work. If these trends are important to you, we invite you to follow us on social media. And to book me as a speaker for your next event, contact us at future@12geniuses.com.
We are back with author, Daniel Pink. In part one of the interview, we talked about the importance of timing and how that enables or disables optimal performance. In this part of the interview, we'll talk specifically about how timing impacts creativity and innovation.
In your book, you write, we are smarter, faster, dimmer, slower, more creative, and less creative in some parts of the day than others. How big are these gaps?
Daniel Pink:
It depends. Sometimes the difference between the daily high point and the daily low point can be massive, really, really significant. But what we see is fairly predictable changes in performance based on time of day and the type of task that's at hand.
Don MacPherson:
Well, let's dive into creativity. You talk about the inspiration paradox, what is that?
Daniel Pink:
It's a really interesting finding by a couple of researchers that showed this. So, it goes back a little bit to chronotype, which is, are you a morning person or an evening person? That sounds like top psychology folklore, but there's a whole field of chronobiology that's shown us that we have different propensity. Some of us naturally wake up early and go to sleep early. Others of us wake up late and go to sleep late. A lot of us are in the middle. What we know essentially is this, that if you give somebody a problem with a… Not a problem with a non-obvious solution. There's a famous problem that they give people where you… About a coin dealer, right? So, there's a coin dealer and he gets a coin and the coin has… He's received this coin that someone wants to sell him.
And on one side is emperor's head, on the other side is the date, 544 BC. And he immediately says, “Oh wow, I'm going to call the police.” So, how do people figure out what's going on there? What these researchers have found is that… So, that's a problem that requires insight. It's not a math problem. You have to say, “Hmm, what's going on here.” You have to see around corners a little bit that doesn't necessarily bend immediately to mathematical logic. What these researchers found is the following, that people who were more morning people, more morning-oriented people who reached their peak in the morning, they were more likely to get this question wrong in the morning, and right later in the day. Weird, right? That's why it's a paradox.
The people who are more evening oriented were more likely to get this question wrong late in the day, but right earlier in the day. Again, it's an inspiration paradox. And what they found in this research is that there are different ways of thinking. During our peak, let's go back to the peak period, which for those morning people was the morning, during our peak, that's when we are most vigilant. That's the key aspect of the peak. We're most vigilant. What does vigilance mean? Vigilance means you're able to bat away distractions. You can focus, you can lock down. That's very good for certain kinds of work, going over an audit, writing a report, analyzing the steps of a strategy.
However, that is a less good frame of mind for certain kinds of creative tasks because you're too narrowly focused. For certain kinds of creative tasks, you actually don't want to be hypervigilant. Vigilance can work against you with certain kinds of creative tasks. So, think about brainstorming. All of us have been in brainstorming sessions with people who are hypervigilant, and they're like, “That's a bad idea. That's a bad idea, that's…” And it's not an effective brainstorming session. So, the paradox is that, in many cases, we can do our most… Some of our insight work, come up with new solutions at what seems to be a less optimal time of day.
And the reason for that is vigilance. We are actually less vigilant. We're less inhibited. And when you're less inhibited, you can be a little bit more freewheeling. You can have a kind of mental looseness. If you tie that with what we talked about in the first segment, especially for the majority of us who are not owls, during that later part of the day, the time of day that you and I happen to be talking right now, you have declining vigilance and rising mood. So, the combination of higher mood and being a little bit disinhibited makes people better at certain things that require kinds of mental looseness. So, there's an argument for grouping some of your insight work to a certain time of day and putting your analytic work at another time of day.
Don MacPherson:
So, we have to answer the question, though, how do you know that the coin is a fake?
Daniel Pink:
Oh, sorry. Right. Okay. [crosstalk 0:23:25].
Don MacPherson:
I know we have audience that are at the edge of their seat.
Daniel Pink:
Yeah. The reason you know the coin is a fake is because it's stamped 544 BC. And so, you can't have a coin stamped... Nobody knew at that moment…
Don (23:36):
BC didn’t exist.
Daniel Pink:
BC didn't exist before C. Nobody knew that 544, the letter C was going to be B. So, the coin is obviously a fraud. And what's interesting about that, and it goes to a lot to creativity, some aspects of creativity, when I first looked at that problem, it took me a very long time to get that to solve it. I was flummoxed. And then, eventually when you're problem-solving strategies, hit a wall, and they hit a wall again, and they hit a wall a third time and a fourth time. And you're straining. People can experience what in this literature is called, it's a lovely phrase, a flash of illuminance. And people suddenly see it. And you are more likely to have that flash of illuminance when you're not tight, but when you're a little bit more loose. And that's what it takes to solve that kind of problem.
Don MacPherson:
What about presenting an innovative idea or creative idea to senior leadership or to a group of judges is, do we want to go early to take advantage of what we were talking about, or after a break, or does the inspirational paradox factor in when evaluating a creative idea?
Daniel Pink:
It varies. What we know is that if there are a relatively small number of competitors, you're probably better off going first. And that's doubly true if you're the incumbent. You can essentially lock it down, and you have a better chance of locking it down if there's a small number of competitors. If there are a lot of competitors, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that you're better off going last. You see this a lot in this research on zero competitions whether it's figure skating or American Idol competitions and whatnot. If the decision maker has very clear criteria, or there could be an advantage in going early, if the decision maker doesn't have very clear criteria, don't go early because they're going to use those first few sessions to figure out what it is that they want. So, there's a lot of nuance there having to do with timing, not only what the clock on the wall says, but also where you fall in sequence.
Don MacPherson:
Can you give some examples, you do a great job of this in the book, can you give some examples of creatives and how they work? I know you mentioned Ernest Hemingway, and you mentioned Jerry Seinfeld in the way that they've worked in fueling their creativity. Can you give us some examples of hacks?
Daniel Pink:
Yeah. There are a lot of little hacks on things like this. So, Jerry Seinfeld famously, in order to maintain his momentum, would keep a calendar. And every day that he wrote, he would keep an X, he’d write an X. So, every day he would write his comedy, his routines, he would make an X. And eventually, you start getting three Xs and then four Xs, and you don't wanna break the streak. I had up a chart like that on my wall, not that long ago, and then I fell off the wagon. But something else is Ernest Hemingway used to stop in the middle of a sentence so that now there is some evidence that if you stop in the middle of a sentence, you're going to be thinking about in the back of your head. But I think more important than anything else, if you have part of a sentence already written, you can start the next writing session with a little bit of momentum.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah. I love that idea.
Daniel Pink:
I do that myself.
Don MacPherson:
You do-
Daniel Pink:
I literally, I'm not joking around, I literally did that today.
Don MacPherson:
What about the where of creativity? I worked in an office for 20 years and I don't think I had a one good creative idea in that office. My creative ideas always came on a train or bus or in the shower, whatever. Do you have any insights in that?
Daniel Pink:
I think what it has to do with is what we were talking about before, which is certain kinds of creativity and certain kinds of insights come when we are unfocused and disinhibited. There was a paper that came out last couple weeks ago about looking at writers and physicists and when their creative ideas came from. And an astonishing number of their most creative ideas came when they were not working. I think it's about disinhibition, that you're a little bit more open, you're a little bit less tight. It's a little bit of a conundrum because I'm a big believer in showing up. Like, if you want to write, show up every freaking day, at the same time, and do your writing, as painful as it is, get out stuff that's bad, get out stuff that's wrong. Just get it onto the page. And a lot of times, if you just… If I sat around waiting for the muse to visit me, I would be sitting here for year decades
Don MacPherson:
Collecting dust, huh?
Daniel Pink:
Right. That said, I do think it's important for us to do things that…. There's a guy, there's a physician at Harvard who wrote a book about this 20 years ago and talked about there's certain things like water, for instance, some people are, when they're like taking a shower or swimming or something like that, that water fuels that. Other people, motion. So, you were talking about trains and things like that. For me, I will often get an idea if I am running and just spacing out. So, these things that we think of as vices, spacing out, daydreaming can actually be real sources of creativity.
Don MacPherson:
I think one of the misconceptions about aging is that you become less creative, but I think you addressed that in the book that is not necessarily true. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Daniel Pink:
Again, our cognition changes. And there's some good work, there's an economist at the University of Chicago who I wrote about for Wired, like 10 years ago, named David Galenson, who has a theory of creativity based on age. What he found is that there, he says, there are conceptual innovators and experimental innovators. The conceptual innovators, people who make like a big… And so, an example of that would be somebody like Jackson, in art, something like Jackson Pollock or Andy Warhol, who did huge breakthrough stuff at a very young age. And if you look at the value of the work, their influence on the rest of art history, a lot of it came during a certain moment, very early in their lives.
Where if you look at other people, other kinds of artists, whether it's poets like Robert Frost or other kinds of visual artists like Montreal, they did their best work much, much later on. And so, one, and they were just different strategies, one was basically, I'm going to turn things upside down and make a breakthrough. The other is like, I'm going to work, and work, and work, and work, and work, experiment, experiment, experiment, and I'm going to have my big breakthrough when I'm 60. I'm going to have my big breakthrough when I'm 70. I don't know of any research saying that people's creativity shrivels past a certain age. It seems nonsense.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah. I think that's just a myth that a lot of people carry around. What do you do personally, to get inspired and fuel your creativity?
Daniel Pink:
I do believe in showing up. I do believe in just doing the work.
Don MacPherson:
And what does that look like for you? 7a.m. with a cup of coffee?
Daniel Pink:
It means, for me, when I am writing, it means showing up at the same time of day and knocking out a certain number of words every day and coming back and doing it the next day, and the next day, and the next day, essentially working like a brick layer.
Don MacPherson:
And do you take breaks in there?
Daniel Pink:
Oh yeah.
Don MacPherson:
What is the longest segment that you would write, for how long?
Daniel Pink:
That's a good question. Probably the longest, an hour and a half without taking a break. It's hard for me to sustain anything longer than that. It doesn't necessarily need to be a long break. It could be like a five-minute break, but that's the way that I do it. Now, that said, that's just basically your basic work habits. The other things, I think, for fueling creativity is, part of it is just your original, your just initial attitude. Like, are you curious or not? I mean, there are people out there who, for whatever reasons of nature and nurture, just don't seem that curious. They're gonna be far less likely to be creative. The only other thing that I would recommend would be to absorb the world laterally. You should be reading about biology if you're interested in that.
You should be reading about art. You should be reading about sports. You should be reading about television. That is exposing yourself to things well outside of your domain, I think, is, to me at least, is really, really, really important. Just look at the stuff that I like to just read. I happen to love sports, so I read a lot about sports. I happen to like art, so I read a lot about art. I happen to be… I'm just using my own. I have a whole stack right there of books about biology because I think biology's kind of cool. There are other stuff that I'm not that interested in. It's like, I'm not that interested in like cosmology and astrophysics and things like that, so I don't read anything about that. But if I read only, let's say, if I read only economics and social psychology, I would be a less able writer.
Don MacPherson:
So, you finished When. Did you finish When in 2000 18, 2017?
Daniel Pink:
I finished When, yeah, I finished… Oh, well, it came out in early 2018. I finished it in 2017.
Don MacPherson:
And what's next?
Daniel Pink:
I don't know. I'm just trying to figure that out. And one way I do that is by reading widely and also thinking through, basically toggling back and forth between this more expansive insight way of thinking and a sort of a tighter analytic way of, of thinking. So, I'm exploring ideas. Writing a book is so painful that I have a very high bar for it. I mean, writing a book is really hard to do and you end up living with it forever. So, you and I talked about a book that I wrote, that I finished, I don't know, I probably finished writing that book maybe 12 years ago or something like that. It's not behind you, ever. So, you have to live with it for a very long time.
So, you have to choose something that you are really, really into, something that you really care about, something that really fires you up, and that you're willing to talk about 12 years later, 20 years later. And that's a very, very high bar. Most things don't reach that bar. So, I have written book proposals that when I got partway through it, or a lot of the way through it, said, “You know what? This is not a book.” Or, “Wow, this is kind of interesting, but I'm not spending years on this.” That said, for other kinds of things, articles or whatever, hey, try it.
Don MacPherson:
Daniel, this has been a fantastic conversation. Where can people learn more about you on social media?
Daniel Pink:
Well, I happen to have a website, www.danpink, D-A-N-P-I-N-K.com. I'm also, even though I’ve reduced my Twitter usage a lot, I'm on Twitter at @danielpink. And Facebook is @danielhpink because somehow somebody took Daniel pink. And that's it.
Don MacPherson:
Fantastic. Thanks for your time today and thank you for being a genius.
Daniel Pink:
Thanks for having me.
Don MacPherson:
Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses. Thanks also to the amazing team that makes this show possible: Devon McGrath is our production assistant; Brian Bierbaum is our research and historical consultant; Toby, Tony, Jay, and the rest of the team at GL Productions in London make sure the sound and editing are top-notch. To learn how 12 Geniuses can prepare leaders for a rapidly changing business world influenced by shifting demographics, new technologies, and innovative business models, please go to 12geniuses.com.