Category: Comedy Books

I recently read “The Art Of The Pitch: Persuasion and Presentation Skills That Win Business” by Peter Coughter. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“Being competitive wasn’t enough. We had to be compelling.” (3)

“We are the gift. We are giving ourselves to our audience. We’re giving them the product of our thoughts, efforts, and personality. We’re giving them who we are. We’re telling them our truth. That’s our gift to them.” (8)

“The trick is to understand that you are simply talking with your audience, sharing your thoughts. You’re not arguing. You’re not selling. You’re having a conversation. You’re giving them a gift.” (8)

“Good enough isn’t good enough. Because good enough will leave you in the middle of the pack.” (11)

“Take some time and figure out how to sell it. Apply the same creativity and energy that went into creating the work to selling the work. Do an ad for your ads.” (14)

“In fact, since we’re trying for a conversational style, there probably SHOULD be some mistakes.” (17)

“What audiences want is authenticity. They don’t want a game show host.” (17)

“Find your own style and exploit it. Work it. Develop it. Find YOUR voice. Don’t try to sound like anyone else.” (17)

“Great presenters tell stories. We all love stories. Stories that have a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories that grab our attention right away and hold it all the way to the end.” (17)

“Get yourself and how you feel about the subject into your presentations. This is what audiences can relate to and, therefore, relate to you.” (18)

“Think of every presentation as a story and concentrate on creating a real attention-getting opening and a powerful close.” (18)

“Nothing will solve as many problems as knowing your stuff.” (19)

“Because she knows her stuff so well, the presenter is free to concentrate on the reason she’s there – the audience.” (19)

“If you’re counting on your memory to conjure up every single word you memorized, you are doomed.” (19)

“Great presenters know that, like advertising, presenting is the art of seduction, not debate. They realize that people make decisions emotionally. They will rationalize decisions based on all the facts and figures, using the objective to help them justify the decisions they made subjectively.” (22)

“I’m not saying you must give them what they like. Not at all. I’m saying that you must know what they like in order to give them what they need.” (23)

“I’ve learned that our nervousness is never transmitted to the audience in the same proportion that we feel it.” (23)

“Remember, the appearance of spontaneity is the product of preparation.” (24)

“We practiced so much, it because natural. An ironic truth,” says Peter Ignazi.” (24)

“You have a symbiotic relationship with the audience. Without them, there’s nothing for you to do. Without you, they have no reason for being there. So you’re dependent upon one another to pull this thing off.” (27)

“This is where elegance lies. In the removal of everything that is superfluous.” (30)

“Start at the end and figure out exactly what it is that you want to accomplish… What do we want, and what do we have to do to get it? Then work your way to the begining.” (35)

“Think of the audience as your partner, not as an adversary. Think of them as your “other half.” They respond to your deft lead. You’re setting the rhythm and tempo of the “music.” You’re in complete control, but you’re exercising this control effortlessly, and they are responding to your confidence and power. And having a great time.” (37)

“Remember that even when you’re supposed to be talking about yourself, you should be talking about the client [audience].” (44)

“Our audience decides an awful lot of what they think about us and what we’re saying based upon our attitude.” (52)

“Dr. Joel Whalens writes, ‘Your attitude is the power that drives the most important and powerful symbols you communicate. To be a great oral communicator, you must first manage your attitude. It’s the way you say your words that makes you persuasive.’” (54)

“If you want to win, if you want to get what you want, you must make your audience respond emotionally.” (57)

“There is a very high correlation between creative reputation and ability to present.” (61)

“Who you really are is far more interesting than who you think they want to believe you are.” (70)

“The essence of selling is emotion. Virtually nothing is sold on the rational, analytical level.” (74)

“The secret to selling great work is to sell the idea of the work before you sell the work.” (76)

“He eliminated the obvious solution and took the audience by the hand, leading them to a point where the only possible solution had to be his. Sell the idea of the work, then sell the work.” (78)

“Whatever the subject matter, there is a way to make it meaningful and relevant to our audience. There is a way to capture our audience’s imagination, and persuade them to our point of view. That way is through the use of emotion.” (80)

“Don’t memorize. Know the material. Make it yours.” (92)

“We are drawn to confidence. We follow confident people. But turn the confidence dial up a little too high, and the audience is turned off.” (95)

“Never appear to be anything but thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is one of the most important attributes we can possess.” (101)

“If you appear to be young, people may assume that you are inexperienced, less than savvy, and not really in any position to be telling folks what to do. But all of that can be overcome if you appear to be thoughtful.” (101)

“I’m talking about the quality that certain people seem to have that communicates intelligence. Wisdom. Knowing your stuff. It’s not necessary to do a lot of talking in a meeting or presentation to seem thoughtful. It is only necessary that the things you say are smart. Insightful. Cogent. Even brave.” (102)

“If you’re really good at it, your ideas will be so thoughtful, and so well expressed, that they can’t be refuted.” (102)

“No one knows if one idea is better than another if it isn’t presented in such a way that it is clear to the audience that the idea is better.” (104)

“While it’s true that the audience will likely remember less than 10 percent of what you say orally, you must give them exciting and powerful words to hang onto. If they only remember a few, make them great.” (107)

“When we are selling our ideas, the audience must first buy us. And as we said earlier, if we want them to buy “us,” we have to show them who “us” really is. Not some caricature of “us,” but the genuine article.” (107)

“We weren’t selling, we were just having a conversation and being ourselves. Which is, of course, the best way to sell.” (119)

“Have a point of view. Have something to say. Say it in such a way that I get excited.” (124)

“You have to develop your own lexicon. Whether it’s your agency talking, or just you, I suggest that you speak in your own language.” (125)

“Until your business decides to get serious about who it is, and why it is, and what it believes in and stands for, and finally, how it expresses itself, you will continue to struggle in the middle of that great undifferentiated pack of sameness.” (126)

“If you aren’t clear on just who and what your organization is, why should anyone care what you think about a specific issue?” (129)

“It just has to be the best story. The story that is most enjoyable to hear. The story that entertains. The story that allows you to show just how passionate you are about the subject. And maybe most importantly, the story that you believe.” (136)

“A good meeting is not the goal. Great work is. Eyes on the prize.” – Mark Fenske (149)

“This is about persuasion, and someone who appears to be regurgitating memorized material is not persuasive.” (156)

“The appearance of spontaneity is the product of rehearsal.” (171)

“From time to time, change the volume of your voice.” (191)

“If you do what the client, or new business prospect expects you to do – they will be disappointed.” (215)

Did you like the quotes? Then buy the book here.

I recently finished “The Art of Doing: How Super Achievers Do What They Do And How They Do It So Well” by Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield. It’s mostly a compilation of interviews, so I’ve bolded the person being quoted for all the quotes below their name. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“The super achievers had ten things in common: Dedication, intelligent persistence, community, listening, telling a story, testing, managing emotions, evolving, patience, happiness.” (i-xliii)

“Know when to pivot, to rethink your plan, while still maintaining the mission.” (xxviii)

“When these emotions compromised their goals, they had the commitment and the skills to examine those emotions and figure out effective ways to cope with them.” (xxxix)

“Because they possess a willingness to challenge their deeply held assumptions and the courage to act on that information, they have been able to overcome obstacles by discarding what doesn’t work and evolving entirely new ways of thinking about their lives and goals.” (xlii)

“George Clinton told us, “If you get to the top and catch up with happy, you got a real problem because you’ll get bored. I’m not trying to catch up with being happy – because it’s the pursuit of happiness I’m after. I want to be so close behind it I can almost touch it. That’s what keeps me looking forward to moving ahead.” (xliv)

“Good writing is not about impressing people with how smart you are but about explaining your subject as simply as possible.’ (xlv)

Laura Linney

“Her goal then is to so thoroughly internalize her role that once she steps on set or stage, she can “throw all the preparation away and let the work bleed through.” (1)

“Most scripts aren’t written to be acted. They’re written to appeal to an executive who doesn’t know how to read a script but has the power to get a film made.” (2)

“Film is a director’s medium, so you need to find out if you share a point of view so you can help them make the movie they want to make.” (3)

Anna Netrebko

“No matter how big you become, you can never be self-satisfied and say, ‘Okay, I’ve made it,’ because the next day you have to go back and prove yourself again.” (10)

“When I started out, I met a lot of extremely talented singers. Everybody thought, “Oh, this one or that one will be a star.” But after a very short time, many of them disappeared. Talent, which is a gift from the gods, isn’t enough. You have to be incredibly smart about your choices.” (10)

“My dreams never went too far. Maybe it would be in my home region of Krasnodar? When I studied, I was not thinking, “I’m going to be the one.” That was not my goal. I loved the music so much that my goal was simply to sing well. That’s it. That’s what I wanted to do. I focused on learning the music, developing my voice and practicing very hard so I could get better.” (11)

“Envy can destroy your soul.” (12)

“Something else has to come through to capture the audience’s attention. It’s soul. Callas had it. You have to find it in yourself. It took me years to find it. I couldn’t even tell someone how I did it except to keep searching for it and allowing it to come out. It’s very difficult to do, but performing with soul is the only way you can move an audience, stun them, shock them, make them cry.” (12)

“Make it (seem like) magic.” (13)

Ken Jennings

“If you let go of the outcome and just enjoy the crazy experience of being on a quiz show, you’ll do much better.” (24)

“No matter how much smarter you think you are than everyone else, you have to first make yourself interesting and TV ready.” (24)

“Overconfidence can kill you. It can be worse than not being confident enough.”( 26)

Yogi Berra

“Play to your strengths and don’t go crazy over weaknesses. The best players improve what they do well.” (32)

Martina Navratilova

“To be a champion you have to play as if every point is a matter of life and death.” (40)

“A lot of players have lost sight of the fact that it’s a game. They’ve lost the joy of playing. They’re so afraid to fail, and with all that pressure, they’re miserable and that affects their play.” (41)

Alec Baldwin and Robert Carlock

“We try to tell emotionally grounded stories in as odd of a way as we can.” (45)

“TV is a medium of limitations. We tell a lot of jokes, but we don’t have a lot of time to mess around. Every joke has to accomplish something, whether it’s smoothing over a transition, telling us something new about a character we’ve known for six years, or progressing the story.” (46)

“In the world of sketch comedy, say on SNL, you can say the most horrible and offensive things and get a laugh, because when the three-minute sketch is over, that world no longer exists and the characters will never see each other again. Whereas, with 30 Rock, we can say things to each other on the edge of being offensive, but you can’t cross that line, because those characters have to continue to live with each other for years.” (47)

“Every character has to have their own voice. On a lot of TV shows there’s no distinction between characters’ voices.” (47)

“Question the script. As we develop a story line, I always ask, what new information have we learned in this scene? How is the story moving forward? How are the stories talking to each other? How is this building? How is the end better than the beginning? Is the end even in the beginning? And most important, am I feeling bored reading this right now? If those questions don’t have satisfactory answers, then, however good the jokes are or acting is, you are failing in your duty to create something funny.” (49)

“The most important question is not “Is this funny?” but “Are we failing at being funny in a larger sense?”” (49)

Simon Doonan

“Reimagine your personal style by uncovering and exaggerating all that is unique about you.” (54)

Tony Hsieh

“The best decisions are made from the bottom up. A manager’s job is to remove obstacles.” (68)

“We try to create an environment where employees feel energized, where work doesn’t feel like work. You’re just living life the way you want to live it, and it happens to make money as well.” (69)

“Ultimately a brand is a shortcut to a set of emotions.” (70)

Will Shortz

“I try to get as many people into the tent as possible by having different “acts” and appealing to everyone at least some of the time.” (76)

Mark Frauenfelder

“The recipe for an excellent blog is to be so deeply obsessed with something that you need to communicate it to others.” (83)

“If you spend too much time obsessing on the minutiae of digital marketing techniques, you’ll lose sight of the mission of a blog, which is to share information with like-minded people.” (84)

Randall Grahm

“The riskiest thing is to stay the course and pretend that things are normal. Nothing is normal; the whole world is upside down. You have to be faily extreme to have any shot at succeeding.” (90)

Constance Rice

“Outlast everyone. There are a lot of folks who are a lot smarter than me. But I am more persistent. I’m more determined and I’ve got more passion. So I outlast everybody.” (102)

Sam Yagan, Chris Coyne, Max Krohn, Christian Rudder

“Getting 99 percent of the people to kind of like you is a waste of time. Accentuate your eccentricities and find the people who will love you as you really are.” (113)

“The three questions that tested above all others in determining if you and someone else have long-term potential are: “Do you like horror movies?” “Have you ever traveled around another country alone?” and Wouldn’t it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?” (117)

Average length of time for online daters before tying the knot: 18.5 months. Real-world daters: 42 months.

Barry Levine

“Showing that Hollywood actors and TV stars don’t have perfect lives helps people accept their own problems. As an old Enquirer editor once said, the big news organizations tell people what they think they should be interested in, whereas we try to give them stories they are interested in.” (128)

“Know where you’re headed. My hero, Ernest Hemingway, would always leave off writing at the end of the day at a point in his story where he’d know just where he’d pick up the following morning.” (130)

“Pace yourself. No matter how big a story is, you can’t let it overwhelm you, because you have to be back at your desk at eight o’clock the next morning to work on other stories. Years ago, I was afraid to leave my desk. But these days, no matter how busy I am, every day I’ll leave my office, walk around the block, get lunch or go to the gym. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” (131)

“You have to embrace your success and think hard about the failures that come your way, but you can’t obsess on either.” (131)

Chad Schearer

“When you practice, simulate the conditions you’ll be facing in your actual hunt. Become familiar. Practice in the clothes you’ll be wearing with the weapon you’ll be using.” (142)

“Injury rates for sports per 100 participants: football (5.3), hunting (0.05)” (147)

Philippe Petit

“Ask a great artist why they do what they do and the answer will be, “Because I have no choice.”” (157)

“Art happens when you work millions of hours not to make it look hard but to make it look effortless. The beauty for an audience is to be inspired and awestruck because you made them forget that the wire was even there.” (160)

Candida Royalle

“Least popular day for viewing online porn, Thanksgiving; state with highest per capita porn subscriptions, Utah.” (174)

OK Go

“Don’t stop trying things because they don’t fit your own stereotype of yourself. If it feels like fun, it is yourself.” (179)

“Listen to your fans. You may have an idea of who you want your fan base to be – throngs in an arena, the hippest kids at school – but they may not be the ones you end up with. When the backward dance video took off, we realized our hardest-core fans were actually the weirdest, nerdiest ones sitting in their offices and bedrooms, trading videos. It might not have been what we expected, but if that’s where the connection was, why not build on it?” (179)

David Chang

“If you do what everybody expects, you’re going to have an exhausted, boring menu, so we were going to just do what we wanted. We started making dishes we thought that the public was going to love or hate.” (194)

“I don’t like to pat myself on the back, because there’s always a place around the corner that’s going to be better and faster. We have to keep our heads down and work.” (197)

Richard Restak

“One a very basic level, you are what you remember – your very identity depends on all of the events, people and places you can recall.” (201)

“If you think outside the box, playfully altering your perceptions, and try to look beyond the obvious, you will improve your imagination, thinking, and other cognitive processes by creating new linkages and new networks. Being open to and experiencing art or music can help us with this.” (204)

“Trying to control everything that happens in your brain can actually be an impediment.” (206)

“E.L. Doctorow writes, “Writing is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way.”” (207)

Marc Routh

“Be tenacious. Shows take so long to develop, as long as eight years or more, so we always have at least a dozen projects in the pipeline.” (210)

“There’s a saying on Broadway that musicals are a business and plays are a hobby.” (211)

Michael Sitrick

“Some people worry about having the last word; my concern is getting the first and last word. Get your story out first so you can set the tone for the coverage that follows.” (216)

“Regardless of how actual events occur, journalists believe that the best way to recount these events is in the form of a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, with drama, conflict and surprising twists. This might be a highly stylized – even sensationalized – way of reporting on events, but this way of thinking is so internalized by members of the media that to get your message across to them you have to present that message in the form of a story, sometimes with clearly drawn heroes and villains.” (218)

“Newspeople tend to be skeptical, idealistic, naive and sometimes relentless, with egos larger and more fragile than the average person’s. For example, journalists love to scoop their rivals, so give a reporter exclusive access to your high-profile client and you might have just made a grateful ally for life.” (218)

“Sometimes by working with instead of against the media you acn turn an unmitigated disaster into a success story.” (218)

“Finding a lead steer, a well-regarded reporter from a reputable institution willing to question conventional wisdom, can initiate a positive media stampede or reverse the direction of a negative one.” (219)

Bill Gross

“There are four types of management skills. And you need people with each one of the four skills to complement each other. The Entrepreneur is ahead of his time, sees the future and invents things. The Producer takes the new product and executes. The Administrator is the organizer who puts systems in place, makes sure the orders are filled and the bills are paid. The Integrator is a people person who understands the other three types and helps them get along, because they often hate each other’s guts.” (240)

“As long as people are punished for failing, they’ll be more focused on keeping their jobs than taking risks.” (241)

“Be 10 times better than your competition. Customers don’t’ want to switch to a new product or service that’s 10 percent better. They’ll only switch to something that is radically better than what’s already out there.” (242)

“Markets can change faster than you can imagine. Instead of judging your success by the size of your office, your marketing budget or the number of employees, sometimes you have to immediately scale your company to last as long as it’s going to take until people are ready for it.” (243)

Guy Kawasaki

“”You cannot influence people unless they actually find you likable.” (248)

“A baker believes she can make more and bigger pies. An eater believes that life is a zero-sum game: What others eat, he cannot eat. Bakers are trusted. Eaters are not.” (248)

“The more complex people make something, the less you should trust it.” (248)

“Always be generous. The most powerful favor is the one given with no clear link between the favor and what you want back.” (250)

Helio Castroneves

“It’s not about pushing harder; it’s about knowing when to push harder.” (256)

“Don’t stop learning till you’re six feet in the ground.” (257)

“To get there, you have to work so hard and face so much frustration that you can forget why you even got into racing. But when you stop enjoying yourself. what’s the point?” (258)

“Sometimes you’re the windshield and sometimes you’re the bug.” (260)

Stephen Dubner

“The best way to write a bestseller is not to try to write a bestseller. Write the book that you want to read.” (262)

“Write what you like. I’m convinced that the worst way to write a bestseller is to try to write a bestseller.” (262)

“Every topic needs an idea. As a magazine editor, I learned a topic is nothing without an idea. If you can’t wring out the idea from a topic, then don’t do the story.” (263)

“Keep it simple. One mistake that smart people often make is trying to remind everyone else how smart they are.” (264)

“It’s always better to tell a story simply than to show off.” (264)

“Simplicity allows you to connect with your readers. They trust plain language.” (264)

“If people finish a book, they’re much more likely to tell other people about it.” (265)

“The op-ed was about parenting… It had nothing to do with anything, but TV producers read USA Today, so suddenly we got on the Today show. Matt Lauer said, “oh man, this is really cool – what else is in your book? Why don’t you come back every week?” Then ABC came to us and said, “Why don’t you come back every week on all our shows – Good Morning America, World News Tonight, etc/” So, we started to have a cumulative advantage – once something becomes big, it’s a lot easier for it to get bigger.” (266)

“I’ve always had the good luck to write what I wanted and get paid. But, if I couldn’t write what I wanted, I wouldn’t write. I’d do something else, ‘cause I’ve got to get paid.” (267)

“From sportswriter Red Smith: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.” (267)

“From Flannery O’Connor: “There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” (268)

As always, if you liked the quotes, please buy the book here.

I recently read “How To Write Good” an e-book by John Vorhaus. The quotes I found most interesting are below. As always, if you liked the quotes, please buy the full book here.

“90 percent of everything everyone thinks is pretty much the same stuff, so the trick of reading other people’s minds is really just getting better at reading your own.” (KL 70-72)

“Choice is made. Don’t second guess. Move on.” (KL 80-81)

“To me, in this context, better is largely just faster. I consider myself a “better” writer when my process is more efficient, when I’m getting more writing done.” (KL 86-87)

“Whimsy says that any choice is a good choice. Whimsy explores ideas just for fun. Whimsy doesn’t care about broken bits of writing or storytelling. Or grammar. Or syntax. Or complete sentences. Whimsy plans to fix everything later. Whimsy, out of sheer whimsy, thinks of as many ways as it can to express whimsy. Whimsy knows there’s more than one path through story. Whimsy says what the fruck. (And whimsy makes fruck a word.)  Whimsy knows the secret of how to write good.” (KL 89-92)

“It’s so great to be a writer who doesn’t fear to be a fool.” (KL 105)

“All real writers are addicted to writing. ” (KL 136)

“The first goal of every writing project, for this completist writer at any rate, is to get the first draft done, and that won’t happen in the presence of fear.” (KL 142-143)

“Judge a sentence by this test only: Does it get you to the next one? If yes, keep writing. If no, fix what needs to be fixed and move on. But the thing is, again, move on. Get that first draft finished. Major revisions – real fixes – will come later, and that’s part of your active practice, too.” (KL 175-177)

“Keep giving them you until you is what they want.” (KL 181-182)

“The more comfortable you become with making those arbitrary choices – the ones that make you cringe and think, Jeez, they’ll never buy this! – the sooner those arbitrary choices become your voice.” (KL 184-185)

“Trust your choices – not that they’re good ones, necessarily, but that they’re yours.” (KL 219)

“As a writer you want to make choices that are easy and fun for you. You don’t want to make choices based on how you think your work will be received or what traffic some mythical market will bear.” (KL 219-221)

“When I find myself shining too long or too much, what I do is I take the win. I bask in the moment momentarily, then tell myself to get over myself and get back to work.” (KL 491-493)

“What happens when things go as planned? Nothing. The story stalls because emotions remain unchanged.” (KL 530)

“Once you see pivots as the substrate of story, and once you understand your story as merely a long string of emotional states changed by new information, you’ll find that you get less and less lost, and your stories have more and more drive.” (KL 532-533)

“Drive a story from action to emotion, emotion to action, action to emotion, and start getting good at that.” (KL 573)

“At the right time in the development process you would dress up Jack’s room, describe the furniture, the people you see, fill it up with detail. That time, though, is not now. Now it’s just action, emotion, action, emotion, action, emotion, until you get the hang of it.” (KL 575-577)

“Don’t be afraid to write stuff that some people hate; if people don’t get worked up one way or another, you’re never going to have any kind of career.” (KL 593)

“Your writing’s not good, your writing’s not bad, it’s just the writing you’re doing now.” (KL 604-605)

“Feel good about writing bad. It’s easy to do if you remember that your writing always serves the twin goals of advancing the current work and advancing your craft.” (KL 608-609)

“Never get down on yourself for a day of bad writing. Every day, every hour, every minute you spend writing, even the worst, builds craft.” (KL 610-611)

“None of it’s wasted. None of it. I’ve had bunches of broken stories that lay fallow until I got good enough to fix them.” (KL 662-663)

“Writer’s block takes place at the specific intersection of too much fear and not enough information.” (KL 698)

“If you say ouch, my feelings every time someone gives you bad news about your work, A) you’ll drive those people away and, 2) your work will cease to evolve.” (KL 813-814)

“Inappropriately large goals kill will and crush productivity. Appropriately sized goals offer the immediate reward of a job, well, done.” (KL 860-861)

“You’re a writer; it’s your job to tell people what to think.” (KL 897)

“A theme is a truth we believe in and want to promote, expressed as a call to action.” (KL 940)

“For 99 percent of the writing process, the best thing to do with the audience is ignore it, because contemplation of the audience takes you off the page.” (KL 951-952)

“A story is an arc of change from denial to acceptance of the theme.” (KL 969-970)

“It’s easy as Mad Libs if you think about it. The theme of the story is [insert theme]. The hero is [insert name]. The story is [name learns to theme].” (KL 984-985)

“Rock bands figured it out long before writers. Just because they were on their own label didn’t mean they sucked. It meant they’d found a way around a clumsy, cumbersome distribution system that no longer met their needs.” (KL 1020-1021)

“More often than not, rules are made by rule-makers for the benefit of rule-makers. If those rules don’t benefit us, we don’t have to follow ‘em.” (KL 1023-1024)

If you liked the quotes, please buy the book here.

I recently finished reading Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink. I consider this a comedy book since motivation and self-direction are so crucial to comedy. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the whole book here.

“When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity,” Deci wrote. Rewards can deliver a short-term boost – just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off – and, worse, can reduce a person’s longer-term motivation to continue the project.” (8)

“Societies also have operating systems. The laws, social customs, and economic arrangements that we encounter each day sit atop a lawyer of instructions, protocols, and suppositions about how the world works. And much of our societal operating system consists of a set of assumptions about human behavior.” (16)

“Routine, not-so-interesting jobs require direction; nonroutine, more interesting work depends on self-direction.” (30)

“The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table.” (33)

“When children didn’t expect a reward, receiving one had little impact on their intrinsic motivation. Only contingent rewards – if you do this, then you’ll get that – had the negative effect.” (36)

“When institutions – families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example – focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people’s behavior,” they do considerable long-term damage.” (37)

“Try to encourage a kid to learn math by paying her for each workbook page she completes – and she’ll almost certainly become more diligent in the short term and lose interest in math in the long term.” (37)

“In eight of the nine tasks we examined across the three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.” (39)

“Another study of artists over a longer period shows that the concern for outside rewards might actually hinder eventual success.” (43)

“Those artists who pursued their painting and sculpture more for the pleasure of the activity itself than for extrinsic rewards have produced art that has been socially recognized as superior.” (44)

“Extrinsic rewards can be effective for algorithmic tasks – those that depend on following an existing formula to its logical conclusion.” (44)

“Several researchers have found that companies that spend the most time offering guidance on quarterly earnings deliver significantly lower long-term growth rates than companies that offer guidance less frequently.” (56)

“In environments where extrinsic rewards are most salient, many people work only to the point that triggers the reward – and no further. So if the students get a prize for reading three books, many won’t pick up a fourth, let alone embark on a lifetime of reading.” (56)

“For routine tasks, which aren’t very interesting and don’t demand much creative thinking, rewards can provide a small motivational booster shot without the harmful side effects.” (60)

“The best way to avoid the seven deadly flaws of extrinsic motivators is to avoid them altogether or to downplay them significantly and instead emphasize the elements of deeper motivation – autonomy, mastery, and purpose.” (62)

“Your best approach is to have already establish the conditions of a genuinely motivating environment. The baseline rewards must be sufficient. That is, the team’s basic compensation must be adequate and fair – particularly compared with people doing similar work for similar organizations. Your nonprofit must be a congenial place to work. And the people on your team must have autonomy, they must have ample opportunity to pursue mastery, and their daily duties must relate to a larger purpose. If these elements are in place, the best strategy is to provide as sense of urgency and significance – and then get out of the talent’s way.” (64)

“Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete.” (64)

“Holding out a prize at the beginning of a project – and offering it as a contingency – will inevitably focus people’s attention on obtaining the reward rather than on attacking the problem. But introducing the subject of rewards after the job is done is less risky.” (64)

“The more feedback focuses on specifics (“great use of color”) – and the more the praise is about effort and strategy rather than about achieving a particular outcome – the more effective it can be.” (66)

“SDT begins with a notion of universal human needs. It argues that we have three innate psychological needs – competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy. When they’re thwarted, our motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet.” (70)

“For Type X’s, the main motivator is external rewards; any deeper satisfaction is welcome, but secondary. For Type I’s, the main motivator is the freedom, challenge, and purpose of the undertaking itself; any other gains are welcome, but mainly as a bonus.” (76)

“Type I’s almost always outperform Type X’s in the long run. Intrinsically motivated people usually achieve more than their reward-seeking counterparts. Alas, that’s not always true in the short term. An intense focus on extrinsic rewards can indeed deliver fast results. The trouble is, this approach is difficult to sustain. And it doesn’t assist in mastery – which is the source of achievement over the long haul. The most successful people, the evidence shows, often aren’t directly pursuing conventional notions of success. They’re working hard and persisting through difficulties because of their internal desire to control their lives, learn about their world, and accomplish something that endures.” (77)

“Type I behavior does not disdain money or recognition. Both Type X’s and Type I’s care about money. If an employee’s compensation doesn’t hit the baseline that I described – if her organization doesn’t pay her an adequate amount, or if her pay isn’t equitable compared to others doing similar work – that person’s motivation will crater, regardless of whether she leans toward X or toward I.” (77)

“One reason fair and adequate pay is so essential is that it takes people’s focus off money, which allows them to concentrate on the work itself.” (77)

“Management didn’t emanate from nature. It wasn’t handed to us from God. It’s something that somebody invented. It is, as the strategy guru Gary Hamel has observed, a technology – and an 1850s technology at that. Now look around your office or home. How many nineteenth-century technologies are you still using?” (86)

“Have you ever seen a six-month-old or a three-year-old who’s not curious and self-directed? I haven’t. That’s how we are out of the box. If, at age fourteen or forty-three, we’re passive and inert, that’s not because it’s our nature. It’s because something flipped our default setting.” (87)

“The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.”

“This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.” (90)

“We’ve always taken the position that money is only something you can lose on,” Cannon-Brookes told me. “If you don’t pay enough, you can lose people. But beyond that, money is not a motivator. What matters are these other features.” (91)

“At the makers of the GORE-TEX fabric and another example of Motivation 3.0 in action, anybody who wants to rise in the ranks and lead a team must assemble people willing to work with her.” (103)

“You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,

you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression, forgetting
themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.

-W.H. Auden” (107)

“In flow, goals are clear. You have to reach the top of the mountain, hit the ball across the net, or mold the clay just right. Feedback is immediate.” (113)

“In flow, people lived so deeply in the moment, and felt so utterly in control, that their sense of time, place, and even self melted away.” (113)

“With a learning goal, students don’t have to feel that they’re already good at something in order to hang in and keep trying. After all, their goal is to learn, not to prove they’re smart.” (120)

“The two self-theories take very different views of effort. To incremental theorists, exertion is positive. Since incremental theorists believe that ability is malleable, they see working harder as a way to get better. By contrast, says Dweck, “the entity theory… is a system that requires a diet of easy successes.” In this schema, if you have to work hard, it means you’re not very good. People therefore choose easy targets that, when hit, affirm their existing abilities but do little to expand them.” (120)

“Try to pick a profession in which you enjoy even the most mundane, tedious parts. Then you will always be happy. – Will Shortz” (122)

“Mastery hurts. Sometimes – many times – it’s not much fun.” (122)

“Being a professional,” Julius Erving once said, “is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.” (123)

“This is the nature of mastery: Mastery is an asymptote. You can approach it. You can home in on it. You can get really, really, really close to it. But like Cezanne, you can never touch it. Mastery is impossible to realize fully. Great athletes often say that they can – that they must – become better. They say it when they’re amateurs. They say it after their best outing or at the end of their finest season. They’re pursuing mastery. That’s well-known. What’s less well-known is that they understand that they’ll never get it. It will always hover beyond their grasp.” (125)

“The joy is in the pursuit more than the realization. In the end, mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.” (125)

“Forty-eight hours without flow plunged people into a state eerily similar to a serious psychiatric disorder.” (127)

“The single greatest motivator is “making progress in one’s work.” The days that people make progress are the days they feel most motivated and engaged.” (127)

“Business leaders, Gary Hamel says, “must find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals, such as honor, truth, love, justice, and beauty.” Humanize what people say and you may well humanize what they do.” (137)

“It’s often difficult to do something exceptionally well if we don’t know the reasons we’re doing it in the first place.” (138)

“There are certain things that if you value and if you attain them, you’re worse off as aresult of it, not better off.” (142)

“If people chase profit goals, reach those goals, and still don’t feel any better about their lives, one response is to increase the size and scope of the goals – to seek more money or greater outside validation. And that can “drive them down a road of further unhappiness thinking it’s the road to happiness,” Ryan said.” (143)

“One way to orient your life toward greater purpose is to think about your sentence.” (155)

“You spend a lot more time grinding through tough tasks than you do basking in applause.” (155)

“At the end of each day, ask yourself whether you were better today than you were yesterday. Did you do more? Did you do it well?” (155)

“Reminding yourself that you don’t need to be a master by day three is the best way of ensuring you will be one by day three thousand.” (156)

“Clay Shirky argues that when we design systems that assume bad faith from the participants, and whose main purpose is to guard against nasty behavior, we often foster the very behavior we’re trying to deter. People will push and push the limits of formal rules, search of every available loophole, and look for ways to game the system when defenders aren’t watching. By contrast, a web of rules that assumes good faith – as most autonomy-centered policies do – can actually encourage good behavior.” (173)

“If you think people in your organization are predisposed to rip you off, maybe the solution isn’t to build a tighter, more punitive set of rules. Maybe the answer is to hire new people.” (173)

“Paying great people a little more than the market demands, Akerlof and Yellen found, could attract better talent, reduce turnover, and boost productivity and morale. Higher wages could actually reduce a company’s costs.” (180)

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