“You can do this yourself.” These were the five words I most disliked hearing from my parents. Oh, I know, you can probably think of five worse words to hear. But these words meant that something I had asked them to do for me got turned around into something I had to do for myself. And that, obviously, wasn’t what I wanted. If I had wanted to do it myself, I wouldn’t have asked them to do it in the first place! Like calling a coach to ask why I wasn’t playing as much as I thought I should be. Or settling an argument with a sibling. Or asking someone for a job. The very point of my asking is that these were things that...

In recent weeks we’ve considered happiness from a variety of perspectives: what makes us happy, what doesn’t, and why we’re so bad at distinguishing between the two. Sometimes the insights offered have been surprising: turns out that getting more stuff or making loads of money doesn’t make us happy, while giving money away does. In this TEDTalk, Dan Pink — author of one of my favorites books in recent years, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future — offers another surprise: contrary to popular wisdom, we are rarely motivated or made happy by the traditional rewards and carrots of...