Behavioral scientist and best-selling author Daniel Pink tackles lofty topics such as the primacy of trust, information asymmetry vs parity, practicing attunement, what we've all got wrong about introverts and extroverts, how breaks are a part of performance, why EVERYONE is selling, and why never to visit a hospital in the afternoon.

Daniel Pink is a behavioral scientist and New

York Times and Wall Street Journal best selling author of

several books; Drive: The Surprising Truth About What

Motivates us in 2009. Definitely one of the biggest ones, then he

wrote the book, part of what we're gonna talk about today, To

Sell Is Human, and When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect

Timing. Anyways, Daniel, welcome to the show.

Great to be here.

So one of the big catchphrases, I think, from your

book was that we're all in sales now.

So when you look at how people actually spend their

time at work, you realize that no matter what their job title

is a huge portion of what they're doing every day is

selling. Now what we did is we put together a survey of about

7,000 full time workers in the US. And we found that people are

spending 40% of their time, persuading, convincing,

cajoling, essentially selling now, they're not necessarily

selling a Winnebago, or selling consulting services or selling

encyclopedias or selling kitchen appliances. But what they are

doing is they are trying to get their employees to do something

different or do something in a different way that's selling,

they are employees trying to get their boss to stop doing stupid

that's selling. You're trying to get someone to see their point

of view that's selling, they're working on a project, it's

trying to get that talented person down the hall to work on

their product rather than another product they're selling.

And so when you actually look at the ground truth of what people

do day to day on the job, we are spending a huge portion of time

selling even though the majority of us do not have that word

sales are selling in our job title.

You refer to that as non sales selling.

You're selling but the characters are not ringing.

And the denomination of the transaction is in dollars, or

euros or rubles, but time, effort, tension, energy, zeal,

commitment, those kinds of things.

Part of the currency there is trust.

No question. Absolutely right. Trust is

essential on so many different domains and so many different

aspects of business. But I mean, you know, it almost goes without

saying, but I'll say it, you know, if someone doesn't trust

you, they're not going to buy from you whether they're buying

a car or whether they're buying an idea.

One of the things you also introduced in the book as you

said, it used to be Caveat emptor, buyer beware. But now

you're saying the world has changed to something else. So

can you highlight it's not Caveat emptor. But now it's what

and why is that?

Well, we've gone from a world of buyer beware to

a world now seller beware. Now how that is extraordinarily

important. Most of what we know about sales, whether you're

selling again, whether it's non sales, selling, selling an idea

concept, or whether you're selling Winnebago, most of what

we know about sale has come from a world of information

asymmetry, where the seller always had more information than

the buyer. When the seller has more information, the buyer, the

seller has the edge worse the seller can take the low road

seller can rip you off. Right information asymmetry is why we

have this principle of buyer beware, buyers have to be aware

because the seller has an AED. And this is true from the very

first commercial transaction in human history. You know,

whatever it was some guy selling a goat to someone else for Shell

or something like that the guy selling the goat knew a lot more

about the goats and the guy buying the goat information

asymmetry is to find what sales is for a very long time.

However, in the last 10 years, everything's turned upside down

is it less and less and less and less and less? Do we live in a

world of information asymmetry, we live in a world of much

greater information parity, where the buyer of something can

actually find out a huge amount of information, sometimes as

much of the often as much as the seller, sometimes more than the

seller. Okay, that's a huge deal. And you see this in you

know, basically buying a car used to be if you bought a car

and a car dealer would know a lot more about cars and a lot

more about Toyota is a lot more about Toyota Camrys than you

ever could fire everywhere now you can go into that Toyota

dealership and you know almost as much sometimes more than that

car salesman knows about cars Toyota's and cameras so point of

all this is that a world of information asymmetry is a world

of buyer beware but a world of information parity in the world

of seller beware. It used to be that buyers had knowledge

information, not many choices, no way to talk back. Buyer

beware. Now we're in a world where buyers have lots of

information, lots of choices and all kinds of with back doesn't

want to celebrate where and this is as huge a change in business

as anything we have had to confront it is one of the one of

biggest cultural and economic changes in the world of the 21st

century. That's the way the world works now and salespeople

who don't adjust to that are going to be in a world of hurt.

Yeah. So you talk about, you know, the old ABCs of

selling and sort of the classic, you know, salesy stuff and you

introduce the new ABCs of selling. The first one is

attunement, right?

So attunement is perspective taking, basically,

can you get out of your own head, see things from someone

else's point of view, that's all that it is. Now, it ends up

being enormously important in any kind of sales and

persuasion. Why? Because today, we have whether we're a boss,

whether we're a teacher, whether we're salesperson, we have very

little ability to force other people to do things, very little

course of power. So when we lack that kind of power, we need

almost the flip side of that, which is, can you get out of

your own head, see things from someone else's point of view,

find common ground. And this ends up being one of the most

profoundly important elements of sales in a world of filler,

beware. And it's something that human beings, you know, are not

often not that great at. Fortunately, we're not

inherently great at it. Fortunately, we can learn how to

be a lot better at it.

Is it right to call it empathy is that part of it?

Empathy, sort of, I mean, empathy is related to

perspective taking. But perspective taking is a little

bit more hard headed than empathy. With empathy, you're

sort of understanding how somebody is feeling. But

actually, there's some interesting research showing

that in in many kinds of sales is understanding what they're

thinking is as important if not more so. So certainly true in

negotiation, that there's some interesting research showing

that if you direct people in a negotiation to focus on the

other side feelings, and the end one another people to focus on

the other side thoughts of interests, that in general, the

people focus on the thoughts of interest, do better than the

folks who are focused on the emotions and feelings. So what

you want is you want to get both channels, you want to get the

thinking channel and the emotional channel. But the

reality of our lives is that we have very, very heavy loads on

our brain. And so if you're negotiating in real time, you're

trying to remember what the terms are, you're trying to

remember what your objectives are, you're trying to remember a

whole variety of facts, you're making decisions on the fly,

it's very hard for us to keep everything in our head. And so

getting, then you say, Oh, you have to have the emotional

channel and the thoughts and interest channel, that's

sometimes hard for us to do. So if you're overloaded focus on

the thoughts and focus on the interest. The other thing about

that is that there's some good evidence showing that that is

the key to in just overall persuading inside of a company

say, that's the key to persuading that when you

persuade up, you're much better off focusing on the other

person's thoughts and interests. And you are in the feeling that

emotions, my view in terms of persuading, selling to people

higher in the organization, as it is my own view, I don't have

data to support this. But bosses always put people into two

categories. Do the people who report to them into two

categories, people will make my life easier people who make my

life harder, and you want to be in that first category of people

who make the boss's life easier.

That's an interesting perspective. So again, getting

back into the data when you talk about attunement, one of the

common things is oh, you know, if you're gonna be great in

sales, you got to be an extrovert. Can you talk about

how extroverts and introverts perform?

There's a very good there's a very good study out of

the University of Pennsylvania. And here's what they did. They

went to a large company, large software company and a large

software company had a large sales force. They measure the

introvert and extrovert, the extraversion levels of the

people in the sales force, then the sales reps, rental software.

So we know that introverts are we know that the extroverts are

we know how much every person sold. Here's what they concluded

that strong introverts were terrible at sales. I don't have

the big surprise. But I think the bigger surprise is that

strong extroverts were also terrible at sales. And then

what's scary about that, if you say is like it's a myth, that

you know that we tend to think that the people who do the best

are the strong extroverts. The data don't bear that out. What

the data show is that the people who do the best are people who

are ambivert, an ambivert, like ambidextrous. And one of the

things that's going on is that we've gotten introversion and

extraversion wrong. We think of it as binary, when in fact, it's

a spectrum. And what the research shows very clearly, is

that the people who do the best at sale are neither strongly

introverted nor strongly extroverted. They're in the

middle, they are ambivert. And if we go back to this idea of

being ambidextrous, think of it that way. They can use the left

hand they can use the right hand. What does this mean? In

terms of attunement, it means they know when to speak up, and

they don't want to shut up. They don't want to push anyone to

hold back. And so, as you say, this idea that strong extroverts

are great at sales is flatly wrong. There's no evidence of

that, in fact, there's evidence of the contrary. But it doesn't

mean that strong introverts are better, they're actually a

little worse. The people who do the best are people who are in

the middle ambiverts. And the best news of all is that most of

us are introverts. Most of us, I mean, they're very strong

introverts, nor are strong extroverts. We're in the middle.

Big, big stuff. Well, I want to shift the conversation

right now to when the scientific secrets of perfect timing, why

this book and why right now?

Well writing a book as you know, is a big

undertaking you have to be you have to have something that you

really love working on somebody that you want to live with, for

many, many, many, many years about the rest of your life. And

I actually wrote and threw away a couple of book proposals in

that time, because I didn't feel like the ideas were big enough

folded up. Interesting enough, but it finally came around to

this idea. And the main reason that I wanted to write this

book, no joke is that I wanted to read it, I realized that I

was making all kinds of wind decisions in my own everything

from when should I exercise during the day? When should I do

in the did my most important work those kinds of daily when

decisions but also, you know, yearly when decisions why? Why

does do a lot of people's well being droop around midlife? Why

do beginning matter? How can I make better endings of, of

experiences. And so I realized that I was making these wind

decisions that are really haphazard way. But it turns out,

there's a very, very complicated, but rich and deep

body of science, on tonic from economic, social psychology to a

lot of work in medicine and biology, that can allow us to

make systematically better wind as it has in our life. And so I

found from doing the research, and writing this book that I'm

now making far, far, far better win decisions in my own life.

The big idea here is the following that we tend when we

make decisions about our performance, about our lives

about our own happiness, we tend to focus on what should we do?

How should we do it? Who should we do it with? And we make these

questions alone, secondary question that sort of sitting at

the kids table. And what what I found in doing the research is

that when belongs at the grown up table, that these questions

of when matter significantly, they matter on how we perform in

our job, they matter on how happy we are with our lives,

they matter in almost every dimension of of what we do. And

so if we start taking these questions of when seriously, do

we take questions of what and who and how I think people are

going to live better lives and work a little bit smarter,

interesting, there's so many different dimensions of that,

let me give you a couple of just like, you know, be really

practical and tactical for your listeners here. So for instance,

having studied this subject, I would never allow anybody in my

family to willingly go into a hospital in the afternoon versus

the morning. Here's what happened. Doctors make four

times as many anesthesia errors at 3pm, as they do at 9am

incidents of hand washing declines dramatically in the

afternoon, compared with the morning or higher number of

surgical errors in the afternoon. And in the morning.

Look at somebody like Alaska, adopted this fine half as many

pilots in the same population in the afternoon exams, as they do

in the morning, that there's a rapid deterioration in

performance in hospitals in the afternoon. So that's one very

specific, very practical takeaway on that. Another really

practical, logical way is that is that we don't, when we think

about break, okay, we, the science of break is powerful.

And what it shows us very clearly, is that we need to

start treating breaks with much greater serious bite breaks

during the day. The way I look at it is that, that, remember,

15 years ago, somebody who didn't sleep, who pulled all

nighters, who came into the office saying, Oh, I only got

two hours of sleep last night, that person, we would look at it

that hero, that person was so dedicated, so committed, and now

that we understand the science of sleep, if you know that

person is an idiot, that person is hurting his own performance,

he's hurting other people's performance, the science of

break through or the science of sleep was 15 years ago. And what

it showed is that we need to start thinking of breaks as part

of our performance rather than a deviation of performance. And a

very specific practical thing you can do on that front is to

make them break lit, right down to two or three breaks you're

going to take during the day, write it down, schedule it and

treat it with the seriousness with which you schedule

meetings. We also know a lot more about breaks. Taking a

break with somebody is more is better than taking without

somebody with with friend, going outside is better than being

inside that moving is better than being stationary, that

being fully detached is better than being only partly detached.

How long?

There's no magic number to that. Unfortunately, I

wish that their work they do the research shows that something is

better than nothing. So if you can get like a 15 minute break

20 minute break a couple times a day you're gonna perform at a

higher level.

So is it the time of it that really matters, or is it

the number, the how long someone's been working?

That's a great question. One of the things,

let's go back to handwashing, for example, one of the things

that can tick and tick handwashing back up in the

afternoon, if they can break. It's unclear exactly what's

causing all of this. But one of the remedies seems to be giving

people a break. So for instance, there's some interesting

research out of Denmark, showing the kids score systematically

lower better life path when they take them in the afternoon

versus the morning. And but a good remedy for that is giving

kids a 20 to 30 minute break before they take the test. So

part of it is basically our circadian rhythms, diurnal

variation, and make them the afternoon a precarious time in

general, and part of it, as you suggest, is just simply people

being out of tap for a long time and losing some of their vigilance.

Well where do you want people to go Daniel, to connect

with you or check out the book?

I think you just come to my website, which is

Daniel pink.com, Daniel pink.com. All things pink.

And then last question here on the topic of self

discipline, and timing. Do you feel like you personally are

seeing data that would suggest that you're more likely to do

your tax return? Make the sales call? Do the workout, balance

your finances early in the day than later in the day? Or do you

is that kind of inconclusive or not? You? Have you not looked at

anything enough to be able to even address it?

Yeah, no, I can't address it. And, and again, some

of it depends. So for instance, what we have are very similar to

what we were talking about with introversion extroversion. So

some of us are mark that is we ride relatively early, we peak

during the early part of the day. And then we're out a little

bit others of us are out. And as we take longer, we wake up a

little bit later, and we reach our peak later in the day. What

the research shows is that most of us are in between most of us

neither large nor out, but 30 Birds right in between, for

people who are larks. And for people who are third birth,

you're generally better off doing your head down focus

analytic work in the morning, that's very, very clear to me,

and save your some of your mundane work for the early

afternoon, which is often a trap for people. And then maybe some

of your more creative work for the rebound that which often

occurs around four or five. So typically, the pattern of the

day have a peak, a trough and a rebound. What's interesting is

that the people who are out and there are about one out of five

of us are strong out, people who are out the pattern goes the

reverse. So you basically have a recovery trough and peak. So

they are often better off doing their heads down analytic work,

the tax return, whatever, you know, maybe beginning at four or

five in the afternoon there. But again, for most of us it's

you're better off doing your head down analytic work in the

morning, clearing the deck, doing what Cal Newport called

your deep work then, and then pushing everything out till

later in the day.

Daniel, thank you so much, man, just for your work and your

science and your data and your objective, creative but

objective empirical view on the world. You're constantly pushing

us to think differently.

Thanks for having me, I enjoyed it.