BA, Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, 1986
Alumni Merit Award Winner
Author Daniel Pink couldn’t motivate his fellow Northwestern students to elect him president of Associated Student Government (“roundly and soundly defeated,” he admits) but that hasn’t stopped him from writing five best-selling books about work and business, selling more than a million copies in the US alone. His latest book, To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others, is all about persuasion and how to be better at it.
Daniel’s provocative ideas about what motivates people to high achievement in an information-loaded, automated age can be found in his books, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, and A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Add a busy public speaking schedule and his many articles for publications like the New York Times, Fast Company, and Wired, and it’s not surprising that Harvard Business Review named him one of the most influential business thinkers in the world.
Daniel’s YouTube video, The Puzzle of Motivation, is one of the 20 most-watched TEDTalks of all time. In his presentation, he says that autonomy, mastery, and purpose move people to succeed, not money. He calls his undergraduate years at Northwestern among the happiest of his life, perhaps because he found all three of those success elements on the Evanston campus.
“For the first time in my life, I had control over what I did and how I did it — in an environment filled with possibilities I never knew existed,” says Daniel, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa. “It was exhilarating. And the whole experience (okay, most of it) was just plain fun. And then there was the intellectual engagement. I was a linguistics major, so many of my classes were more like graduate seminars than undergraduate courses. That offered a mental workout that widened my understanding of humanity and sharpened my thinking.”
He also took advantage of the opportunity to explore other disciplines.
“Mary Shulman’s Introduction to Economics was a life-changer,” he says. “And the three main courses in the Writing Program — Writing the Essay, Writing Poetry, and Writing Fiction — forced me to take writing more seriously and convinced me I would never be a poet.”
While at Northwestern, he hosted a talk show on WNUR radio, worked as a reading tutor for Evanston schoolchildren, and won a prize for penning an outstanding work of short fiction.
After graduating from Yale Law School, Daniel chose not to practice law and instead worked in politics, eventually becoming chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore from 1995 to 1997.
Daniel lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Jessica Lerner, and their three children.