Daniel Pink
Author of Drive, To Sell Is Human and The Power of Regret
Where to hear and read about Daniel Pink1 episode or test
Daniel Pink is the author of Drive, To Sell Is Human, When and The Power of Regret, and he also writes plays. The habit most worth copying is that he tests a book idea with a 30 to 40 page proposal and starts every project by asking what promise he is making to the reader.
what is the promise I'm making to the reader?
How to Improve Your Writing Skills (Daniel Pink Interview)
Daniel Pink: the story and the lessons
1How Daniel Pink became a writer and built his craft
Pink became a writer by noticing what he did unprompted. He wrote op-eds in law school and short stories in college, and studied linguistics. While holding a demanding government job, he wrote magazine pieces unpaid at 11:30 at night.
After several years in politics he wanted his own ideas and to work for himself. He treats the late-night writing as the strong signal, not a goal he set.
Pink writes to find out what he thinks when an outline stalls. Stuck on a college essay, he brought professor Charlie Yarnoff an engineer's list of 13 fixes. Yarnoff told him to chill out because he did not yet know what he thought.
School taught thesis, then outline, then write. In an ethics class he wrote an essay against what he believed, then realized he agreed with it. "Sometimes you have to write to figure it out."
Pink trains by arguing both sides of a question. He says the most useful thing law school gave him was taking both sides, as in moot court where a coin flip assigns your side.
He cites Tyler Cowen's version: write the most compelling case you can for something you vehemently disagree with.
Pink says skill comes from reading widely and getting reps. Asked how he would teach a writing seminar, he says to consume quality and breadth, start with short forms, and write a lot. He says that covers about 80% of a semester.
He adds that you also need to form your taste and find hard, smart feedback.
Pink keeps a daily commonplace book to sharpen his attention. For eight years he has saved one sentence, phrase or word a day, including words he did not know, such as kakistocracy.
The collection is useful, but the habit also changes what he notices. One saved line, from a modern Oedipus play: the water got poisoned and we got used to the taste.
2Daniel Pink's daily writing routine
Pink sets a daily word count and does nothing else until he hits it. He writes 500, 700 or 800 words a day, because he is a slow writer. Hitting the number brings a moment of liberation, and then he can check sports highlights and email.
He says he could not have written his first book without this routine. For a book he drafts one chapter at a time over several weeks, then spends another week rewriting it. "The structure itself is liberating."
Pink keeps his phone and email out of the writing room. He walks 22 steps to a refurbished garage behind his house, leaves his phone behind, and does not open email until he reaches his word count.
The day starts with coffee, a light breakfast and the print New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Pink treats breaks as part of performance, the way athletes do. The best breaks are in motion, outdoors, with other people, and fully detached from a phone. In a lab study, treadmill walkers generated about three times as many uses for a brick as sitters.
He says calling a break wimping out gets it backwards. "They're part of our performance, not a deviation from the performance."
Pink calls himself a tortoise and relies on consistency over intensity. He reads slowly and writes slowly, and says things take him a long time.
The fixed routine is how a slow writer still finishes books.
3How Pink tests a book idea before committing years to it
Pink keeps a long list of ideas and rereads it months later. He holds the list in a Word document. Some ideas look stupid after four months, and others stick.
Survivors get a few collected articles and some reading before he considers a proposal. A book on wisdom has stayed on the list for a long time.
Pink writes a 30 to 40 page proposal to test the idea. The proposal tests the idea and also whether he enjoys the work. If he hates writing 30 pages, he will hate writing 300.
He dropped The Invisible Present, a list of 10 unseen trends, after 10 days alone drafting its proposal, and was glad to learn it early. "It's a test of the idea."
Pink only writes a book he would want to read in week one. One of his criteria is whether he would want to read it the first week if someone else had written it. If not, he drops it.
Pink talks ideas through with people and watches their reactions. He looks for dead eyes, questions or pushback, and explaining aloud also helps him work the idea out. He floated his regret idea to friends sheepishly and found everyone wanted to talk about it.
That reaction led him to email his publisher an entirely new proposal for The Power of Regret, which began after his daughter's college graduation set him thinking about his own regrets.
Pink pitches ideas as totally fresh and totally familiar. A proposal must say why no one has written the idea, why he is the person to write it, and why now. His pitch for When was that there are many how-to books and we need a when-to book.
Publishers also like the story of how the idea arrived.
Pink names a specific audience because it is never everybody. He says writers delude themselves that everybody will read the book. A specific audience forces sharper choices about what goes in.
Pink adds value by connecting fields that rarely talk to each other. Chronobiologists, decision scholars and sports psychologists find consistent things, but no part of the academy joins them up. He sees the writer as a translator between specialist vernaculars.
4How Pink builds a book and the promise he owes the reader
Pink will not write until he can see the skeleton of the book. He spends months on research and reporting to find the structure. Then he puts first sketches on a whiteboard or big Post-its behind his swivel chair and stares at them.
He calls the search tortured and unpleasant. "I can't write a book unless I see at least the skeleton of it."
Pink tried several structures for his 600 timing studies before one worked. Sorting by day, week, month and year failed, and so did sorting by domains like school, work and health. It worked once he organized around beginnings, midpoints and endings.
Those stages act on people the same way across domains.
Pink stress tests his structure while drafting and lets it change. A planned short section on breaks in his timing book turned into a whole chapter once he found how much research there was.
He says writing is engineering: you build something that has to work, then test whether the walls can hold the roof.
Pink cuts research the reader does not need, however long it took. For The Power of Regret he spent three to four weeks on how regret develops in children. The book needed one paragraph.
His stop signal for research is hearing the same findings again and again.
Pink circles every laugh in a draft to check its pacing. After a speech he circles the laughs to see their density. In one of his plays he found a plot-heavy fifth scene with no laughs and added some.
He borrowed the idea from David Zucker's team, who fixed any 25 to 30 second stretch without a laugh in films like Airplane. He says a book is a house but a play is a watch, because there is no room for a misplaced gear.
Pink asks what promise he is making to the reader before any project. A reader spends about $25 and nine hours that could have gone to family or exercise, so he feels he must pay that off.
He wants readers to do different things, not only think differently, so he puts usefulness first. He admits some may disagree with that, and applies the same aim to his plays.
How to Improve Your Writing Skills (Daniel Pink Interview)
Daniel Pink explains how he treats writing as engineering: a rigid daily routine, a structure found before the drafting starts, and ideas stress tested before he commits years to them. The habit worth hearing is that he writes a 30 to 40 page proposal to find out whether a book idea survives, and asks one question before every project: what promise am I making to the reader?
Pink became a writer by noticing what he did unprompted. He wrote op-eds in law school and short stories in college, and studied linguistics. While holding a demanding government job, he wrote magazine pieces unpaid at 11:30 at night.
After several years in politics he wanted his own ideas and to work for himself. He treats the late-night writing as the strong signal, not a goal he set.
Pink writes to find out what he thinks when an outline stalls. Stuck on a college essay, he brought professor Charlie Yarnoff an engineer's list of 13 fixes. Yarnoff told him to chill out because he did not yet know what he thought.
School taught thesis, then outline, then write. In an ethics class he wrote an essay against what he believed, then realized he agreed with it. "Sometimes you have to write to figure it out."
Pink trains by arguing both sides of a question. He says the most useful thing law school gave him was taking both sides, as in moot court where a coin flip assigns your side.
He cites Tyler Cowen's version: write the most compelling case you can for something you vehemently disagree with.
Pink says skill comes from reading widely and getting reps. Asked how he would teach a writing seminar, he says to consume quality and breadth, start with short forms, and write a lot. He says that covers about 80% of a semester.
He adds that you also need to form your taste and find hard, smart feedback.
Pink keeps a daily commonplace book to sharpen his attention. For eight years he has saved one sentence, phrase or word a day, including words he did not know, such as kakistocracy.
The collection is useful, but the habit also changes what he notices. One saved line, from a modern Oedipus play: the water got poisoned and we got used to the taste.
Pink sets a daily word count and does nothing else until he hits it. He writes 500, 700 or 800 words a day, because he is a slow writer. Hitting the number brings a moment of liberation, and then he can check sports highlights and email.
He says he could not have written his first book without this routine. For a book he drafts one chapter at a time over several weeks, then spends another week rewriting it. "The structure itself is liberating."
Pink keeps his phone and email out of the writing room. He walks 22 steps to a refurbished garage behind his house, leaves his phone behind, and does not open email until he reaches his word count.
The day starts with coffee, a light breakfast and the print New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Pink treats breaks as part of performance, the way athletes do. The best breaks are in motion, outdoors, with other people, and fully detached from a phone. In a lab study, treadmill walkers generated about three times as many uses for a brick as sitters.
He says calling a break wimping out gets it backwards. "They're part of our performance, not a deviation from the performance."
Pink calls himself a tortoise and relies on consistency over intensity. He reads slowly and writes slowly, and says things take him a long time.
The fixed routine is how a slow writer still finishes books.
Pink keeps a long list of ideas and rereads it months later. He holds the list in a Word document. Some ideas look stupid after four months, and others stick.
Survivors get a few collected articles and some reading before he considers a proposal. A book on wisdom has stayed on the list for a long time.
Pink writes a 30 to 40 page proposal to test the idea. The proposal tests the idea and also whether he enjoys the work. If he hates writing 30 pages, he will hate writing 300.
He dropped The Invisible Present, a list of 10 unseen trends, after 10 days alone drafting its proposal, and was glad to learn it early. "It's a test of the idea."
Pink only writes a book he would want to read in week one. One of his criteria is whether he would want to read it the first week if someone else had written it. If not, he drops it.
Pink talks ideas through with people and watches their reactions. He looks for dead eyes, questions or pushback, and explaining aloud also helps him work the idea out. He floated his regret idea to friends sheepishly and found everyone wanted to talk about it.
That reaction led him to email his publisher an entirely new proposal for The Power of Regret, which began after his daughter's college graduation set him thinking about his own regrets.
Pink pitches ideas as totally fresh and totally familiar. A proposal must say why no one has written the idea, why he is the person to write it, and why now. His pitch for When was that there are many how-to books and we need a when-to book.
Publishers also like the story of how the idea arrived.
Pink names a specific audience because it is never everybody. He says writers delude themselves that everybody will read the book. A specific audience forces sharper choices about what goes in.
Pink adds value by connecting fields that rarely talk to each other. Chronobiologists, decision scholars and sports psychologists find consistent things, but no part of the academy joins them up. He sees the writer as a translator between specialist vernaculars.
Pink will not write until he can see the skeleton of the book. He spends months on research and reporting to find the structure. Then he puts first sketches on a whiteboard or big Post-its behind his swivel chair and stares at them.
He calls the search tortured and unpleasant. "I can't write a book unless I see at least the skeleton of it."
Pink tried several structures for his 600 timing studies before one worked. Sorting by day, week, month and year failed, and so did sorting by domains like school, work and health. It worked once he organized around beginnings, midpoints and endings.
Those stages act on people the same way across domains.
Pink stress tests his structure while drafting and lets it change. A planned short section on breaks in his timing book turned into a whole chapter once he found how much research there was.
He says writing is engineering: you build something that has to work, then test whether the walls can hold the roof.
Pink cuts research the reader does not need, however long it took. For The Power of Regret he spent three to four weeks on how regret develops in children. The book needed one paragraph.
His stop signal for research is hearing the same findings again and again.
Pink circles every laugh in a draft to check its pacing. After a speech he circles the laughs to see their density. In one of his plays he found a plot-heavy fifth scene with no laughs and added some.
He borrowed the idea from David Zucker's team, who fixed any 25 to 30 second stretch without a laugh in films like Airplane. He says a book is a house but a play is a watch, because there is no room for a misplaced gear.
Pink asks what promise he is making to the reader before any project. A reader spends about $25 and nine hours that could have gone to family or exercise, so he feels he must pay that off.
He wants readers to do different things, not only think differently, so he puts usefulness first. He admits some may disagree with that, and applies the same aim to his plays.