Speaker 1: It's great to welcome to the program today, Daniel Pink, who's the author of five
New York Times bestsellers, including the latest The Power of Regret How Looking Forward
Moves US, I'm Sorry How Looking Backward Moves US Forward.
Published last month.
Daniel, it's great to have you on today.
Speaker 4: Hey, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: So I read the book with great interest, and the book both confirms some of the intuition
that we may have about regret and also and also tells us that some of the intuitions
we have about regret are very, very wrong.
Maybe to start with, can you talk a little bit about when it comes to the idea of it's
just better to live without regrets, which is a very general principle that a lot of
people assume is just accurate?
Can you talk a little bit about what aspects of that make sense and maybe where it falls
short?
Speaker 4: Well, it's I mean, it's a great way to frame the question there.
When we when we look, we have this idea that we should never look backward and that we
should if we feel a spear of regret, we should essentially ignore that.
And that is actually colossally wrong headed advice.
What the research tells us, what 50 years of science tells us is that everybody has
regrets.
Regret is one of the most common emotions that human beings have.
It is ubiquitous in the human condition.
It is actually part of our cognitive machinery.
And so to say that I don't look backward and I don't experience regret runs against the
science, it's just simply not how human beings operate.
So and the truth of the matter is that everybody, you know, regret, regret makes us human.
Nearly everybody experiences regret.
I mean, literally, except for a very small number of people with certain kinds of disorders.
Everybody experiences regret.
And if we use it right, it's actually useful to us.
And this is the paradox of regret.
This is sort of the puzzle of regret, which is that this emotion that makes us feel bad
is ubiquitous in the human experience.
So what why?
And the answer is because it helps us if we deal with it right?
And we haven't been equipped to deal with regret properly.
We've been taught in some ways to ignore it.
When that fails, we end up getting captured by it.
And what we should be doing is confronting our regrets.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you talk in the book about and this doesn't seem unique to feelings of
regret.
But in the book you talk about how if the thoughts of regret become intrusive, if they
become sort of bottomless, if they become repetitive, that they end up having a sort
of counterproductive impact.
And it's not, it's not.
It's not good.
But that thinking about the regrets in particular ways and using them is actually something
that that is a positive thing.
Can you talk a little bit about the difference between that?
Because some people might say, Well, if I'm not thinking about the regrets, then how can
I use them to my advantage?
Speaker 4: Well, so that's great.
Another great, another great question.
So it's really I think at a broader level, we haven't been taught how to deal with negative
emotions.
I think our religious traditions actually do a better job of equipping us to deal with
negative emotions.
I think secular society hasn't done a very good job.
And so what happens is that some of us ignore negative emotions.
We say, no, not real, got to be positive people.
People put our fingers in the years.
That's a bad idea.
But because we haven't been equipped to deal with them when we do, when they intrude, as
you say, they can feel overwhelming.
And so we have to ask ourselves this question about like, what are these negative feelings
for?
They're not for ignoring, they're not for wallowing, they're for thinking about and
therefore thinking about, as you say, in a particular way.
And there's a certain process by which we can think about our emotions and arrest that
march toward rumination, arrest that march toward getting sucked into the into the vortex.
And it's actually relatively simple.
And when we do that, the evidence is overwhelming that that reckoning with our regrets leaning
into our regrets in some ways can help us become better negotiators, better strategies,
better problem solvers, better parents and find greater meaning in life.
Speaker 1: You know, it's interesting that our interview is today and yesterday.
It just so happened that during these Supreme Court confirmation hearings, particular sentences
that the nominee Judge Jackson had assigned in the past were a topic of much discussion.
And she was asked numerous times Do you regret the sentence you gave to this particular individual
who went on to re-offend or whatever the case may be?
And one of the interesting things about that framework is that it's sort of like a results
based regret where the time that that a decision is made, you don't have the information as
to what subsequently happens.
And the question was based on what happened after you decided.
Do you regret what you did?
And Daniel Kahneman has written about this and in the context of it being sort of a cognitive
limitation that we sometimes experience?
Can you talk a little bit about results oriented thoughts about regrets?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
I mean, I don't want to legitimize those questions about sentencing as as serious intellectual
inquiries Speaker 1: agreed 100
Speaker 4: percent.
They were, they were.
Yeah, it was basically performative grandstanding and dog whistles.
Absolutely.
I believe in leaving that.
Aside from leaving that aside for a moment, and I know, I know that you agree with that.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, this is actually there are a couple of ways at this.
One of them is as we were talking about before.
That's a way to arrest the march toward rumination.
That is what you need to evaluate is a decision itself, not the not what happened subsequently,
because the decision itself is something you had control over.
What happened subsequently is something you don't have control over.
And so what I found in talking to people about their regrets is they were actually much less
outcomes than I would have expected that they were actually scrutinizing that, especially
when it came to a certain kinds of regrets.
They were much more willing to scrutinize the decision itself and were less wedded to
the outcome.
Now all of us have that.
All of us have that cognitive glitch.
But but what's important to understand with with regret is that when we evaluate our choices
and when we try to extract lessons from them, we should be evaluating the context of the
decision, what we knew, what situation we were in.
Who in some ways, who we were as a person at that moment.
And because that's something we have control over.
But the outcome itself, we don't always have control over, although the outcome does, you
know, can give us clues.
Speaker 1: You in the book, you categorize regrets into sort of certain buckets.
And in that context, you did this world regret survey of 15000 people in more than 100 countries.
Can you talk about the categories of regret that seem to be the most impactful for people
when they look back on their lives?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
I mean, what I found in collecting regrets from all over the world, as you mentioned,
we're now up to over 19000 regrets from over from 109 countries.
It's unbelievable.
And what I found, which is, to my surprise, is that over and over again, people had the
same core regrets.
They regretted the same things.
And these regrets are less about the domains of people's lives.
They were less about, Oh, I have a career regret.
I have an education regret.
I mean, superficially, that's what they were.
But deep down, there were four things that people seem to regret the most, and I'll go
through them very quickly.
One of them, or what I call foundation regrets foundation regrets are if only I'd done the
work.
And these are regrets about small decisions people make about health, about finances,
about education early in life that accumulate to, you know, sometimes very grave consequences
later on.
So things about especially things like not saving enough money, spending too much money,
smoking those kinds of things.
Second one are boldness regrets, which are if only I'd taken the chance.
These are regrets people have where they're at a juncture in their life.
They can play it safe, they can take the chance and they don't take the chance and they often
regret it.
And it's everything from traveling to speaking up to asking somebody out on a date to starting
a business.
And what's interesting about those, David, is that.
There were people who acted boldly and it didn't work out.
And many of them said, I don't love that, but I'm cool with that because I took the
chance, so that's a good example of what you were talking about before people being, to
my surprise, being less outcomes than I would have expected.
Third category, if only I'd done the right thing.
These are people who again are at a juncture.
They can do the right thing.
They can do the wrong thing, to do the wrong thing.
They regret it.
Bullying, marital infidelity.
Other kinds of cheating.
And finally, our connection regrets, which are if only had reached out, which are about
relationships, not mostly romantic relationships, just the full spectrum of relationships we
have in our lives that if they come apart and we don't do anything about it, we end
up regretting it.
And and what's amazing to me in this research is that is how universal these four regrets
were.
I mean, irrespective of, you know, of of nationality, especially pretty much irrespective of gender
and to some extent, even irrespective of age.
Speaker 1: Are there certain cultures or countries that just have a lower level of regret in
your estimation?
Speaker 4: I don't know.
That's an interesting question.
I tried to get at that.
I tried to get at that question in in a I did another piece of that to the the world
regrets.
Everyone's a piece of qualitative research that as I was essentially collecting stories,
I also did a piece of quantitative research, which was a which essentially a giant opinion
poll of the American population.
The largest sampling of American attitudes about regret ever conducted a pretty rigorous
quantitative survey.
And I tried to get at that.
A version of that question that way by asking, say about, say, belief in God, does it believe
in God correlate with people's regrets?
D. Zero correlation of any kind.
I asked people, Do you gave people three choices?
Do you believe in God?
Which of these best describes your belief?
I believe in God.
I don't believe in God.
I'm not sure.
I believe in God and zero correlation of any kind, with me, with anything.
I also asked people whether they believed that in general, everything in life happened
for a reason.
And most people did it.
Most people also believe they have free will.
So, so, so other ways at that question about belief systems seem to indicate there.
There wasn't much difference.
I mean, I'm not.
I'm hesitant to say that.
I'm very hesitant to say definitively.
My hunch right now is that that that that belief systems didn't matter all that much.
And it could be because regret is so central to our literally to our brain function.
That is, our brains don't have a nationality.
Our behavior can have a nationality because as our brains acting in a context.
But ah, but the the lump of of of cells in our head doesn't isn't, you know, an Indonesian
isn't an Indonesian brain or an American brain or a Polish brain, it's just a brain.
Yeah, right is central.
Speaker 1: That makes sense.
I mean, at the same time, there are so many cultural ideas and memes like, you know, FOMO
fear of missing out YOLO.
You only live ones that aren't the same across all countries.
So it would be interesting whether, you know, do Brazilians tend to have fewer regrets than
Danes vs. Americans or that type of thing?
And it sounds like we don't really have that data, at least at this point.
Speaker 4: Not at all.
I mean, and in fact, if you're talking about the number of regrets, I have no idea because
I because in my surveys, I asked people in the quantitative survey, I asked people to
list one of their biggest regrets in the qualitative survey.
Also, tell me about one big regret I didn't ask.
You know, so, so it could.
There could be volume differences that people in in in Slovenia have lots and lots of regrets,
and people in Brazil have only one or two.
And yet when you look at the top regrets, the biggest regrets, there's commonality there.
Speaker 1: I the other thing that is interesting is whether and you I think you touched on
this in the book a little bit, I think and I've also read articles preparing for the
interview.
So now I'm not sure.
But one of the things is do more opportunities, create an environment for having more regrets?
Whereas someone whose life felt like it provided fewer opportunities reduces the amount of
regret that one might feel.
Speaker 4: Yes, although opportunity is also an opportunity is a little bit paradoxical,
so let me give you let me give you a piece of data on that from the quantitative survey
of the American Regrette Project, the big public opinion poll.
What we found there was that people who had high levels of formal education, that is,
they had degrees in advanced degrees, right?
Those people we know, which is which is a minority of of of Americans, I think it's
something like 30 percent or so of Americans have a college degree and an even smaller
percentage of that have a so-called advanced degree.
And what we found there is that those folks, the people with college degrees and advanced
degrees especially had more career regrets than other people.
Which is weird because.
You know that.
But but it's so superficially weird, but it goes to exactly to your point, which is that
the fact that they had more career opportunities might have given them a larger universe of
career opportunities to regret right now.
That said, thwarted opportunity can also be a source of regret.
So opportunity sort of lives at the core of regret, but in a somewhat paradoxical way.
Huge numbers of opportunities can lead to regret, but reduced opportunities.
Can also lead to regret.
Speaker 1: Last thing I want to touch on in terms of takeaways for one's own thinking
and actions and sort of life.
One principle that I got from the book maybe, rightly, maybe wrongly, is in general, there
seems to be more regret for things not done than for things done very, very broadly speaking.
Is that true and what other kind of general principles that one can apply, do you think
are important?
Speaker 4: It is.
What you're saying is very true.
I mean, that think that that's a claim that I can make without with very little hesitation
based on the existing research and based on my own research and the quantitative survey,
that was a very, very clear finding, particularly when it comes to age when we're younger, we
tend to have equal regrets of of of action, things I did and inaction what I didn't do
as we age.
Overwhelmingly, it's regrets of inaction.
And I think that the takeaway there is that in general in life, we should have a slight
bias for action that that in some ways we're generally over indexed on risk and we're over
indexed on feelings of awkwardness.
So we think that asking somebody out on a date has a high level of risk when it actually
doesn't.
We think that reaching out to a friend who's drifted apart, it has high levels of awkwardness,
but it really doesn't.
We think this is a little bit closer to the line.
But but we sometimes overindex on how much risk it is to start a business.
And and so I think that a takeaway is that we should have a in general in life a bias
for action because action is also a way that it's also a way that we learn things.
So I think sometimes we plan too much and act too little, which we feel like in order
to act, we have to plan out everything when in fact, acting itself is a form of planning
and understanding.
So I think that's one big takeaway.
The other big takeaway is, I think in terms of how we reckon with our regrets is that
we should recognize that when we feel regret it is utterly human and that when we do that,
we should treat ourselves with kindness rather than contempt.
Recognize that it's part of the human condition.
We should talk about our regrets and use language to make sense of our regrets, and we should
explicitly stop and try to extract a lesson from those regrets.
So if we do that, if we say, you know, this is this is this is what I regret.
It's totally normal.
I'm going to treat myself with kindness.
Let me try to make sense of it.
Let me draw a lesson from it and let me apply that lesson next time.
Then it's an incredibly productive and even transformative emotion.
Speaker 1: The book is the power of Regret How Looking Backward Moves US Forward.
We've been speaking with the book's author, Daniel Pink.
Really appreciate your time today.
Speaker 4: Thanks for having me.
It was a pleasure.