Drive: Ask yourself questions, and take a Sagmeister

I really liked Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

In Drive, Pink suggests asking yourself "What's your sentence?" (examples include "He raised four kids who became happy and healthy adults" or "She invented a device that made people's lives easier" or "She taught two generations of children how to read.") and then asking every night before your go to bed "Was I better today than yesterday?"

Pink also suggests trying the following exercise from Alan Webber's Rules of Thumb:

Get a few blank three-by-five inch cards. On one of the cards, write your answer to this question: "What gets you up in the morning?" Now, on the other side of the card, write your answer to your question: "What keeps you up at night?" Pare each response to a single sentence. And if you don't like an answer, toss the card and try again until you've crafted something you can live with. Then read what you've produced. If both answers give you a sense of meaning and direction, "Congratulations!" says Webber. "Use them as your compass, checking from time to time to see if they're still true. If you don't like one or both of your answers, it opens up a new question: What are you going to do about it?"

Pink also suggests following designer Stefan Sagmeister's lead and taking one year off every seven years, during which you travel, experiment with new projects, and generate ideas that (at least for Sagmeister) often provide income for the next seven years. 

"Taking a Sagmeister" (as Pink calls it) sounds intense but it's something I've advocated for years. 

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