‘Writing is a form of figuring it out. And in fact for me, sometimes it’s essential. It’s like, what do you think about this? I don’t know, I haven’t written about it yet.’
Dan Pink has written quite a few books, and they’ve done pretty well. So how does he do it? It’s about showing up, he says, especially on the days you don’t want to, and it’s also about curiosity, hunches, thinking onto paper, and structure. (The structure REALLY matters.)
Discover too why regret is such a positive force for good, and why feeling better doing necessarily make us do better.
(But you certainly won’t regret the time you spent on this.)
Dan’s site: https://www.danpink.com/
Dan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DanielPink
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Alison Jones: I am delighted to be here today with Daniel H. Pink, who 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 New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind, as well as number one New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell Is Human.
His books have won multiple awards, have been translated into 42 languages, probably more actually by the time I finished writing this introduction and have sold millions of copies around the world and he lives in Washington DC with his family, and I’m very, very pleased that you’re here with us today Dan, nice to see you.
Daniel Pink: Hi Alison. Thanks for having me.
Alison Jones: Really good to see you.
So first we’re going to talk about The Power of Regret because what a, it sounds like a novel title, you know, there’s something so elegiac about that. Where did that title come from and what drove…
Daniel Pink: Where did the title come from?
Alison Jones: …Most people, well, most people think of it as negative…
Daniel Pink: …yes, well, okay. So let me answer the second part first. So I started writing about this, I decided to write about this book because for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is that I had regrets of my own, that I was trying to figure out, make sense of. And I found that when I was, whenever I would start talking about regret people really leaned in. They were interested in talking about this in a way that really surprised me given all of the taboo that seems to surround this topic and this philosophy that we should always be positive, we should never look back, where that regret is bad for us.
And then I started diving into the research.
There was about 60 years of research in social psychology, developmental psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science. And I think we’ve profoundly misunderstood this emotion. And so I wanted to try to figure out how to understand it better and show people how to enlist it as a force for good, because I think it’s not only our most misunderstood emotion.
I think it’s our most transformative emotion.
Alison Jones: Yes, it is, you’re right, it is extremely human, and I guess if you haven’t got regrets, you’re probably some sort of psychopath. So there is something really important about it. But what I love is the way you almost do the kind of negative data thing, don’t you? There’s this like a, I think you call it a photographic negative.
Daniel Pink: Oh right, yes.
Alison Jones: Of course by studying what goes wrong and what you did in the past that was wrong, you can then extrapolate from that something for the future and for other people.
Daniel Pink: Well, in particular on that idea of the photographic negative, one of the things that I did, as you know from the book, is that I did a massive collection of regrets from around the world. I’ve collected now over 20,000 regrets from people in 109 countries. And what I found is that over and over again, people regret the same four things.
And I realized slowly that if we understand what people regret the most, we understand what they value the most. That’s where the photographic negative comes in. So when people tell you their regrets, they’re actually telling you indirectly what they value.
If I make a decision or an indecision 10 years ago and I don’t remember it, it’s a sign that it’s not anything that meaningful to me, but if I do something or don’t do something 20 years ago and it sticks with me to this day. That’s a signal, it’s a signal about what I value. And so I do think that regret among the many things that it does is it offers a photo, as you say, a photographic negative of a life well lived.
Alison Jones: Tell us about your taxonomy of regret, because I’d never seen that before.
Daniel Pink: Well, well, yes, no, it’s never been seen before because it’s, you know, and that’s actually important because the way that scholars have typically looked at regret and the way that I looked at it initially was by the domain of life. So you have career regrets, education regrets, family regrets, whatever.
And consistently researchers have found that regrets are all over the place. It’s hard to group them by domain. They’re just spread all the way across. And that’s kind of… it’s true, I think, it’s a little unsatisfying. What I realized when, instead of having people put them in categories, the traditional categories, when I read through and I read through the first 15,000 of these regrets that we received, when I read through them, I realized when you actually listened to people’s language and spend time with it, there’s something else going on. Beneath the surface, a deep structure, what I call a deep structure of regret that transcends any of the surface categories.
And so those regrets are number one, foundation regrets, which are: if only I’d done the work. These are regrets that people have about small decisions, small, bad decisions that accumulate into, you know, longer-term negative consequences, not saving enough money, spending too much, not taking care of your health, not working hard enough in school or university, that kind of stuff.
Second one, are boldness regrets. Again, they transcend the category. So these are regrets that people have about not asking somebody out on a date, but they’re also regrets that people have about not speaking up, the regrets that people have about not starting a business, regrets that people have about not traveling, those kinds of things. So boldness regrets are: if only I’d taken the chance.
Third category, moral regrets. If only I’d done the right thing. Again, these regrets begin at a juncture. You can do the right thing, you can do the wrong thing. When people do the wrong thing, most of us, most of the time, and I really believe that, almost all of us almost all the time regret it. And so you see things like bullying, you see things like marital infidelity.
And then finally our connection regrets, which are regrets about relationships, not only romantic, mostly not romantic relationships, which is the full spectrum of relationships in our life that come apart and you don’t do anything about it. And the regret is: if only I had reached out.
So these four regrets come up over and over and over and over and over again around the world. That’s the thing that to me is so interesting.
Alison Jones: It is, it’s phenomenal because you sort of think you’re uniquely cursed with your regrets and it’s very heartening, I think, to hear that.
Daniel Pink: Okay, that is an extremely important point that you’re making right there. I mean on so many different levels. And I can say that as someone looking at it from the helicopter or not even a helicopter, almost like the jetliner 30,000 feet above, but looking at all of these regrets, but also thinking about it from my own individual perspective.
So right about that, because I sort of, for instance, I myself have regrets about kindness and particularly when I was younger and I was thinking, God dang, you know, and I always thought, it’s like oh my God, I’m just kind of, maybe I was kind of a jerk earlier in my life and I wasn’t kind and then I looked at all these things and I’m like, oh my God, I am so not special.
You know, it’s like and for any regret that any of your listeners have, truly, you give me 90 seconds I’ll find the pretty much the exact same regret somewhere in my database. Probably multiple times.
There are regrets, Alison, that again, submitted by different people in different parts of the world, totally different experiences. And they’re almost, not quite word for word the same, but close. That’s how much commonality and universality there is.
Alison Jones: You must want to put these people in touch with each other? Don’t you? I mean…
Daniel Pink: That’s an interesting point, yes.
Alison Jones: I was sort of thinking as I was imagining this, you know, the regret survey, which again, it’s just a captivating phrase: you’re doing it from a research perspective, you’re writing a book, you’re extrapolating these principles, you’re producing a really well-researched book and there’s an awful lot of catharsis and soul searching and people articulating this stuff for the first time. It must have been quite moving to read a lot of it.
Daniel Pink: It was, it was, it was moving and it was also heartening in a weird way, or I guess not that weird for the reason that you were suggesting earlier, which is that again, when people tell you what they regret the most, they tell you what they value the most.
And you’re like, and so somebody has a regret about not being honest. He’s like, oh man, I totally understand that. Like, I want to be honest too. If somebody has a regret about not reaching out to an old friend and having that friend pass away. Oh man, I totally empathize with that. Like I want, I don’t, you know, and so there is a degree -and you hit on it very nicely -there’s a degree of personal connection, but not so much a personal connection, as much as recognizing oneself in the entire human condition. I think that’s what it’s more like. You recognize yourself in the broader human condition. And even that alone can be a step toward mitigating some of the downside of regret.
You know what we want to do with our regrets is we have this ridiculous philosophy of no regrets, that we should never look backward, that we should always be positive, blah, blah, blah. That’s a really bad idea. It goes against what the science tells us about this very common emotion. And it’s not an effective blueprint for living, but wallowing in our regrets is even worse.
And so what we want to do is we want to confront our regrets. And one way to confront our regrets is to recognize the universality of that and how our having a regret doesn’t diminish us as people. It actually identifies us as a part of humanity.
Alison Jones: It’s interesting because you’ve got a sort of bell curve, haven’t you, of people who never regret, and people who are always regretting and I just thought, you know, both ends of those are kind of terrifying.
Daniel Pink: Yes, well, I’m not sure, it’s interesting. I’m not sure it’s a bell curve. I think that most people are lost. That is I think a lot of people have, I actually think that it might’ve been, instead of a bell curve, it might be a well curve. It might be bimodal in the sense that you have a lot of people who are just ignoring their regrets and a lot of people who are captured by them and nobody in the middle who is treating them properly, which is treating your regrets as a signal, as information, as data, as a lesson.
Alison Jones: Yes, so when you put your book together, it’s got a very, I know you’re a trinitarian, you like three-part things, don’t you? I’m going to come on to that. So just tell me a little bit about where that structure came from. Did you do that sort of grounded research thing where you look at the data and then you allow the patterns to come up or did you have a sort of hypothesis when you went into this?
Daniel Pink: No I definitely did not have the hypothesis. I did not have a… I had a few inklings along the way. For me, so thank you for mentioning the trinitarianism, I do believe that everything comes in groups of threes. The other thing is that when it comes to writing books, which I know is something that’s, you know, something you talk about a lot, is that I am a fervent as much as I am a devout trinitarian, I might be an even more devout structuralist in the sense that I think for nonfiction books, structure is everything.
And there are too many books that I read that have no structure, not even that they have a bad structure, they have no structure. And to me, when you figure out the structure, it’s almost like a form of engineering in a way, when you figure out the structure, then you can figure out what you think and how to make it clear.
But for me, the structure doesn’t emerge immediately to put it mildly, I’m dead serious the structure changes all the time.
Alison Jones: Just take us into this box.
Daniel Pink: That’s a good thing. And so for me, I iterate the structure many, many, many, many times.
Alison Jones: And I’ve read that you’ve given up on white boards. You go with the jumbo note, post-it
Daniel Pink: You know what, I actually did that for a while, I actually have a whiteboard right over there that I use, but I also use, like I have this table behind me, this big table behind me now is stacked with books, but like when I was figuring out the regret categories, okay. So here’s the high-tech way that I would do the regret categories, trying to figure out the regret categories.
So all the entries for this survey come in and they end up in a database and I would go into the database and literally just read them because they’re not, it’s not a massive amount of reading because people’s regrets are maybe like a paragraph long. Okay. So say there were 15,000, it’s not like I read 15,000 books or even 15,000 pages. I read 15,000 paragraphs essentially, you know? So, over time it’s very manageable.
And so what I would do is I would read them through and I would take notes and then there’ll be something like wow, I have a hunch. Wow, I feel like I’m hearing the phrase ‘speak up’ a lot. I regret not speaking up, versions of speak up, of spoken up, speaking up, and now here’s where the database came in handy. I could then search for that phrase and I could then say, oh wow, there were a lot of people talking about this. And then I would print out some of those regrets and I would stack them on a stack of them here. All right.
And then I would just go through and I would periodically look at my stacks and say, what do the stacks have in common? What’s going on here? Like, pretty early on, I saw the word bold a lot more than I would have expected. And what the interesting thing about that is that the word bold was in multiple domains. It was not in, I wish I was bold in my career. I wish I was more bold in everything. Okay. I wish I was more bold romantically. I wish I was more bold about travel. Okay.
So that’s kind of interesting. So you know, print that out and stack it up there and then just keep iterating and iterating and iterating and even things like, I mean, a better example, I think for your readers is when you say something that didn’t fit, where a hunch was wrong.
So I think at one point I read, I said, oh my gosh, everyone’s talking about their inner voice. Everyone’s talking about their inner voice. And so I started looking for that and everyone was not talking about their inner voice. There were a few people, but not that many. I mean, you know, a handful of people, I just happened to notice it. And it’s like, okay, that was a hunch that was off. And so over time, that’s how I iterated those…. that’s how we iterated those categories. So essentially what I do, to make a long story longer here, is that I go in with, I mean, to me, it’s like I go in, I have to go in with a preliminary structure recognizing that it’s going to be short lived. But I need that to think.
And then as I read and research and interview, I say, wait a second that’s, the structure is very different. And then finally over time it comes into being, and then I can start really rocking and rolling.
Alison Jones: There’s a really interesting mindset there, which is there’s some intellectual humility going on. Isn’t there? There’s that ability to hold your theory lightly and to be surprised, willingness to be surprised by what emerges.
Daniel Pink: Yes, I mean, I think it’s, I mean, I don’t want to dress it up and call it sort of the positive side of intellectual humility. I think it’s basically sort of honest uncertainty. But also the other thing is it’s like, or the flip side of it is like, it’s some degree of curiosity, but I have to say this is not any kind of noble sentiment. The thing is if I go in with a theory, if I go in and say, here’s the structure and the facts and the data and stories and everything else doesn’t fit that structure, it’s not going to work. You know what I mean? Like the building won’t stand up. Think of a book like a building, you know, one of the things that a building has to, like the first mission of a building is that it doesn’t collapse, right? And hurt people.
So before you make it beautiful, before you make it user-friendly, before you make it functional, it has to stand up, right. And so that’s to me is like how I, it is a way that I think about it.
Alison Jones: It is a great metaphor and one of the things that I know that people who are doing this for the first time don’t always appreciate is just how iterative that approach is.
Daniel Pink: It is. For the good stuff, for the good books, for the good books it is interative. There are plenty of people who say, okay, I got to have an outline. Here’s my outline. And then they write a half-ass book and it stinks and what I don’t like about bad books, particularly in this genre, is that it pollutes the whole pond.
So when somebody writes a bad book and a reader picks up that book and says, this is crap, then it actually hurts the people who are actually doing good work, who are actually doing research, who are actually taking the reader seriously and trying to create quality work.
The people who are just hacking it out actually end up hurting everybody.
Alison Jones: Yes, it’s true, isn’t it? ‘I read a business book. It was rubbish. I’m not going to bother with that again.’ Yes.
Daniel Pink: Bingo.
Alison Jones: Just looping back for a minute to regrets, because I think it goes into writing as well. There was one particular point, which you introduced me to, and I’m really grateful actually, because I’ve used it a lot since: the idea of counterfactuals. And this is very closely tied in with regrets, but it’s also, I think, tied in with mental health and I think tied in with our ability to imagine what’s not there, which is kind of part of what you’re doing when you’re creating a book out of nothing, isn’t it?
So talk us through counterfactuals, because it might just be really valuable for someone.
Daniel Pink: Well, counterfactual is just simply imagining a set of circumstances that run counter to the existing facts. So, again, it’s part of our, you know, one of the things that, one of the reasons that regret serves a function in our minds and our brains and our brains are incredible. Our brains can do counterfactual thinking.
So I could say I’m talking to you here in Washington, DC, where I live. I’ve lived in Washington, DC for 28 years, amazingly. And outside here is a window, there’s a window right here and I can look outside, it’s my backyard and I can see like some squirrels and things running around.
All right, so those squirrels I don’t think could do counterfactual thinking. I can’t prove that, but it’s unlikely that the squirrels can say, do what I do which is say, what would have happened if I never, suppose I had moved when I was young to London, what would my life be like? And you can imagine that, it runs counter to the facts.
The facts of my life is that at, you know, at a young age, as a very young adult, I moved to Washington DC, my wife and I moved to Washington DC as very, very young people. And we ended up staying here. But imagine if Jessica and I had moved to London when we were in our twenties: what would our likes lives be like now? What would we be doing for a living? Who would be our..? so you can imagine that.
And that’s in some ways what, you know, I mean, that gives rise to fiction.
Alison Jones: But also regret, you know, if only, if only…
Daniel Pink: Yes absolutely. But regret is a form of counterfactual thinking. There are basically two broad categories of counterfactual thinking. One of them is what’s called an upward counterfactual: imagine how things could have been better, all right. So you can have things that could have been different. Okay. So let’s say that I can do an upward counter. I can do, I don’t want to use my self as an example. You can do an upward counterfactual where you say if only I hadn’t married, Bob, I wouldn’t be stuck here in Manchester. Okay. And so you know, so it’s like you imagine how things could have been better. If only I hadn’t married Bob, I wouldn’t have moved to be stuck here in Manchester and I could have lived a more engaging life in London and I’m being completely biased different regions of the United Kingdom. All right.
Alison Jones: I’m going to edit this for the North West listeners. Okay.
Daniel Pink: So you imagine that things could have turned out worse. All right. So that’s an upward counterfactual.
But you can also do a downward counterfactual where you imagine how things could have actually been worse. All right. So you know, oh, I moved from the North Western part of England to London and I hate living in London, but at least I have these two great friends and there’s good food to eat.
Alison Jones: I like the way you balanced that.
Daniel Pink: I’m trying to rescue myself from the hate mail.
And so again, so the thing is about, so upward counterfactuals are ‘if only’ and downward counterfactuals are ‘at least’. Let me say that again, upward counterfactuals are ‘if only’, downward counterfactuals are ‘at least’, and here’s the thing, downward counterfactuals, ‘at least’, make us feel better, right. They take some of the psychological sting out, but they don’t help us do better.
Upward counterfactuals ‘if only’s’, regret, makes us feel worse, but here’s the thing, it can help us do better. All right.
If we regret what we did in an negotiation. We say, oh, if only I had made a better first offer, there’s research showing that if we lean into that, rather than ignore it or wallow in it, we do better in the next negotiation. Right.
We feel worse, but do better. We feel worse, but do better. We do better in part because we feel worse. And so that’s one of the things that regret does for us.
Alison Jones: Really powerful. And I think just that ability to imagine what’s not there… And, you know, if only I could write a book, well, hey, you know, I’m not dead yet. You know, that ability to sort of just imagine what’s not yet there. I think that’s really important. But I love the counterfactuals and I just found it really helpful so I just wanted you to tell everybody else about it, because I think that will help them too.
Let’s talk about your writing because you are helpfully sane about writing and you don’t sort of, you know, go into mysticism about it. Tell us, yes, it’s just you have to get behind a desk and write, I think, is what you’re basically going to tell me, but what does it look like for you?
Daniel Pink: What does writing look like for me? It looks like a very boring pursuit because…
Alison Jones: It’s not a spectator sport, is it? No.
Daniel Pink: Unless it’s a very twisted mind of a spectator. This is not, it’s like you have like Twitch and all these people like streaming their gaming and think this is not a profession that you want to live stream.
Alison Jones: Maybe it could be a niche thing. I don’t know.
Daniel Pink: Maybe for people who are incredibly, incredibly, incredibly under-stimulated, they can get some excitement from that. But beyond that, I don’t think most people would care. For me, you know, writing looks like… Writing is about showing up. The actual act of writing is about showing up and showing up regularly and showing up on days you want to show up and showing up especially on days you don’t want to show up. And doing the work on days you’re into it, but also doing the work on days you’re not into it. And you just do your fricking job and then you show up the next day, you do your job and show up the next day, you do your job and show up the next day.
If I sat around here and waited to be inspired. I can’t write until I’m inspired. I can’t write until I’m in the mood. I never would have written a book in the last 20 years.
Alison Jones: So here’s a question, there are days when you are in the mood. There are days when it flows, when it’s a beautiful thing. There are days when you are grinding it out. When you read it back afterwards, can you tell the difference?
Daniel Pink: It’s an interesting question. And that’s a really, really interesting question and I am not sure, actually. I think in some ways we overstate how great it is on the good days. And we understate how bad it is on the… We sort of exaggerate the goodness and the badness. So on the days of, oh my God, it’s so good. I can’t believe how good this is, then you come back and read it. It’s…
Alison Jones: It’s all right.
Daniel Pink: Yes exactly. And then when it’s like, oh, this is total rubbish, complete crap. Okay. It’s not that bad. You know, I just again, I mean I can’t emphasize that any more strongly to anyone who wants to be a writer. Show up and do the work, show up and do the work the next day, show up and do the work the day after that. That’s how it goes.
Alison Jones: Do you think everybody should want to do writing? Is it a thing that you do when you’re… I mean, I know you are a writer, but do you think it has value for other people? This is a terribly leading question.
Daniel Pink: Yes, I mean I think that writing has value in general, but I don’t think that everybody should be a writer professionally, you know. Because I think the ability to express yourself in writing is essential in any endeavor. But again, one doesn’t have to do it full time. One doesn’t have to do it as the center of their profession.
But I think that the ability to do it is a form of basic, you know, I think it’s an aspect of just basic literacy. Should people be able to read with some, with a critical mind? Yes, of course. It doesn’t mean that everyone needs to become a critic.
It means that everybody, in every profession, in every realm as a citizen has to be able to read critically. Should everybody be able to write clearly? Yes. It doesn’t mean that everybody should be a writer. What a horrible world we’d live in if everybody in the world became a writer, you know? So it doesn’t mean that everybody has to do that, and that’s partly, it’s for two reasons.
Number one. All of us have ideas. All of us are trying to persuade. All of us are trying to influence. All of us are telling stories and you have to be able to do that clearly. But the other thing is that writing is a form of thinking. That’s I think that’s an aspect of it that many people don’t necessarily realize.
It’s like, I don’t sit down to write because I figured something out. I often sit down to write in order to figure it out. And that’s something that I didn’t discover until, probably when I was in university, I always thought that before, when I went to, well, you know, when I got to university, that the way that you write is that you figure out what you’re going to say, you outline it and then you just write it.
And when I actually started doing more serious writing, I realized, no way. That writing is a form of figuring it out. And in fact for me, sometimes it’s essential. It’s like, what do you think about this? I don’t know, I haven’t written about it yet.
Alison Jones: I’m having a vision of almost climbing a rock face. I mean, you can do a sort of a short scramble, fine, you can just free climb. If you’re going to do a really serious climb, you need to have those pitons going in. You need to have the structure. The points, which you’re writing, anchor your thinking, and then you can advance on to the next point.
Daniel Pink: Well said. I agree.
Alison Jones: Yes, Yes, great. So if you had one tip for somebody who is writing a business book, maybe for the first time
Daniel Pink: In writing business book, okay. One tip somebody writing a business book. This is going to sound peculiar, but make sure that what you’re writing, ask yourself this question, is what I’m writing going to be better and more impactful as an article? I’ve seen too many business books that don’t deserve to be books. They’re interesting in the way that a magazine article is interesting, but they don’t deserve to be books.
And as a consequence, there is crap and padding and fluff and waste, and a lot of wasted time for readers. The last thing I want to do is waste readers time.
Alison Jones: Brilliant tip. Thank you. And would you like to recommend us, it doesn’t have to be a business book, but a book that you think anybody who’s interested in business books should read.
Daniel Pink: Influence by Robert Cialdini both in terms of the, so there’s a book that has, first of all it’s research-based, second of all, it’s really fricking useful. Third of all, it is very well structured because he has the six principles of influence and that creates a very natural kind of spine for the book.
It creates a very natural you know, it’s you know…
Alison Jones: it makes the structure,
Daniel Pink: …yes, it’s the structure. And so when you’re reading it, you know where you are, oh, this is the, he’s going to tell me six principles. Here’s the introduction. I’m going to tell you six principles. Then he’s going to lay out the six principles.
Then at the end, he’s going to tell you how to put it, you know, how they all fit together. And so when you’re reading, like, okay, where am I? Oh, I’m at the second principle. You know, now I’m going to go to this. And so I think that kind of structure is very helpful to readers and the dirty little secret is that it’s liberating for writers.
Alison Jones: Yes, absolutely. But you’re right, you feel safe as a reader, don’t you? You don’t feel that you’re going, you don’t quite know where you’re going. You know exactly where you’re going. You know how much is…
Daniel Pink: Here’s the thing. The problem is, so it’s okay in certain forms of writing if the reader periodically is lost and doesn’t know where she is. Okay. If that’s intentional. If that’s the feeling you want to evoke in the reader, but very rarely is that intentional. In most cases, it’s because the writer hasn’t done the work of laying out the structure so there is a clear logic about where you are in the argument, where you are in the story, where you are in the explanation, where you are in the the instruction.
Alison Jones: I don’t mind getting lost in a fictional, historical epic, you know,
Daniel Pink: There are great works of fiction where part of the joy of reading it is, oh my God. I don’t know where I am. This is weird. What’s going on here? You’re right. And so if that’s intentional, I’m all for it.
Alison Jones: Business books, not so much.
Daniel Pink: You can do it in a business book if it’s intentional, but it’s never intentional. It happens a lot, but it’s never intentional. It’s always because, it’s always because of laziness. It’s always because of laziness on the part of the writer.
Alison Jones: Great recommendation. Actually, interestingly, I spoke to Robert Cialdini on the podcast and I asked him about Pre-Suasion, which I think was about 30 years after Influence. And I said to him why the long gap? He went I just didn’t have an idea big enough for a book.
Daniel Pink: There you go. I mean, that’s how do it. That’s how you do it.
Alison Jones: Beautifully illustrating both of your points.
Daniel Pink: That’s how you do it. So, Bob Cialdini, Bob’s book Influence, you know, I think it would’ve come out into the mid-Eighties, maybe late Eighties, somewhere around there or somewhere around there, so here I am I’m recommending it, you know, three and a half decades later.
That’s good. Believe me.
Alison Jones: That’s longevity.
Daniel Pink: Most business books, let’s say, you know, of the hundred thousand business books that came out in the mid 1980s, or whenever Bob’s book came out, we have forgotten 999,998 of them. So you want to be in that, and there’s a reason that he’s in that too.
Alison Jones: Yes. Yes, it’s very, very good, I thoroughly recommend it.
Daniel Pink: It’s evidence-based. It deserves to be a book. It is interesting. It offers practical advice. It is well-structured. That’s how you do it. It’s compelling, you know, that’s how you do it.
Alison Jones: Yes, brilliant. I remember him saying he had his neighbour on one shoulder and his academic peers on the other, so it’s rigorously academic, but it’s just written in a way that anybody could read.
Daniel Pink: Yes, you write for the neighbours, not for the academic.
Alison Jones: Absolutely. Where can people find out, I mean, Google Daniel Pink people, it’s not hard, but you know, where would you like people to go if they want to find out more?
Daniel Pink: You can go to my website, which is danpink.com, D A N P I N K.com or danielpink.com and everything that you could possibly want Pink related is there.
Alison Jones: Marvellous. Thank you so much for your time, Daniel, it’s been an absolute joy talking to you.
Daniel Pink: Thanks a lot. I’ve enjoyed this.