Daniel Pink
Appearances
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
It's neither one of those. It's neither dark nights of the soul where I'm wondering whether I can do this, nor is it this kind of blissful thing. It's neither one of those. It's I have a job to do. I have something I care about. So get to work. And then do it the next day and do it the next day.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I didn't spend a lot of time on either of those polls because I didn't spend a lot of time pondering it. I just was doing shit. And so that's what it was for me. Now, again, just to be very clear about this, when I first started out, I couldn't make enough money as a writer. And so I actually took on some corporate speech writing, which I hated, but paid for diapers.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
That was a side gig for about a year or so until I... found my footing as a writer, and then also managed to get a book deal that paid in advance that covered us partially, kind of, sorta. You know, I was in my early 30s. We had one baby, then we had another baby. I'm working for myself. My wife is litigating on behalf of the United States Department of Justice.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
you're just like trying to get through each day, you know? I mean it. I mean, you're just not thinking about, oh my God, is this a source of meaning? Oh my God, I'm living the dream. Oh my God, I'm so scared. You're saying, What is the mess in front of me that I need professionally or personally that I need to clean up right now?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
At that point... So I wrote Free Agent Nation. And so I got that out of me. I wrote a book and I learned how to write a book. That's really important. I showed myself and I showed the world that I can do this. Then I wrote A Whole New Mind. And A Whole New Mind did very well commercially, knock wood. I mean, I always believe the wolf is at the door, but that mitigated that fear for a little bit.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And then I wrote a graphic novel in 2007. I got a fellowship because our kids were little, they were very portable. And I said, let's go to Japan. And so we got a fellowship to go to Japan and I studied the manga industry, the comic industry. Because I was very interested in that and then came back and wrote this graphic novel career guide, which was a hoot.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And then after A Whole New Mind, I got a lot of questions from readers about if you're right that we're moving from a world that prizes logical linear skills to one that provides prizes artistic empathic skills. And how do you lead people? How do you motivate people to do it? I didn't know the answer to that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I started looking at the research and the research said some things that were shocking to me. about the limits of some of these if-then rewards and about how rewards can sometimes backfire and how there are other things that actually lead to sustained, enduring high performance. I thought it was fascinating.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
As you know from writing a book yourself, it's a giant pain in the ass to write a book. And so you have to pick something that you're genuinely interested in. And I was genuinely interested in this and I wanted to figure it out. And that's what I did. So I wrote that book. And then, again, the goal is to...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
for me, at least until recently is, you know, as I think about making a different kind of leap myself, the goal is in writing books is to be able to write another one. That's the main goal. That's what was firing me on that one.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I think that it resonated because it gave... language and relatively simple and straightforward language and an explanation to a phenomenon that people felt intuitively. They had a sense. They knew deep down that they were not motivated only by carrots and sticks.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And they had a sense that a system constructed so heavily on that was somehow off, but they didn't have the language quite to describe it. And so I think it was a combination of giving people language to describe these inchoate feelings and also giving evidence for this claim that shouldn't be counterintuitive, but that is.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Right, right. I mean, rewards do motivate people. It's just that, and if you're in an organization, you want to pay people really well. But the idea that you're going to get better performance by dangling a high-stakes reward in front of somebody all the time is just not true.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Yeah, sometimes it hurts.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I'm so glad to be here, Alana. Thanks for having me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
So, I mean, I had another book that came out before that called To Sell is Human. And that was basically about the science of selling because I was interested in that. And then after that, I said, I'll just give you the genesis of the book when, and it was again, like the genesis of the other stuff. It's just something that I was curious about.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I realized in writing before I wrote that book that I was making all kinds of decisions about timing in a given day. Like when do I start my work? When do I quit for the day? When do I start a project? What do I do in the middle of a project when I'm not sure it's going to work? Do I quit? Do I go forward? How do I summon the motivation to do something when I'm in that messy middle, as you say?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
So I was making all these questions about timing and I was doing it in a completely blind, intuitive, half-assed way. And I said, someone's written a book about this. And so I started looking around for the book and no one had written a book about it. And I was like, oh man, you know what? I need to read this book. And the only way I can read this book is if I write this book.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And so what I did is I looked at a very large number of studies on timing, asking these timing questions. And the thing about these timing questions is that they were spread across many, many, many disciplines. They were in psychology, they were in economics, but they were also in neuroscience, they were in anesthesiology, but they were also often asking very similar questions.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
How does our behavior and our mood change over the course of a day? How do breaks affect us? How do beginnings affect us? How do midpoints affect us? How do endings affect us? How do people synchronize? And so I wrote that book largely so I could read it because I was interested in it. So on your question of midpoints, yeah, I mean, one of the things is, is that Our lives are episodic in a way.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
So much of what we do has a beginning, a middle, and an end. This interview has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Any kind of project has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And those episodic moments change us in a way. And so for midpoints, Midpoints can drag us down. There's no question about it. There can be kind of a droop at the midpoint.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
We saw that until recently, sort of a U-shaped curve of well-being over time where people in the middle of their lives were the most unhappy. Some of that data has changed recently, not because people in the middle have gotten happier, but because people who are younger have gotten way less happy recently.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
No, I mean it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
So instead of it looking like a U, it looks like just a decline. Everybody's unhappy until you get old. Let me answer the question you actually asked, which is, what do you do at midpoint? So there are a few things that you can do. I think there's some pretty good research showing that the way you frame it can be really important. And I use this sometimes for running.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Well, I think the love of books preceded the love of writing. When I was growing up, I didn't say, oh, I want to grow up and be a writer. I don't think that was my main goal. A lot of life, as you know, as all of us know, is about circumstance. And I happened to, when I was six, early in first grade, my father got a new job.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Let's say I'm going to go run five miles. During the first two and a half miles, until you get to the midpoint, you motivate yourself better by thinking about how far you've come. So, oh my gosh, I've already gone a mile. I've already gone two miles. And then when you're past the midpoint, you actually get more motivation by imagining how little you have to go. That can be really useful.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Another thing that you can do in the midpoint is actually create a set of smaller, shorter moments. And so what you can do is you can say you're writing a book and you're not sure exactly what the midpoint is. Basically say, you know, what I want to do is I want to get to the end of this section. I want to get to the end of this chapter.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And that can give you the motivation, even if you're not at the end of the book itself. So slicing into smaller things. There's some interesting research from the NBA about the NBA. done by Jonah Berger and Devin Pope showing that teams that are ahead at halftime in the NBA are more likely to win the game.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Not surprisingly, but teams that are behind by one are actually behind by one are actually more likely to win. than teams that are ahead by one. And there's other experimental evidence showing that if you feel like you're slightly behind in the middle, you get some extra motivation. So if you feel like you're way behind, you give up. If you feel like you're way ahead, you can become complacent.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
But if you just feel like you're a little bit behind, and so having that thin edge of hunger and feeling a little bit behind in the middle can be helpful.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I had regrets. I mean, it's that simple. It's very therapeutic for me, Ilana, to sort of talk about how all of this evolved. But this is not a book that I would have written in my 30s. I would not have written a book about regret in my 30s. But in my 50s, it felt in some ways inevitable because, you know, if you hit age 50, you likely have more of your life behind you than ahead of you.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And so I had a lot of room to look back. And I look back, as people do. And when I look back, there were things I wish I had done. There were things I wish I hadn't done. There were things I wish I had done differently. And I was curious about that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Here there was a catalyst in that I really started thinking about this deeply at my elder daughter's college graduation because that kind of marker is very meaningful because, you know, I'm in this graduation ceremony and, you know, I see this kid, not kid, this young woman and... How did that happen?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Exactly. Precisely the question I asked, how the hell did that happen? Like this kid used to be like an infant. This is the same kid we're talking about being born and then like then they're writing Free Asian Nation. It's like crawling up the stairs of my attic office. And suddenly she's walking across the stage in a college graduation. I blinked and that happened.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And so that's kind of disorienting. And then also it's like, how can I have a kid? How can I have a daughter who's 22 years old when I'm like 25 myself? And, you know, I started thinking about, in particular, about my own college experience, which was generally quite positive. But I had some regrets about that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And when I came back home to Washington, D.C., where I live, this is a moment where I was thinking a lot about regret. I realized it's like, oh, my God, I don't want to talk about this with anybody because nobody wants to talk about regret. And I sheepishly mentioned my regrets to a few people. And I discovered that everybody wanted to talk about it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And we moved from Wilmington, Delaware, where I was born, to Columbus, Ohio, where I grew up. And It just so happens that Ohio in general and central Ohio in particular have an amazing public library system. And as a consequence, I grew up a short walk away from an excellent local public library and a very easy bus ride away from a massive and majestic library.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
That once I brought up regrets, it just uncorked this need that other people had. And that's a very interesting reaction when you're a writer. And so I decided that I would actually threw away a book that I was working on and then wrote an entirely new proposal for a book about regret.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
This is the closest thing I have to a moment where I was going one way and I reached that moment and then went the other way.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I mean, I think so. There are differences among regrets on a number of different dimensions. I do think that what you're talking about there is a difference between sort of retrospective regrets and prospective regrets. So, you know, if you look retrospectively, you shouldn't regret every mistake that you made. You'll drive yourself crazy.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And I think one of the discoveries is that a lot of the decisions we make don't really matter all that much. And then there's certain kinds of regrets that people have that are not massive, that are small. They can make peace with them. They don't really bug people. When you're thinking about the end of your life and getting there without deep regrets, I think that's a different kind of reasoning.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And I think it can be healthy, but it has to be done in the right way. So it depends on whether you look backward. If you're looking backward and scrutinizing your choices of what you did or didn't do, that's one thing. If you're looking forward and trying to avoid future regrets, that's something else.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Let me just show my work here a little bit. So to write this book, what I did was I looked at, there's a lot of good research on regret and multidisciplinary research. Again, a lot of it in social psychology actually started out in almost like political science, political economy, national security studies. There's a lot in economics.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
There's a lot now in psychology and social psychology, but there's also a lot in neuroscience and cognitive science. And so looked at what is 50 years of research tell us about this emotion of regret. Then I also did a very large quantitative survey, basically a very large public opinion poll, the largest public opinion poll ever. Well, I did two things.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I did a quantitative poll of the largest public opinion survey ever conducted of American attitudes about regret. And then I collected regrets from around the world. And that proved to be really revelatory because we have this database now of 26,000 regrets from people in 134 countries.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And what it says, to answer your question again, in my typically roundabout way, is that yes, indeed, Alana, there are, we did find that around the world, there are four types of regret. There are foundation regrets, which are decisions that people make, smallish decisions that people make early in life that accumulate. They're not devastating up front, but that accumulate to bad consequences.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I spent too much and saved too little, now I'm broke. There's regrets about boldness, which is a very big category where you are at a moment in your life and you say you could play it safe or take the chance. And overwhelmingly, people who don't take the chance regret it. Not always, but overwhelmingly, there's moral regrets, which are if only I'd done the right thing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
So once again, you have a choice. I can take the high road. I can take the low road. I can do the right thing. I can do the wrong thing overwhelmingly. Again, not all the time, but people regret taking the low road, doing the wrong thing. It sticks with them. And then finally, their regrets of connection, which are, if only I'd reached out.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And these are regrets about relationships that come apart and you want to do something, but you're too scared to do something. And your forecasting is off about how other people are going to respond. And so these four regrets are incredibly common around the world.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Well, what we know from my quantitative research and what we also know from other research is exactly that distinction. So, again, forgive me for getting in the weeds here, but I did something called the World Regret Survey, which was basically a giant collection of regrets. from all over the world. That's what we were just talking about. That's a qualitative piece of research.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I also did a pretty sophisticated public opinion survey of a sample of about 4,400 Americans, asking them a set of questions that you might get from Polster about attitudes to regret. That's a very large sample, 4,400, for this kind of research. And the reason that the sample is so large is that my main goal was to look for demographic differences in regret.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
So do women have different regrets than men? Do people with lots of formal education have different regrets than people with less formal education? I found very few demographic differences except for one. And that had to do with what you're talking about here. So in the architecture of regret, there can be two kinds of regrets. There are regrets of action. I regret something I did.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Carnegie-funded, massive public library. And so both my parents were readers as a kid. I went to the library a lot, not because I had to, not because somebody was forcing me, because it was good. I liked it. And also, truly, in the summer, the library had air conditioning, and my house did not have air conditioning. And it was cooler in there. And so I grew up going to the library a lot.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Regrets of inaction. I regret something I didn't do. Action, inaction. people in their 20s had equal numbers of regrets of action and inaction. But as people age, in their 30s, they're more inaction, regrets, inaction, regrets. 40s, even more inaction. By the time you get to your 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, it's overwhelming. Overwhelmingly, as we age, There are more inaction regrets than action regrets.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
There is zero. I mean, I don't want to think about this as like akin to the law of gravity, but in the world of social science, this is as close to a unshakable truth as you could possibly have, which is that over time, people are much more likely to regret their inactions over their actions. It's not even close. Inaction regrets are what stick with us.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
It could be anything. If only I'd started a business. If only I'd asked that person out on a date. If only I traveled over here, which is a place that I wanted to travel to earlier. If only I had spoken up. The regrets about inaction.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I mean, give me an example of something that somebody like a Leap Academy person might regret.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Bingo. Okay, there you go. So, and that's a very common regret. And it's actually much more common than people who regret trying stuff and failing. It's much more common than that. There were people in the database who regretted, tried something, let's say entrepreneurship, it went south on them. They regretted doing that. But-
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I also did a lot of interviews and there are people who said, I tried it, it didn't work. I didn't like that, but I'm glad I tried. So let's say you have some, I had a great idea, but I never moved on it. All right. So we know from the science, there's a way to deal with that. So number one is how you treat yourself and that kind of thing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And our tendency, and probably you hear it in the sort of the leap academy, people hear it in their own self-talk, which is I'm such an idiot. I'm so lazy. I'm such a weakling. I'm such a wimp.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Like the way we talk to ourselves, it's horrible. It's the worst. It's far harsher than we talk to than we would ever talk to anybody else. OK, so here's what the science says about that. Don't do that. All right. That's basically what the science concludes and what it says. And the reason not to do that is that it's not effective.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I mean, this lacerating self-criticism doesn't, honestly, it doesn't improve performance. If it did, God bless America, let's go for it. But it doesn't. It typically has no effect on performance. It has an effect on your mood. It makes you feel worse, but it has no effect on your performance. And so don't do that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
What does have an effect on your performance is something very different, something I didn't know about until I did this research, which is something called self-compassion, which essentially is treating yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Don't treat yourself better than anybody else, but don't treat yourself worse than anybody else.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And so treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Recognize that regrets are part of the human condition. Everybody has regrets. It's one of the most common emotions that people have. There's almost nobody who's not five years old or brain damaged or a sociopath who doesn't have any regrets. So treat yourself with kindness. You're not that special. Give me any regret that you have.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Any of your listeners have a regret? I'll find it in 15 seconds in the database. And so treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. The second thing, which I think is really important, Writing about your regret, talking about your regret.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Not only is it a way to relieve the burden, but there's some interesting research that shows that when we take this kind of amorphous dread of a feeling, which is abstract, and convert it to words, which are more concrete, they're actually less menacing. And so a lot of research about converting these blobby, amorphous kinds of feelings into actual words, which can be helpless and sense-making.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And then finally, what you have to do is you have to stop and extract a lesson from it. So basically what it is for your person, it's this. First of all, you regret like not starting of, you're not trying something on your own, all right? Trying something yourself. So first of all, treat yourself with kindness. You're not the only one like that, okay? People make mistakes. That's how it works.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And as a consequence, I grew up reading a lot. And being a reader was actually a big part of who I was as a kid. And I think that had I not grown up in a place where I had such immediate access to fantastic public libraries, I don't think I would be a writer today. I really don't. I think I would have done something else.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Number two, tell people about that regret. Try to make sense of it. Talk about it, write about it. And then third, it's like, This is a pretty strong signal, all right? If you think about it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
This is a strong signal. We make all kinds of decisions every single day, and most of them we don't remember, but here's an indecision that is haunting you. That's a strong signal. So the question is, is basically what it says is that you value, what's the lesson? You might value independence more than you think. You might value risk more than you think.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
You might value creation more than you think. more than you think. Listen to that signal. And then the question is, what's the next thing that you can do? And so maybe what it is in this case is go meet with five entrepreneurs and get their advice. Give yourself a deadline in the next two weeks, write a business plan for something you're interested in.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Go take a course on entrepreneurship, like basically extract a lesson. The lesson is, this is something that's valuable to me and something that I want to pursue, then do something about it. And what you don't want to do is beat yourself up for not doing it until now. That doesn't do you any good.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I think that's a great way to put it. I mean, we get a lot of clarity from action.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
But what do you do? Extend your metaphor. You stop the bleeding. You know, that's what you do if it's like a physical wound and you don't begin the sense making or the lesson extraction when someone has a gaping wound that's
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
But when the scar tissue starts to emerge, that's when you can begin deriving lessons from it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Marketing a book is always a ferocious battle. Doesn't matter when or who or where. It's always a battle.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I would never write a book just to write a book. I would never say it's time for me to write another book. I would have to be it's something that I want to work on. And so that's why I haven't started working on a new book and instead have been trying to work on some other kinds of projects that speak to me more clearly.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
you know right now that's what it is and again this is where and i'm totally not joking about this this is where being frugal is helpful and not having very high carrying costs i have never i'm talking to you today from my garage office i have never paid rent I've been working for myself for 25 years. I've never paid rent for an office to anybody else.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
You have to be very clear about what do you care about? And what I care about is doing stuff that I find interesting. That's it. And so I'm not trying to build a giant enterprise. I don't care if I have people reporting to me or not. I just want to work on cool stuff. I want to make stuff, put it out in the world. That's it. That's a hard gig. So don't waste your money, you know?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
It's just a refurbished garage. You can see here.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I don't want to have all your listeners completely click out of here. It has to do with the unique way that Ohio, unlike other states, funds public libraries. Ohio is essentially a dedicated fund for public libraries, which means that Ohio libraries are among the best in the country.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
It's a great question. And I think that when I was much younger, I don't know whether I would have listened. And that bugs me. You know what I mean? And I don't think I'm alone in that necessarily. But bypassing that, I think it would be like, no one is thinking about you. No one is watching you. No one is evaluating you. I think a lot of times in our early in our lives, we
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
are concerned about what other people think of us. And I certainly did. I certainly was concerned about that. And then eventually I discovered what people were thinking about me, which is that they weren't thinking about me. Nobody was thinking about me. They were thinking about themselves. And so there's a liberation in that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I mean, first of all, most people aren't thinking about you. They really are not. And if they are, who cares? You know, they don't know you. They don't necessarily have your best interest in mind. So who cares? There's a danger in living someone else's life. There's a big danger in that. And I think people do it and they do it in a unintentional way.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
If you say intentionally, I want to live the life that my mother wants for me or my father wants for me or whatever. In some ways, I'm okay with that. But I think what people do is they do that unintentionally. They do it kind of passively. They do it as a default.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Bingo.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I've enjoyed the conversation. As I said, it was very therapeutic for me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
So just to take a step back, when I was maybe like 9 or 10, what I really wanted to do, I did have a career aspiration. I mean, my original career aspiration was to play both Major League Baseball and the NBA. And by the time I was 10, it seemed like that dream was not going to come true.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And so the other thing that I would do when I was much younger is when I was actually in elementary school and even in junior high, what we now call middle school, I was actually in a lot of plays and actually wrote a lot of plays. curiously enough. And when I was maybe like 10 or 11 or 12, you had asked me what I wanted to do. I would say, oh, I think I want to write and direct movies.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
But then I kind of abandoned that. Not kind of, I did abandon that in part because I was also pretty good in school because school was actually really easy. When I went to school, basically all you had to do was be compliant and give the authority figure what they wanted on time neatly. And you were suddenly, quote, a good student. And so for whatever bizarre reasons of,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
personality and insecurity. You know, I was a good student and the good students typically didn't participate in the arts. Those are two different worlds. So I went that way and I was a good student because it was so easy because the system was so stupid. So I went to college and college is different because college, I could actually learn something.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Everybody has regrets. It's one of the most common emotions that people have. Give me any regret that any of your listeners have. I'll find it in 15 seconds in the database.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
and pursue what i wanted to pursue and i ended up pursuing linguistics just because i was sort of the perfect combination for me and that it was obviously about language i would simultaneously be in classes with linguistics classes literally like from one to another with computer science majors the early computer science majors there's a certain kinds of syntactical courses in linguistics that are also the core of computer science and then i would also be in classes with poetry
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
students because there's other aspects of linguistics that were very literary and so the combination of sort of the math and literary was fantastic for me i loved it and then i went to law school largely because i grew up in columbus ohio and i was a middle class kid who went to college on financial aid and was concerned that i needed to make a living and that was the way to do it and i didn't want to be a doctor and i didn't want to be an engineer
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
It's a very common pattern among American middle-class people, zero to one generations removed from coming to this country without any money. or, you know, anybody who wants to try to get a stronger foothold into the middle class. And so I did that. And I was also deeply interested in politics at the time. And I went to law school.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And once I figured out what lawyers did, I was like, I'm not doing this. It was too boring. I was like, I'm not doing this. And even if it makes a lot of money, I'm not going to do this. And so I happened to be fortunate in that my law school had a program where
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
If you went to work upon graduation and you earned below a certain salary, no matter what you did, they would help subsidize the repayment of your student loans. And again, circumstantial. But for that, I maybe would have gone to practice law to pay off my student loans. But that allowed me not to do that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And so I started working on political campaigns because that's actually what I was deeply interested in doing. And that took me to some early work in politics.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I don't know. That's a good question. Part of it is that it was kind of exciting. I was a big sports fan, so it's sort of like sports. It was about something that mattered. You know, it was about how we're going to run things. And so the stakes were high. I thought that the issues were pretty substantive.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
So I found politics super, super interesting when I was probably starting in, you know, high school.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Yeah, but I didn't major in political science or anything like that. I just, I was deeply interested in politics, you know, and I felt that it was substantively interesting and also important because there were things happening then that I thought were messed up and I didn't want them to happen.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
You know, I'm a writer and I like to craft a narrative around big moments. And I think that makes for a good story. It's just not the reality of my life. I haven't had any like epiphanies or big moments or come to Jesus encounters. It's usually these things, they're slower. It's more like a crock pot rather than a microwave.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
You know, if you hit age 50, you likely have more of your life behind you than ahead of you. We have this database now of 26,000 regrets from people in 134 countries. These four regrets are incredibly common around the world. There are foundation regrets, which are decisions that people make. They're not devastating upfront, but that accumulate to bad consequences. There's regrets about boldness.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Oh, God, no. I mean, yeah, no, I would go to work for a law firm in the summer to make some money. And I was like, oh, my God, this is so boring. Who would want to do this? That was not like some kind of traumatic wrestling. That was just like, oh, man. If I were smarter, a little less risk-averse when I was younger, I probably would have waited to go to law school and might not have gone at all.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
If I was one of those people who had gone to law school when they were 30 or something like that, first of all, I might not have gone. If I had waited, I might not have gone, which could be a great decision. And if I had gone, I think I would have gotten a lot more out of it and enjoyed it a lot more if I had waited.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
But the idea of going when you're that young and you don't know anything and you're just kind of a cork bobbing along on the surface of the ocean—
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
It happens in a non-linear half-assed kind of way, as many things do. One of the things about politics, which I really liked, the mechanics of politics is that things move fast and it's not entirely, but it's kind of a meritocracy internally, especially in campaigns because there's winners and losers. And it's also very low paid. So the people in it tend to be younger than you would ever expect.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And so I went in younger than I would, doing things at an age that I would never have expected. And basically I became a speechwriter because at some point, I don't even remember when, I don't even remember this as a moment, somebody turned to me and said, can you write a speech?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And one of the things that I intuited, but which I now specifically instruct my own kids and others, is that when somebody asks you that question, the answer is yes. whether you can do it or not, the answer is yes. And then you freaking figure it out. So I was at intuitive sense that the answer to that question should be yes. And I said, yes. And I wrote a speech. It was probably okay.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And then they said, can you do it again? And I was like, yeah. Can you do it again? Yeah. And suddenly that was my job. And because, again, it's low paid and fast movie. So I started doing that. And then, you know, there aren't that many people who write speeches. And so when there's turnover, there's a limited supply of people who are eligible for that kind of job.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And it turned out that was actually I mean, again, I don't want to toot my own horn here, even though I'm about to. It's like I was actually a pretty good speechwriter. I'm sure you were.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I was actually pretty good at it. You know, I was, to my surprise, like it wasn't something I set out to do, but it's like, oh, I get this. You know, and I think that's another lesson for leapers out there is that there are certain things that we are good at and certain things that we're not. And you can get better at almost anything, but there are certain things that feel like,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
a native language in a way. So there are other kinds of things that for me, I could learn how to do it, but I would do it in a clumsy way. And it just turned out that speech writing was something that I sort of had a feel for in the way that some people have a feel for physics, which I do not, or some people have a feel for tennis, which I do not.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
There's moral regret. And then there are, in the architecture of regret, there can be two kinds of regrets. There are regrets of action and regrets of inaction. As we age, there are more inaction regrets than action regrets.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
Basically what happened was this, is that I really liked the people I worked with. And I was very fortunate, especially later in when I was working in politics, to work for big bosses who were good. So I worked for the then Labor Secretary Robert Reich. I worked for Vice President Gore. Those are two good guys. And those are two good people to work for. You know, that was not it at all.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And actually, my colleagues were outstanding. I really liked my colleagues. What I didn't like were some other things. Number one was that I did get a sense that politics—this is a long time ago now— that it was all about tactical short-term advantage.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
You know, it's sort of like a doctor who goes in and says, I became a doctor to take care of people and she spends all of her life dealing with like electronic medical records and insurance paperwork. You know what I mean? It was sort of analogous to that. It's like, oh my gosh, all we're doing here is we're seeing about this far out, we're seeing one news cycle out
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And there isn't really a great strategy or vision because of the nature of the system. So that was one thing that really was kind of discouraging. The second thing that was discouraging, not discouraging, but the second thing was sort of a discovering about oneself is that I don't like having a boss. My bosses were okay. They were not like, they were good people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I didn't have any, you know, generally, but it's like, I don't want someone telling me what I was going to work on and what I was not going to work on. I don't want to do that. Another thing is that I had, especially true because when I was working for the VP, my wife and I had our first kid and that changed my life.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And so it was like, wait a second, I'm like killing myself for this short-term thing and not having any autonomy. And I don't get to see my little girl. I don't like this. And then even worse is that I would look sort of
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
prospectively and say what is the me 10 years from now going to do if he stays on this trajectory and i was like oh my god i don't want to do that that was in some ways a come to jesus moment and i quit now again it's not i don't want to sound like too much of a renegade because My wife kept her job. She kept her health insurance.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
We had a plan because I wasn't bringing in like that, that much money. We had a plan and the plan was that we'll try it for, I wanted to go out and do my own writing and we'll go out and try it for a couple of years and see if it works. And if it didn't work, I'd go back and get a job. But she's not giving up her job. She's not giving up her health insurance.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
If there's a superpower that I have, it is frugality. So I don't spend a lot of money. So we just sort of stumbled our way into figuring out how to make it work.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I mean, I should have probably. Maybe because I was clueless. You know, I mean, here's the thing, Alana. I mean, I'm not joking about this. When I went to work for myself, basically leaving a job and then going to work in the attic of our house, I had a negative net worth. Now, the good news is that at the time, I don't think I knew what a net worth was. I didn't know that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
First of all, treat yourself with kindness. Number two.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
I just know retrospectively. It's like, holy crap, you did this with a negative net worth? Because I, you know, I owed more than I was worth. And I did. It actually didn't feel especially scary, honestly.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
That's a different thing. That is like discovering that something is harder than you expect is a reality. And I think I definitely did encounter that. But the being frightened beforehand wasn't a big thing, in part because I planned it out. You know, and basically I looked at it very, very rationally. Again, we still had an income coming in. We still had health insurance. We were not big spenders.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink on The Unexpected Tool to Unlock Your Greatest Success | E101
And also there was a plan B in the sense that I knew I could always go find another job. I was not worried that I was going to be unemployable.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Possibly, but I think the bigger issue is that people don't know. Let's take starting a business. I have people who regret starting a business and having it fail, but very few. In fact, I have people who say, I started a business, it failed, but I don't regret doing it because I wanted to take the chance and I know how that particular thing turned out.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
And so I do think that, of course, there are a gazillion counterfactuals to any decision that we make. But when the regrets that people express keep coming back to the same thing, to me it suggests what we actually want out of life. That is, I really believe that if we understand what people regret the most, we actually understand what they value the most. And what people value is...
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
You know, they realize they're not here on this planet forever. They want to do something. And when they feel timid and when they don't take that chance, they often regret it much more so than taking a chance and failing.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Yeah. There's ample research showing that disclosing our regrets helps us make sense of them. What's more is that when we're skittish about disclosing our regrets or negative things about ourselves, we're skittish in part because we think that people will like us less. When in fact the preponderance of evidence says people like us more for doing that.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
So you want to reframe it and you want to disclose it. But the most important thing is not to stay mired in it, but to draw a lesson from it. So the lesson from say not asking somebody out on a date is next time I have a chance to speak up, I have a chance to take a risk, whether it's at a meeting at work, whether it is maybe starting a side hustle along with my regular job.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
or whether I'm back on the dating market and I see someone I'm interested in, then actually using that lesson to apply next time. And when people act, they are less likely to regret it than when people don't act. And this comes up again and again in the research. Regrets of inaction easily outnumber regrets of action, particularly as people get older.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
They want to avoid it. Here's the thing. Regret hurts and it's instructive, but you can't have one without the other. And so what happens is when people try to avoid regret because it hurts, regret stinks. All right. Regret is not fun. It's an awful feeling. It makes our stomach churn.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
But the reason it makes our stomach churn is because it instructs and clarifies us about how to make subsequent decisions. But you're not going to get that instruction unless you get a little bit of that pain. The question is how do you deal with that pain? And so by denying the pain, by sort of brushing it away, you lose all of the instruction.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
which are regrets about having a relationship that was intact or should have been intact that ends up drifting apart. And people want to reach out, but they feel awkward about reaching out. They think it's not going to be well received. And so they drift further apart. So one of the huge regrets that people have are these connection regrets with family and friends and colleagues.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
that say, if only I'd reached out. And to me, one of the big lessons from this research on regret is that if you're at a juncture in your life and you're wondering, should I reach out or should I not reach out? You've answered the question. To me personally, the big takeaway from this huge amount of research is that one should always reach out. What's a foundation regret?
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Foundation regret is a regret about not building a stable platform for your life. So if only I hadn't smoked, if only I'd saved more money, if only I'd worked harder in school, if only I'd taken care of my health. And again, these four core regrets tell us what makes a good life. And one of the things that makes a good life is is some amount of stability.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
It's hard to have a good life without some amount of stability. Stability gives us a chance to explore. Stability gives us a chance to be a good person. Stability gives us a chance to connect with others.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
what did i build a stable platform for my life did i take a smart risk did i do the right thing did i connect with people who i care about and who care about me those are the things that those are the kinds of regrets that we should anticipate but what color sweater we're going to wear what we're going to have for dinner what kind of car we're going to buy ultimately doesn't matter and so i think that what's interesting about regret this this negative emotion is how clarifying it is
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
It instructs us for what makes a good life.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Yeah. You don't want to be riddled. You want to be poked a little bit. You don't want it to be a heavy blanket. But here's the thing. I mean, truly, there's a famous study from 40 years ago. where a social scientist named Susan Shimanoff looked at recorded conversations with lots and lots of people. So she recorded all these conversations that people were having organically in their world.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
So college students and married couples, and then she got transcripts of all these conversations and then she started counting the emotions that people regret, the emotions that people expressed in these everyday ordinary conversations. The most common negative emotion that people expressed was regret. It was the second most common emotion of any kind.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
The only emotion mentioned more often than regret was love. And so why do we experience love? Because it helps us survive and get through the day. Why do we experience regret? Because it instructs and it clarifies. And if we get past this stupid idea that I should have no regrets, we can actually use this transformative emotion to find the path to a life well-lived.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Well, it's a great question. So, okay, so in this data, I'll give you two examples of this. So in this database where I collected all these regrets, I had people who would fill out this thing called the World Regret Survey and then say, I don't have any regrets, and then proceed to tell me some regret that they had.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
What's more, I did a piece of quantitative research here where we surveyed 4,489 Americans in this big public opinion poll where I asked people the question without using the R word, and this is the key. We asked 4,489 Americans, a representative sample of the U.S. population, how often do you look back on your life and wish you had done something differently? So we don't say the regret word.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
1% said never. 12 percent said rarely. Eighty three percent said they do it occasionally. So sometimes, you know, this this word regret for some people is so charged that they have this instinctive view that, oh, I don't have any regrets. But when you actually peel it back and ask them to ask. So to answer your question more directly, it's like, oh, really, you don't have any regrets.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
So do you ever look back on anything and wish you hadn't done it? Oh, yeah, I wish I hadn't majored in blabbity blonde college. Oh, I wish I hadn't dated that person. Oh, well, that's a regret. Well, no, it's not. Well, yeah, it is.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
What are they trying to say? I don't know. I mean, I think part of it is that they're trying to put forward a...
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
a life performance that that seems to be flawless to other people even though none of our lives are flawless i think part of it is is that they have been indoctrinated to think that we should have only positive thoughts and positive emotions and the truth of the matter is is that we should have lots of positive thoughts and lots of positive emotions
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
But our portfolio of emotions has to be at least somewhat diversified. So if you have only positive emotions, you're not going to do very well. You have to have some negative emotions because not that many of them and not an overwhelming number of them. But negative emotions are instructive. Imagine somebody who couldn't experience fear. All right.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
That person is not going to escape a burning building. And so negative emotions serve a function. And so we've been seduced into thinking the only emotions that we should have are positive emotions. And while it's true that we should have a lot of positive emotions, that is not a diversified emotional portfolio.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
One of the biggest categories of regrets are these boldness regrets where people say, if only I'd taken the chance, if only I'd asked that person out, if only I'd spoken up, if only I'd taken that trip. Over and over again, people regret playing it safe.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
We would never have all of our stocks in our financial portfolio in one industry or in one sector. We would want a little bit of diversification. And that's what we want with our emotions. And the blue chip emotional stock for negative emotions is regret.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Looking forward to it.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
so what is creativity to you let me use a quote by albert einstein creativity is intelligence having fun um throughout our our school lives we have been trained if you will to look for right answers if you consider the fact that most students between kindergarten and 12th grade have been asked have taken about 2500 test quizzes and exams
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
And they've been asked over one and a half million questions. What the research is showing is that about 80% of those questions on the test and 80% of the verbal questions tend to be factual questions. In other words, we have been trained throughout our education career to look for the right answer. Creativity moves beyond that right answer. It plays with that knowledge.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
It experiments with that knowledge. It has fun with that knowledge, as Einstein was alluding to. Creativity is letting our minds roam with no barriers, no restrictions whatsoever.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Because there are many times in our daily schedules when we need something new, mentally speaking, that is, when we need a different way of doing things or times when we would benefit from a new idea. We all need creative approaches that not only increase our productivity, but also give us an opportunity to search for new answers, give us a new way of seeing the world.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
And what we've discovered is that creative acts done every day keeps us mentally agile and professionally competent, able to deal with some of the challenges that we may face in both our personal and professional lives.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
I'm going to step back a little bit and say one of the big myths that we have in the area of creativity is that creativity is something that we only use about three or four times during the year when our boss says we need a new marketing plan or our supervisor says we need to develop a new product. And we think creativity is big events.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Creativity is actually small events, little things that we do every day. The myth that creativity is a big event sort of holds us in check, if you will. It prevents us from taking a look at creativity as small things. Here are some examples of some small things. Going to a Peruvian restaurant because you've never been to a Peruvian restaurant.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Driving on a new route home instead of taking the freeway, taking a rural road to get home. Talking with your child about some ways of building structures with wooden blocks. It's the little things that we do every day that makes us creative. Creativity is not the big events. It's how we prepare for those big events with a series of daily events in our lives. Trying a new recipe, for example.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
These are the things that sort of prepare the mind for the big events and also lets us know internally that we are all creative creatures.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
We are all equally creative. One of the things that tends to hold a lot of people back in terms of their creativity is that we tend to compare ourselves with so-called creative giants. If we're an artist, we might compare ourselves to Picasso and say, well, you know what? I'll never be a Picasso.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
If we're a writer, we may compare ourselves to Stephen King and say, well, I'll never measure up to Stephen King.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
those comparisons are very very dangerous because we we tend to think of creativity as big events and big people and that's a mistake we all have creative possibilities we all have the the intelligence and the capabilities of becoming more creative in our daily life no matter what our age may be do you think that
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Let me answer that with the most compelling book. Back in 2006, Carol Dweck, who is a researcher at Stanford, wrote a very compelling book called Mindsets. And in it, she says, we either accept one of two mindsets. Either we're in a fixed mindset, that is, we've determined that we are not creative, and so we're not going to work to change that. And the other mindset is the growth mindset.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
That's those of us who say, you know what, creativity is doing something, a little bit of something every day. I can grow, I can improve, I can achieve, I can do things that I have not done before, and I can think things that I have not thought of before. So depending on what mindset we accept, that will determine how creative we believe ourselves to be.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Exactly, and another one of the things that tends to hold us back in terms of creativity is a fear of failure. I'll use an example. A number of years ago, there was an Englishman who had tried and tried and tried to create a new invention, something that every housewife uses. And he failed 5,762 times. On the 5,763rd time, he succeeded.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
His name, James Dyson, who invented the tornado vacuum cleaner. He failed over 5,700 times in creating that, but he was of the growth mindset and said, you know what? Let's give it another try. And the latest figures that I have are from 2019. In 2019, his company had profits in excess of $6 billion, that's with a B, dollars. This is from somebody who had 5,700 failures on his resume.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
So, yes, we create a lot of ideas. Not every one of those ideas is going to be a world-shaking or earth-shattering event. And that's okay. The creation of the ideas, whether they're good or bad, is what is important, not determining ahead of time, well, these aren't going to be very good ideas.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
We need to have the belief in ourselves that if we can generate sufficient ideas and are comfortable with that generative process, then we can make creativity a regular, normal part of our lives.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Yeah, we tend to, I guess, downplay it. You know, a little sucking here and there is good for the soul. I'm reminded of another anecdote. Thomas Edison, when he was trying to improve on the light bulb, he kept trying and trying for months and months. A reporter from a local newspaper was sent to interview him. And he said, Mr. Edison, it seems like you're trying and trying and you keep failing.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
And Thomas Edison looked the reporter in the eye and said, you know what? I haven't failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that don't work. So it's our concept of failure. Failure is a normal part of the creative process.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
If we're willing to understand and accept the fact that there will be lots and lots of failures and Thomas Edison's case, 10,000 failures, then we give ourselves permission to be more creative, to think outside the box, to use a very hackneyed phrase.
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The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Yeah, and you used a key word, it's different. We may think that Bob's painting sucks, but it's Bob's expression. It's his way of looking at the world. If we apply arbitrary criteria, assessment tools to it, everyone says Bob's painting sucks. Bob may say, you know, I'm okay with this. I've expressed myself on a piece of paper. I've done what I've set out to do. And I'm okay with that.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
And he gives himself permission to venture out. and try things um there is another a wonderful study where a a presenter and i think it was part of a ted talk uh invited an audience to each take a sheet of paper and a pencil turn to the person next to you and in the next 30 seconds draw a portrait of that individual The people were working and very hard, diligent.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
30 seconds, he said, how many of you, when you were sharing that portrait with your partner, said, oh, I'm not a very good artist, or I can't paint very well, or I'm sorry for all of this. And every hand in the audience went up. He did that with a group of kindergarten kids and asked that question and no hands went up. What's interesting is kids have this very imaginative view of the world.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
And as we grow older, and we get into paying income taxes and mortgages and job responsibilities, et cetera, et cetera, we narrow our focus. And then we become more critical of our own creativity and a little bit more critical of the creativity of others.
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The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Art is simply a creative expression. Art is simply a way of allowing the pictures in our mind to be expressed, say, for example, on a sheet of paper. And that's okay. Your art may be different from my art, from Picasso's art, but it's art nonetheless. Is it going to be great art? I don't know. I'm not in a position to evaluate it.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
But what I can say is let's give everyone an opportunity or let's give ourselves an opportunity to be creatively expressive. And that may be through art, that may be through music, that may be through sports, that may be through writing, whatever. We need those opportunities. And we can give ourselves those opportunities as adults in our daily lives, as I mentioned before,
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
by doing one little creative thing every day. New recipe, new way home, new kind of food, a new coat and a color that you've never worn before. A little bit of expression each day turns us into creative individuals.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Well, if all we do is eat steak and potatoes, we have no idea of what else is out there. If we aren't willing to do a little bit of imagining, then we sort of do ourselves a disservice. Let me take a side road off of that. Oftentimes when I was a classroom teacher, parents would ask, what are some things I can do to help my child become more creative?
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
And I said, one of the things that you don't want to do is you don't want to go to a toy store and buy a product that says educational on the package, because that's just a marketing technique to sell more toys. I told them the three best creative things that parents can give their kids is an old sheet.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
a box of crayons and some cardboard boxes and let them create their own universes, their own castles, their own spaceships, their own pirate ships, whatever it may be. When kids realize that there are unlimited ways of thinking, we are not looking for the right answer as might be the case in a computer game, we're looking for a multiplicity of answers.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
I'm going to disagree with you slightly there, Mike, because what we're trying to figure out is what the game creators have determined to be the right way. Sure, there's some mental gymnastics in there, but ultimately to win the game or to score the most points, we have to find the answer, so to speak, that somebody else developed. Give kids an old sheet and some cardboard boxes.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
There's no right way to put those together. If we step back and watch the kids turn that sheet and those boxes into a spaceship or a pirate ship, there's no right way or actually no wrong way to do that. They are letting their imaginations go. And as Albert Einstein said, imagination is more important than knowledge.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Yeah, exactly. And that carries forward into our work environments as well. I recall one study that found that the average worker in this country gets something like 300 negative comments in the course of a week. Now imagine, you know, trying to get around working through 300 negative comments in a week. Kids get even more than that.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
There's times that kids hear the word no, don't go there, don't do that, don't touch that, those kinds of things. Those have a significant psychological effect on the development of our creativity. Whether we are children or whether we are adults, those negative comments significantly affect our personal creativity.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
No, point well taken, Mike. There are times when we do need to say no for safety reasons, obviously. But to say no, you can't walk in a puddle, for example, or you can't play in the mud. Those are very creative kinds of activities for kids. There's very little safety involved in those activities. And kids tend to hear a lot of that, the no in the potential situations.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Here's one of the things, one of the creative studies that really stood out for me, and it was a couple of years ago, and they were taking a look at a major corporation, taking a look at the creative productivity of engineers, and this happened to be at a major oil company. And the executives of the company were concerned about the lack of creativity on the part of some of their employees.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
And they decided to bring in a team of psychologists to see if they could determine any significant differences between those who were deemed to be creative and those who were essentially categorized as non-creative.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
And over the course of three months, the team of psychologists asked tons and tons of questions focused on childhood experiences, family influences, academic performance, and even favorite colors. And after they analyzed all the data, They concluded that one factor clearly separated the two groups. And here's that factor.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
The creative people thought they were creative and the less creative people didn't think they were.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Appreciate the opportunity.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Well, that's a great insight. And the truth is, is that everybody does have regrets. It's part of the human condition. In fact, the only people without regrets are five-year-olds whose brains haven't developed, people with certain kinds of brain damage and neurodegenerative disorders, and sociopaths. And the reason for that is that regrets are part of our cognitive machinery.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
They exist for a reason. And if we treat them right rather than ignoring them, we can use them as a force for forward progress.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Absolutely right. Regret is one of our most common emotions. Everybody has it, as we were talking about just a moment ago. But it's also our most instructive and transformative emotion. And the problem is, is that if we say, I never look backward, I don't have any regrets. We're not going to learn anything. Now, at the same time, if we say, oh, my God, I have regrets. I'm completely debilitated.
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The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
And you try to exonerate yourself from any responsibility to do anything. That's also bad. What we need to do is we need to take a systematic approach to our regrets. And none of us have really been taught to do that.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Yeah, well, you got it exactly right. So what we need to do is we need to use regrets as a signal, as the universe telling us something. And if we think about our regrets, if we recognize that these feelings are for thinking, we can use them to— I mean, the evidence is overwhelming in 50 years of research. We can use them to make better decisions. We can use them to become better negotiators.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
They concluded that one factor clearly separated the two groups. The creative people thought they were creative and the less creative people didn't think they were.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
We can use them to become better problem solvers, better strategists, find greater meaning in our lives. And, you know, in looking at this 50 years of science, I do think there is a relatively simple three-step process that we can all enlist to use our regrets not to hobble us and not to for us to ignore them, but to actually enlist them to lead a better life.
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The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
First of all, we've got to reframe the... Number one, reframe your view of yourself in our regrets. A lot of times we beat up on ourselves for making mistakes or having regrets. Instead, what you should do is show yourself what's called self-compassion, which is to treat yourself with the same kindness you would treat everybody else and to realize that your regrets are part of the human condition.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Step two, you want to disclose your regret. This is a huge thing. Disclosing our regrets relieves the burden, but even more than that, when we take this amorphous negative feeling and convert it into words, those words are less fearsome. we begin to make sense of it. So you want to reframe it, you want to disclose it, and then you want to extract a lesson from it.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
And a good way to do that is to take a step back. Think about how you're going to feel about this situation in 10 years, or even better, ask yourself, what would you tell your best friend to do with this regret? And so this systematic process of
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
reframing it through self-compassion, disclosing it because we know the benefits of disclosure and sense-making are vast, and then also taking a step back and extracting a lesson from it gives us a way to take this spear of negativity and turn it into something positive.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Oh, interesting. That's very interesting. Okay, so there are distinctions here. And I'll tell you how I got some insight into this, is that I went out and collected about 16,000 regrets from people in 105 countries. This incredible trove of human longing and aspiration. And one of the things that people regret, it turns out around the world, people regret the same four things over and over again.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
And one of those categories was sort of what you're hinting at, which is moral regrets, where you're at a juncture. You could do the right thing. You could do the wrong thing. And you do the wrong thing and you regret it. Now, what I found is that while there's some people who kind of sort of regret getting caught, There are more people who regret the act itself.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
I have literally hundreds of people in my database who regret bullying kids when they were young, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. I have one that really sticks in my head is a 71-year-old woman in New Jersey who regretted stealing candy from a store when she was a kid 60 years ago. I have huge numbers of regrets about infidelity.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
And in many cases, these are people who actually didn't get caught. What they really regret is the act itself. And I find that this category of moral regrets is powerful and revealing because it suggests to me that most people actually want to be good. And that's the other thing about regret that I find so fascinating and looking at this incredible trove of regrets.
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The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
That is, we understand what people regret the most. We actually understand what they value the most. And so this negative emotion actually points the way to what people think makes life worth living. And one of the things that people want out of life, not every single person, but what a lot of people want out of life is actually to be good.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
It's a really, really important and interesting question because there's a difference between regret and disappointment. With regret, you have agency over it. So in this case, for these moral regrets, people had agency over the act. You don't necessarily have control over whether you get caught or not. You know, it could be that you're disappointed that you got caught rather than you're regretful.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
The best the best example of the difference between disappointment and regret comes from Janet Landman at the University of Michigan, who has this brilliant, I think brilliant example where she says, imagine a scenario where a three year old girl loses her tooth and she goes to sleep and she puts the tooth under her pillow.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
you know, hoping the tooth fairy, you know, waiting for the tooth fairy to give her a buck. And she wakes up in the morning, lifts up her pillow and the tooth is still there. She's disappointed, but her parents regret not replacing the tooth with a dollar. And so regret depends on our control over things. I mean, just like I'm a basketball fan. I live in Washington, D.C.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
I'm disappointed that the Washington Wizards haven't won an NBA championship for 40 years. But I can't regret it because I don't have any control over it.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
And that's why it feels so bad because you can't fix it. Some of our regrets we can undo. So for instance, there's a guy who I write about who got a no regrets tattoo. and then he regretted it, and he had his tattoo removed. Okay? So you can undo your regrets. Another thing that you can do for regrets that are harder to undo is that you can find the silver lining in them. That's a much more common
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
adaptation that people have. So once again, in this collection of 16,000 regrets, I have hundreds. I think they're all from women that go basically like this. I regret marrying that idiot, but At least I have these two great kids. So you find a silver lining in it. Finding the silver lining in a regret makes it hurt a little bit less. It doesn't really help you draw a lesson from it necessarily.
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The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Over and over again in the world, we see these same four regrets. One of them is what I call boldness regrets. And so I'll give you an example of it. So among Americans who went to college, huge numbers of people regret, I was surprised, not studying abroad. At the same time, I have hundreds of people around the world who have a regret like this.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
X years ago, there was a man or woman who I really liked. I wanted to ask him or her out on a date, but I was too chicken to, and I never got around to it, and I've regretted it ever since. Okay, that's a romance regret. We've got an education regret, a romance regret. And then, again, around the world, people say, ugh. I wish I had started a business rather than stayed in this lackluster job.
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The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Career regret. But all of those regrets to me are the same core regret. It's a regret that says, if only I'd taken the chance. And a lot of these regrets come at a juncture of decision making in our lives. In this particular case, you can play it safe or you can take the risk. And over again, over and over again, people regret playing it safe.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
Some people regret taking a risk, but not nearly as many people as you expect, even if it doesn't work out. What people regret is not taking the chance. And to me, what that reveals is that You and I and the folks listening to your podcast, we want like a good life involves doing something and learning and growing and trying and leading a psychologically rich life.
Something You Should Know
The Unexpected Value of Regret & The Evolution of Creative Thought
And so one of the biggest categories of regrets are these boldness regrets where people say, if only I'd taken the chance, if only I'd asked that person out, if only I'd spoken up, if only I'd taken that trip, if only I'd started that business.
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Daniel Pink
And you have to – when we think about our regrets, you have to actually evaluate the person making the decision at that moment. And that's a different – you're a different person today at age 52 than you were at age 16, unfortunately. The other thing that you can do – the other thing that people can do here with regrets that can't be undone.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
is transmit your understanding and your lessons to other people. That is, be open about talking about the regret and extract a lesson from it and see if people are interested in hearing that lesson.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
So I think this is a connection regret. It's a regret about not doing something to keep a relationship intact. The best remedy for this, I think, is something called self-compassion. Self-compassion is very simple. Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. It's that simple. All right. And so if you think about your self-talk, what is your self-talk? My hunch, Kathy, is cruel.
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Daniel Pink
It's vicious. It's mean spirited. All right. Here's what the research on self-compassion says about that kind of self-talk. Don't do that. All right. And the reason to don't do that is because it's not effective. What's effective is self-compassion. And a way to think about that is to take it. If you had a friend who came to you with this situation, what would you tell her?
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
You can share with other people also. I think one of the lessons for regret, particularly when it comes to relationships, it's very simple to – articulate. So when in doubt, reach out. So if there's somebody you're thinking about and you're saying, should I give that person a call in any part of your life? If you reach that juncture, the answer is yes, do it.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
There's also something to be said for saying it now. You have a regret about not saying something at the moment. So say it now. And the best way to help other people is to exemplify that behavior by reaching out and by saying it now. The don't disrespect the work you did building a career and building a family. I mean, that's actually really important.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
And I don't want you to think of that as something that was somehow a betrayal of your husband or your family. It was something that actually fortified your husband and family.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
If we repair this mismatch between what science knows and what business does,
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
And it's kind of a boldness regret. That is, making yourself small is in some ways the opposite of being bold. And we have a lot of regrets in this database, Kelly, that just reminds me of people using the phrase, speak up, speaking up, spoken up. And so what would it mean for you to not be small right now? Not an emotion, but an action. What would that mean? What step would you want to take?
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Okay, so this is sort of out of the pages of my own book. I'm gonna tell you something that I told to my daughters when they were younger. I have two daughters and a son. Something I told my daughters when they were younger, and they were like, oh, I don't know if I should apply for this. I don't know whether I should ask to be a research assistant.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
I don't know if I, and I say to them, what would a mediocre guy in your situation do? And it was always like, raise their hand. Yes. And it's like, so what would a mediocre guy... Believe me, a mediocre guy in your situation who's written 110,000 words would already be out there. So you need to be out there and doing everything you can to...
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Get that book out there so you can be a guest on season three of this podcast. And so one of the things – it's interesting as a writer. One of the things with a Kindle or the e-books is you can see what people underline.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Yeah, I like that. And I find it interesting. In this book, one of the things that people underline was not – something that I wrote. And it was a Chinese proverb that goes like this. And it reminds me of your dilemma here, Kelly, is the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. So if you want to get your book out there, get it out now.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
If you want to go back to school, get it out now. And use that feeling, that spear of regret, as a catalyst for starting now. Not waiting for the perfect moment, because there isn't a perfect moment.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Yeah, Edward Hopper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's sort of a Hopper. It's like Edward Hopper meets Andrew Wyeth.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
And congrats on finishing a book. That's an amazing thing. Now get it out to the world because the world, you owe it to the world to do that. You have a moral obligation to put that in the world.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
So it sounds a little bit like a foundation regret, which are the small decisions or indecisions we make that accumulate to bad consequences. But I don't know. I'd say I don't really buy the idea that you should have gone in just talking to you for 60 seconds, that you should have gone into a corporate – Life with a 401k. Yeah. Yes. I don't buy into it because of the hot pink you're wearing.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Imagine this counterfactual, all right? We have counterfactual Zoom, and we put an image on the screen of you having made that choice, and we're talking to you today. Do you think your regrets would be deeper about not pursuing your dreams, about not living a life fully, if you had been an actuary at the amalgamated widget company?
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
I mean, what I, what I would say, what I would say is when it comes to like saving and I mean, you're young, uh, start now, uh, that, um, that a dollar a week is saving. Uh, so start now and do it. I mean, we know a lot about sort of the behavior science behind this is do it automatically. The other thing that I'm hearing from you is a kind of a, um, sort of
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
almost maybe a little too much exploration and too little focus. So if you have multiple lanes, pick a lane for the moment and just focus hard on that. We tend to think that pursuing your dreams and being kind of diligent and responsible are at odds with each other, when in fact, they actually work together really well.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
That the best way to pursue your dreams and be bold is to be diligent and show up and do your work. And so the lesson of foundation regrets is,
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
is do the work and the lesson of boldness regrets is is take the chance but if you take the chance and do the work at the same time you're going to be you're going to be fine and once again as i was saying to um i think it was kelly the um start now like this is not a kind of thing that you that okay when i feel right when i'm in the mood is basically start now as soon as you get off the zoom man start yeah right pick one yes yeah does that sound does does that sound reasonable to you
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Because I had regrets. Hmm. And I wanted to make sense of them. They actually were catalyzed in part when my elder daughter graduated from college. And I'm at her college graduation, and I can't believe that this kid is graduating from college because it seems like yesterday she was two years old. I can't believe that I'm old enough to have a kid graduating from college.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
That I'm not that special. That almost every regret that I have, I can find in that database. Really? Yeah.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Most people are like most people, and I'm most people. I have regrets about kindness, but I saw that in the database. I have regrets about... not acting boldly and not speaking up for things that mattered. There are other people like that, that, you know, I'm like everybody else.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
And as singular as that is, it's prevalent. And if I were to go pull up this database right now and look for the phrase, listen to a voice, inner voice, whatever, you would see dozens upon dozens upon dozens that we have this intuitive sense of what's right, that we want to listen to ourselves. And I do.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
And I started thinking about my own college experience, and I had some regrets.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
It's almost at the core of a lot of these. At some level, we know what the right thing is to do. We know that we should be bold. We know that we should be responsible. We know that we should be moral. And our inner voice is telling us that, and yet there's noise on the outside or countervailing voices coming at us, and we don't do that, and then we regret it.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
And arguably, you should be. Because you do better. Because you knew better. Now, you should be constructively mad at yourself. It shouldn't be self-flagellation. It should be sort of irritation in the service of action.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Yeah, I wish I were kinder. I wish I had taken more risks, you know, those kinds of things. And I came back to Washington, D.C., where I live, and I knew that no—and it bothered me, these regrets. And I came back to Washington, D.C., where I live, and I knew that nobody wanted to talk about regrets.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
heard the voice you felt it inside yourself and you acted differently than what you knew to be right true right you also had i mean again you also there's also a lot of momentum behind that yeah and so when you do something for a long time particularly at the level obviously at the level that you did it there's a lot of momentum carrying you forward yeah and it takes actually greater force to stop the momentum stop the momentum and go in a different direction exactly yeah yeah
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
I have to say, I like to think of my books in some level about science and economics, but every single book that I've written has come back to meaning. People want meaning in their life. They want to figure out why they're here. They want to actually spend their time wisely.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Right. Yeah. And that's what we are – we are here on this planet for a vanishingly short amount of time. We really are. And at some level, all of us, either consciously or unconsciously, are reckoning with their mortality. And you want to have spent your time in a meaningful way. And so stuff that I've written looking at like economic research and neuroscience research –
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
So much of it comes back to the fact that we are mortal creatures looking for a sense of meaning and a sense of love.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
But I kind of sheepishly mentioned it to some people, and I discovered that everybody wanted to talk about it. That as soon as I gave them the license to talk about it, they came forward with their own regrets. And you did your own— And that's a really good sign.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Yeah, well, the key is not to be stuck in the regret. And the thing is, everybody has regrets. It's one of the most common emotions that humans have. The thing is, we haven't been taught how to deal with them properly. So some of us ignore our regrets. So we put our fingers in our ears and say, no regrets, no regrets.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Denial, right? Denial, yes. Bad idea. Bad. Others of us get captured by our regrets. We wallow in our regrets. We ruminate on our regrets. That's also a bad idea. What we should be doing with our regrets is looking them in the eye, thinking about them.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Because regrets are often kind of blobby and amorphous, and so when we write about them or talk about them, we take this blob and make it concrete. We turn it into words, and those words help us make sense of it, and those words are less menacing.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
And the more we realize that, oh, I'm experiencing something that other people have experienced, the more we kind of defang some of the pain of the regret.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
I mean, it holds power, I think, in part because we don't know what to do for two reasons. One is that everybody has regrets. It's one of the most common emotions that human beings have. And yet we've been sold such a bill of goods about positivity and being positive all the time that when we feel regret, we think that we're the only one and we're not. It's part of the human wiring.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
It's part of our cognitive machinery. And the reason it exists is that it clarifies what we value and it helps us do better in the future.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Sure thing, yeah. It's pretty remarkable. Around the world... People seem to have the same four regrets. One are what I call foundation regrets. Those are small decisions people make early in their life that accumulate to terrible consequences later. Spend too much and save too little, now I'm broke. Another one, big category, boldness regrets. You're at a juncture in your life.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
You can play it safe or you can take the chance. And what's overwhelming is that people regret not taking the chance much more than they regret not taking the chance than taking the chance. Yeah. And it doesn't matter the domain of life. You have people who regret not traveling. I have hundreds of people in this database who regret not asking somebody out on a date.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
And that's what really sticks with people. Oh, boy, that is the thing. Boldness regrets. You didn't take the shot. Moral regrets, which again, a lot of these regrets begin at a juncture of decision making. So moral regrets are you can take the high road. You can take the low road. Yeah. You can do the right thing. You can do the wrong thing.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
And most of us, when we do the wrong thing, when we take the low road, we regret it. Because most of us are good. And most of us want to be good.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Absolutely. Absolutely. Because these other, I mean, the other regret that people have are connection regrets, which are regrets about relationships. But when we look around the world and people have these regrets, these four regrets operate as kind of a reverse image of what we really value in life. Foundation regrets. We value stability. What's a good life?
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
A good life has some stability underneath it. A good life is not wobbly. And so what foundation regrets, taking care of your finances, taking care of your health, taking care of your education, that's part of what it is to lead a good life. Boldness regrets. We value learning and growth. We value not wasting our time in this limited space that we're here. Moral regrets. We value goodness.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
A good life is being good. A good life is being true and honest and just. And connection regrets are about love. And so when you look at these regrets, what do we value in life? We want some stability. We want learning and growth. We want goodness. And we sure want connection. Absolutely. That was the biggest category.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
As I've grown? Yes. Well, I mean, I think earlier in my life, I was clueless about that. I think I was incapable of answering that question. I think I didn't know. In the same way that I would not have written a book about regret in my 30s, whereas in my 50s, it felt inevitable. That's right. Because I had mileage on me.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
You actually know what it is. But I mean, I think a good life is having people who you love and who love you. I think one can stop there. I think there are other things, but I think that's really at the core of it. And we have some interesting research on that.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
The famous Grant study at Harvard, there was this longitudinal study following men, but then other people from the time they were in college all the way through the rest of their lives. It didn't matter what their IQ was, what their money, what their health situation, how much money they had, what ultimately mattered in people's satisfaction. was love.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
I mean, one of the people who founded this study, this incredible piece of psychological science, he said, well, I can summarize the results in a few words. He said, happiness is love, full stop. And I think that's true. Now, I think there are other things that give us meaning in life, in a good life, and I think regret exemplifies that.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
not wasting your time, doing stuff, contributing, trying things, learning and growing. I think that's a big part of it. Providing for other people, contributing to the world. And also I come back to this idea of these moral regrets of just being a good, just, generous person. And it's pretty simple.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
And I think that one of the things that the research on regret and even my own investigation of it reveals is that a lot of the decisions we make in our life A lot of them don't matter that much.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Right. But that's true. I mean, what we see in the cognitive science is that even though everybody, many people perform not having regrets, the only people who don't have regrets are five-year-olds because their brains haven't developed the ability to do counterfactual thinking. Certain kinds of people with certain kinds of neurodegenerative disorders and sociopaths.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Everybody else has regrets because it's part of our wiring. And when it comes to moral regrets, I think one of the things that's heartening about this research is that the number of people with moral regrets, people who regret bullying a kid in school. 40 years ago and then break into tears when I'm interviewing them about it because they feel so bad about it.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Absolutely. I mean, I still have my own regrets about that. There is a big cathedral right near my house in Washington, D.C., and there was a funeral that I didn't go to. Over 20 years ago. And every time I walk by, I think about, oh my God, I should have gone. The guy's name was Bob. I should have gone to Bob's funeral.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
No, but I knew. And you know what? I want to be a good person. I want to show respect for people. I want to show respect for his family. And I didn't do that. I was at a juncture. The right thing, go to the funeral. The wrong thing, keep doing my work that afternoon instead of taking two hours. And now, what do I do with that? I can say, it doesn't matter. Everything happens for a reason.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Or I can say, I'm the worst person in the world. No, I say, you know what? Something that I didn't do 20 years ago is still bugging me when I can't even remember what I had for breakfast this morning. Right. That's a strong signal. Yes. And it's a signal that show up and go to the funeral no matter where it is.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
Well, I mean, you know, what we, you know, in the first of all, what kind of regret is this? I mean, I think it's I think in Tanya's telling it's a moral regret. Yeah. All right. So you had a chance to do, you know, you could do the right thing or the wrong thing. And in your view, retrospectively, you think you did the wrong you did the wrong thing.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
But we can also look at this in the architecture of regret as a difference between an action regret, something I did and an inaction regret, something I didn't do. So this is an action regret. And the way you deal with action, there are two ways to deal with action regrets. One of them is to undo it. Hard to do here, right? You're not going to unscramble this egg. So you can't undo that.
The Oprah Podcast
Daniel Pink
So the other thing you can do is what's called in the psychological literature a downward counterfactual where you imagine how things could have turned out worse. And so it usually starts with a sentence, at least you didn't get in trouble. At least you met your incredible spouse right now. And so you find essentially the silver lining in that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
They're part of what makes life worth living. But here's the thing. People shouldn't have only positive emotions. That's not healthy. It goes back to what you were saying before. We have adapted to the world. Negative emotions are adaptations. So if you think about this, I'll give you an example. Let's take fear. Fear is a negative emotion.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Do I want to go, if somebody knocks on my office door, some weird person knocks on my office door and says, hey, Dan, I'll give you an operation. We're going to open up your head, but it's going to be completely no pain. We're going to seal it back up perfectly. And what we're going to do is we're going to do a little tweak in your brain to ensure that you never experience fear again in your life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Do I want that operation?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Of course not. Because when I'm in a burning building, I want to experience fear so I get the hell out. It's helpful. Again, I don't want to be burdened by fear. I don't want to experience fear all the time. That's debilitating. I don't want to experience, think about an emotion like grief. The reason we experience grief is because we experience love. So I don't want to banish grief.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I don't want to banish negative emotion. I want to actually reckon with them. I like what you said at the top of the show, Hala, is that there's evidence here, okay? This is not some kind of philosophy of mine. We have 50 or 60 years of evidence telling us that when you line up the emotions, all right, when you line up our negative emotions, we're going to do a little police lineup.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Fear, guilt, shame, you know, but that regret ends up being the most common and the most useful if we treat it right, if we treat it right. And again, we haven't been treating it right because what's happened is we're totally over index and positivity. We think we have to be positive all the time. And when we're not, especially younger people,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When they say, when they feel negative, they feel regret, they feel bad, they say, wait a second, I'm feeling regret, I'm feeling bad. That's terrible because not only is it inherently unpleasant, but I look around and everybody else is perfect. There must be something wrong with me. And they get brought down by that rather than saying, A negative emotion is a knock at the door.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. Someone's trying to tell me something. Let me listen, not drown it out, not get freaked out by it, but listen to it, learn from it, and do better in the future.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Amen.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah. So I was also curious about what people regretted. I was really curious about that. And the reason I was curious is that when you looked at the existing evidence, most of it in social psychology, initially researchers said, oh, this is an American sample, that Americans, oh, they have education regrets. Education is the biggest regret that Americans have.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Scientists believe that for 20 years. And then Somebody finally realized, like, wait a second, all these studies showing that education is the biggest regret were done on college campuses with college students. And so, you know, if you had done all this research in hospitals, maybe health would be the greatest regret. If you had done it in banks, maybe, you know, whatever.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So it's like, huh, maybe there's not something there. And so actually not that long ago, 16, 17 years ago, researchers started doing more systematic looks at what people regretted. And they found that people regret a lot of stuff. It was all over the place. They have career regrets. They have romance regrets. They have finance regrets. They have health regrets. They have family regrets.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's all over the place. So that's the lay of the land. So I said, I'm going to try to crack the code here. And so I did something called the American Regret Project, which is the largest public opinion survey of American attitudes about regret ever conducted. We did a brilliant, gorgeous survey of nearly 4,500 Americans modeling the
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
the sample, sort of configuring the sample so that it reflected the glorious diversity of the United States of America. And so I asked these people, tell me one of your big regrets. And then I had them put it into those categories, career, finance, romance, whatever, because I said, I'm going to figure this out.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I found after careful deliberation and data analysis that people regret a lot of stuff. It was all over the place. So now that's the bad news. The good news is that I also did another piece of my own research, something called the World Regret Survey, where I simply set up a website, worldregretsurvey.com, where I gathered regrets from around the globe.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And we now have a database of over 21,000 regrets from people in 109 countries. It's incredible. And once I looked at those, okay, just basically just people offering their regrets, but by the thousands all over the world, and I didn't ask them to categorize it. I just wanted to know their age, their gender identity, and their location.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When I started reading through those regrets, I didn't read through all 21,000, but I did read through the first 15,000 of them. What I discovered is that there's something else going on, that trying to understand what people regret by those categories that I initially had thought is not the way to look at it, that there's something bigger and more interesting going on beneath the surface.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Okay, perfect. You got it exactly right. So let me be less abstract. Let me be concrete here. Okay, here we go.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We're looking at these regrets that are coming in from all over the world. I'm reading them one by one, trying to make sense of them. It's fascinating to hear people all over the world disclose a big regret. So let me give you an example. So I have, again, the volume here is helpful. So I have lots of regrets. of people who say, I mean, here's a weird one.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's like, from American college graduates, I am stunned by the number of regrets that American college graduates have about not studying abroad when they were in college. I couldn't believe it. Like, even if you Google, not Google, but if you go into the database and search the phrase, like, study abroad, you get like, Hundreds of hits. I couldn't. It's crazy. OK, so that's an education regret.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
OK, people say, oh, I wish I had studied abroad. I was a little bit too scared to go away. And, you know, I thought I would miss people. And now I wish I had taken that. You know, now I wish I had studied abroad.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But you know what? It's a big deal, man. I have to say, I was blown away by that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I actually think that there is a, and this is for the entrepreneurial YAP listeners out there, I think there's a business, a travel agency serving basically 30-somethings and 40-somethings, 20-somethings, 30-somethings, 40-somethings who wish they had studied abroad and didn't and now have a little money in their pocket. I really think there's a viable business in there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But that's an education regret. Okay, so then I have a lot of regrets. Okay, let's go back to entrepreneurship. I got lots of regrets, again, all over the world, where they basically say this. I really regret staying in this lackluster job. I always wanted to start a business, but I never had the gumption to do it. Okay, that's a career regret.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Then I have, and this is again, volume, volume, volume, hundreds, and I'm not kidding around, hundreds. They basically go like this. X years ago, there was a man slash woman who I really liked. I wanted to ask him or her out on a date, but I was too chicken to do that. And now I've regretted it 10 years later, 20 years later, 30 years later. Okay, that's a romance regret.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So we got an education regret. We've got a career regret. We've got a romance regret. But here's the point I'm making in this little diatribe here. Those are all the same regret. Those regrets on the surface, they're in different categories, but they're the same regret. You're at a juncture in your life and you have a choice. You can play it safe or you can take the chance. And overwhelmingly,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When people don't take the chance, they regret it. And that's what I call a boldness regret. So on the surface, it's career is different from romance, is different from education. But one layer down, it's the same regret. If only I'd taken the chance.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And what I found is that that is one of boldness regrets or one of four of these deep structure core regrets that people all over the world seem to have.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah, rock and roll.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Cool. One category of what I call foundation regrets. Foundation regrets are if only, because remember, regrets, as you said earlier, regrets are if onlys, all right? So foundation regret is if only I'd done the work. If only I'd done the work. So these are regrets that people have. Okay, a lot of regrets about, I spent too much and saved too little.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And now I don't have enough money and now I'm broke. A surprising number of regrets about people who didn't work hard enough in school. Oh, if only I'd listened to my parents and worked harder in school, I'd have a little bit more of a stable footing in the job market. A lot of regrets about health in this way too.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If only I had eaten better, if only I had exercise, I wouldn't be out of shape and unhealthy today. So it's small decisions early in life that accumulate to really nasty consequences later in life. Again, these small decisions, like no single one is cataclysmic. It's like, oh, I ate a whole bag of Cheetos once. People don't regret that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
They regret eating unhealthily for a year, two years, five years, 10 years, and it adds up and it's hard to undo. So foundation regrets, if only I'd done the work. Third category, we got boldness too. We got moral regrets. Moral regrets are, if only I'd done the right thing. Again, you're at a juncture. You can do the right thing. You can do the wrong thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When we do the wrong thing, most of us regret it because I think most of us are good and want to be good. And when we're not good, we feel crappy about it. And so these are regrets that people have about, oh my gosh, the two bigger ones here, marital infidelity. I had a lot of people basically confessing on this world regret survey. It was like an online confessional.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then also a shocking number, shocking to me, number of people who regretted bullying other people when they were younger. So bullying and marital infidelity, if only I'd done the right thing. Finally, Fourth category, connection regrets.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Connection regrets are about relationships and not only romantic relationships and really not even mostly romantic relationships, just the full suite of relationships in our lives. And what happens is that you have a relationship that was intact or should have been intact. with a parent, with a sibling, with a relative, with friends, with colleagues.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It was intact, and it comes apart, or should have been intact, was intact, and it comes apart. And I think what's interesting is that, again, if you read story after story, the way a lot of these relationships come apart is not dramatic at all. There's no big fight. There's no screaming or yelling. It's just like this drift that takes place over time. And here's what happens.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
somebody wants to reach out okay so let's say you know like man i was such good friends with holla 10 years ago i haven't talked to her for so long i should really reach out to her and then i say oh man no but if i just reach out to her now it's going to be so awkward because i haven't talked to her for 10 years it's gonna be so awkward i don't want to do that and besides she won't care so i don't do anything and then two years from now i say
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
oh man, I was such good friends with Hala 12 years ago. I really should reach out to her. But oh my God, it's even more awkward now and she's going to care even less. And so we don't do anything and sometimes it's too late. And that's a big mistake. Let me just double click on that for a moment.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
That's a huge mistake. We have piles of evidence showing that when people do reach out, it's way less awkward than they think. We're completely over-indexed on awkwardness. My view in general in life, reading the research, is that if you're feeling awkward about something, just freaking push through it. Don't let awkwardness, feelings of awkwardness, be that barrier.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Awkwardness is not a strong enough signal to stop you from doing something. Second thing is that we say people, but Hala's not going to care. People almost always welcome it. We're completely wrong on both fronts. We think it's going to be awkward and they're not going to care. And when we do it, it's not awkward and they always care. So connection regrets are if only I had reached out.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So let me quickly summarize those. We've got confoundation regrets if only I had done the work. We've got Boldness regrets, if only I'd taken the chance. We've got moral regrets, if only I'd done the right thing. And then we've got connection regrets, if only I'd reached out. And just remarkable universality all over the world. These are what people regret.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And it's that deep structure that really matters. That deep structure is really universal. You see these in every country, at every age, at every gender identity.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Okay. Really important. I'll give you a little bit of insight in how the sausage is made.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So at one point I had a chapter called the rules of regret, where I was going to say, here's how regret works. Like we're basically pull up the hood. These are the rules of regret. This is how regret works. Okay. And I was like, okay, should there be five rules or seven rules or whatever? So I had this like these giant bulging folders of research and I was like, okay, I'm going to crack the code.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I'm going to figure out the rules of regret. And I started going through the research and I'm like, oh, there's one rule. And the rule is, there's a big difference between regrets of action and regrets of inaction. Everything comes back to that difference.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the architecture of regret, the difference between regrets of action, I regret what I did, and regrets of inaction, I regret what I didn't do, is huge. And here, there is a distinct difference in age. In my American Regret Project, which is a giant public opinion poll, I put together such a large sample in order to try to find demographic differences in what people regretted.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So thinking that whites would have different regrets from people of color, people with lots of formal education would have different regrets from people with less education, men would have different regrets from women, blah, blah, blah. There were very few demographic differences. I was kind of shocked by that. But the one had to do with age, and it's this.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
People in their 20s tended to have equal numbers of regrets of action and inaction, equal numbers of regrets about what they did and regrets about what they didn't do. But by the time you hit basically your late 20s and certainly into your 30s and 40s and 50s and beyond, it's not even close. By the time you get literally to your late 20s, the inaction regrets take over.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When you get to my age, okay, and I'm basically like double the age of somebody in their mid to late 20s. When you get to my age, it's like three to one inaction regrets over action regrets. Overwhelmingly, over time, we regret what we didn't do. I regret that I didn't reach out. I regret that I didn't start that business. I regret that I didn't tell that person that I loved them.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I regret that I didn't stand up to an injustice. That's what we regret, inaction over action as we get older.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I'll tell you a few of them. I mean, you hinted at one of them just a few moments ago, Hala, which is that, let's take these connection regrets. This is my philosophy now, okay? So let's say you're at a juncture and you're wondering, ah, should I reach out to this person or should I not reach out to this person? If you have arrived at that juncture, you have the answer to the question. Reach out.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When in doubt, reach out. If you arrive at that juncture and you're wondering, the question is answered. Always reach out. I'm dead serious about that. I've heard too many stories where it didn't happen and then something horrible arises and ends up not being possible. Somebody dies. I have so many stories like that. Always reach out. I'll give you another one.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And let's go back to inaction and action.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I think that there's a lot to be said for, in general, having a slight bias for action. That is for, so for just like for trying stuff. And again, it goes to the awkwardness. So I think that awkwardness is a weak excuse. I think fear is a stronger excuse. I think feelings of awkwardness, do what you can to push past those. Sort of a bias for action.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I'm a happily married guy of 27 years, but I'll give everybody who's listening, all the Yap listeners, some romantic advice, okay? Ask the person out. I'm dead serious. If you're wondering whether he, she, or they, you should ask him, her, or them out, do it. The worst thing that can happen is that the person says no. And you know what happens when the person says no? You're fine. Life goes on.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You're exactly where you were before you were asked. But here's the thing. Now you know. You've taken your shot. So I think if there's one takeaway here is that ask the person out. Just slight bias for action. Don't take awkwardness as a meaningful signal. Always reach out. The other thing is, I'll give you one more life lesson here too, is that I think there's something to be said for...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
when you're making a decision to consult your future self. So if you're stuck, see if you can sort of send a text or make a phone call to the you of 10 years from now. So think about, let's say that you're 28 years old, all right? What does 38-year-old you want you to do? 38-year-old wants you to put a little bit more money in your 401k and spend a little less money at Applebee's.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
That's what you're... That's what 38-year-old you wants you to do. If you're at a juncture and you're saying, God, should I do this unethical thing or should I not? 98% of us, 38-year-old you wants you to do the right thing. The you of 10 years from now is really looking out for your best interests. And here's the thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Well, the other thing is also, we can make a pretty safe prediction about what the you of 10 years from now will care about. And it's not most things. The me of 10 years from now isn't going to care what I have for dinner tonight. It isn't going to care what t-shirt I wore today. But it is going to care, did I do the work and build a stable foundation for myself, for my family, for my team?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It is going to care of, did I use my opportunity, this vanishingly short amount of time that I'm alive to like learn and grow and do something and contribute. It's going to care if I, 10 years from now, if I do the wrong thing, I have to confront the me of 2032, who's going to be wagging his finger at me saying, shame on you. Why'd you do the wrong thing?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And it's going to care if I don't reach out and build relationships of love and connection and affinity and belonging. And again, it's not super complicated, but I think the cool thing is that this emotion that we often try to avoid is giving us this very, very clear window into what makes life worth living.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Okay, it's a great question. So I think that the wrong way is pretty obvious. The wrong way is to simply ignore it. That's a totally bad idea. And it doesn't work over the long term. Another bad idea is to wallow in it, is to stew over it. So the right way to do it is to try to avoid, especially that second path.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the way I look at this process is inward, outward, forward, inward, outward, forward. The first step is to look inward. So let's say you have a regret or even more broadly, you make a mistake. In the face of regrets, in the face of mistakes and screw ups, the way we talk to ourselves is incredibly harsh. If you listen to like people self-talk, it's brutal.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Listen to my self-talk, you'd think I was a lunatic. The way I talk to myself is just cruel. I would never talk to anybody else that way. And what the science tells us is don't do that. There's very little evidence that that's effective in enhancing your performance.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
A better technique than self-laceration is what's called self-compassion, which is work pioneered by Kristen Neff at the University of Texas about 20 years ago. And the principle is pretty simple. Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Don't treat yourself better than anybody else. There's no evidence, oh, I should treat myself special. I should, you know, that's not true.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But don't treat yourself worse than anybody else. Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Recognize that regrets are part of the human condition. Any YAP listener out there who has a regret, I'll find almost the identical regret in my database and 90 seconds. It's part of the human condition. And the other thing I think is really important is that a regret is a moment in your life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's not the full measure of your life. We sometimes will make these broad assessments of our entirety based on a single thing in a single moment, and that's unhealthy. So that's inward. So you reframe inward. Second thing is outward. There's a strong argument to be made for disclosure. Disclosure is a form of unburdening.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's not accidental that 21,000 people around the world told a complete stranger their big regret because they wanted to talk about it. Just like what I was saying at the top of the show, Hala. It's like I mentioned my regrets very sheepishly and suddenly like this sort of uncorked this bottle where people want to talk about it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But the other thing I think is actually really important is that emotions by their very nature are abstract. They're vaporous, they're blobby. That's what makes positive emotions feel good, but it's what makes negative emotions feel bad. And so when we talk about our negative emotions,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
or even when we don't have to even tell anybody else, when you write about them privately, we take this abstraction and make it concrete. We turn it from this blobby thing into concrete words, which are less menacing. It helps us begin the sense-making process. So we reframe inward, we express outward, but we also have to move forward.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the way we do that is we have to extract a lesson from that regret. And we tend to be pretty bad at solving our own problems. We're good at solving other people's problems, terrible at solving our own problems. So a really good technique is essentially to, it's what's called self-distancing. It's basically get some distance from yourself. So you can do things like talk to yourself in the,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Second person, what should you do? Or even better, your third person, what should Holly do? I got to say, the single best decision-making tool that I know of when you're stuck is to ask yourself, what would I tell my best friend to do? I have people come to me saying, Dan, I should do this or should I do that? I'm just so torn. I don't know what to do.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I say, what would you tell your best friend to do? And they say, oh, well, I tell her, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, all right, you kind of answered the question there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So for the business people in your audience, Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, had a brilliant technique where he said when he was stuck on a business decision as an executive, he would say, okay, if I were replaced tomorrow, what would my successor do? And he always knew.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So again, so if we reframe inward, express outward, and then move forward by self-distancing, we begin to sort of develop that as a habit. And then instead of trying to bat away this negative emotion or getting brought down by it, we basically hop on it like a surfboard and ride it into better health, higher productivity, more meaning in life, and more effectiveness, especially at work.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
we're too caught up in the details of our life. At some level, we know too much, and that blinds us from the big picture. It's like trying to understand, okay, I want to study the ocean, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to scuba dive to try to understand the ocean. It's like, well, now I'm immersed in everything. If you really want to understand, what does the ocean look like?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
What are its boundaries? How's it configured? You want to be an oceanographer. You want to get up like in a helicopter and go above there. And that's a better, often a better problem solving technique. We just know too much about ourselves. We're too caught up in the gory details where with other people, we see the big picture. We see what's really going on.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I really think that's it. Now, we can bring those techniques to bear on our own problems, but we have to be deliberate and intentional about that by doing these kinds of sort of like Jedi mind tricks to self-distance. Again, talking to yourself in the third person, even that thing that I suggested before about talking to yourself 10 years from now, that's a form of self-distancing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And again, truly two takeaways from this for your listeners. One, Ask them out too. If you're stuck on a decision, ask yourself, what would I tell my best friend to do? And then do that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Sure. That's another really good point. There's a technique, some good research on this called mental subtraction of positive events. It allows us to feel a greater sense of gratitude. It's also a way to reckon with regret. I give you an education regret of mine, which is that I regret having gone to law school in general and probably gone to law school when I did. That's not a cataclysmic regret.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's not my biggest regret, but it's illustrative here. But here's the thing. I met my wife in law school. So what I can do is I can say, well, let me mentally subtract that event. Imagine a world where I didn't go to law school. That's a world where I never would have met my wife. I don't want to live in that world. With action regrets, we can find the silver lining. We can at least them.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We can see a benefit in them, which is why we can process them and make sense of them. Some action regrets, we can also undo. All those people who have bullying regrets, more regrets, it's an action. I bullied somebody. Many of them go back 20 years later and apologize to the people they bullied. And so they're trying to undo that kind of regret.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I have a guy in the book who has a no regrets tattoo and he goes to get it removed. So with action regrets, we can mentally subtract certain positive elements of them. We can at least them, we can undo them. And therefore we can tamp down how much they bug us. That's why over time, action regrets recede, inaction regrets dominate.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
On a number of different dimensions. Number one is that we know from these four regrets, if we know what people regret the most, we know what they value the most. So regrets are a negative, a reverse image of a life well-lived, of a good life. What people want out of life in general is they want a degree of stability. A good life is not precarious.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Well, once again, I've fallen down the trap of me search because that's what this is again. So here's what happened. In 2019, I had one of those moments in life that you get to when you get to be my age. I'm in my 50s and I had a kid graduate from college. So that's kind of a jarring experience because you wonder like, how did that kid grow up so fast?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Boldness is about the chance to learn and grow and do something and not like waste your time here and just do something. Moral regrets are about goodness. Connection regrets are ultimately about love. And so as you think through your decisions, you can anticipate your future regrets.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the way to do that is to really maximize on things that, if you're making a decision, it's like, is this going to build my foundation? Is this going to help me learn and grow? Is this the right thing to do? Is this going to help me build connections and affinity with people I care about? Those kinds of things you should really maximize on. But the other stuff, Good enough is good enough.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I know we're not supposed to say good enough is good enough, but good enough is good enough for a heck of a lot of things. So again, let's go back to future you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Future you is not going to care this year whether you bought a blue car or a gray car. Future me, as I said earlier, is not going to care whether I wore that blue shirt today or I wore a yellow shirt today. There's so many decisions that we make that we don't even remember, we don't even care about. But there's some that stick with us. And we have a sense of the things that matter most.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And so if we really focus our efforts and our attention on these kinds of things, on building a solid foundation, on learning and growing, being good and moral and truthful and doing the right thing and on building relationships of love and belonging, I think that regret gives us this path to do things better.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I'll give you one other tip here that I think is useful because it's, again, less abstract and more practical. One of the most useful things to do is to do what I did a couple of years ago, which is that push past the awkwardness, And if you have a team that you work with or a group of friends, tell people about one regret that you have. Tell them what you learned from it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Tell them what you're going to do about it. And I can almost guarantee that you will have one of the richest, most interesting conversations you've had this year because I was wrong. I thought nobody wanted to talk about regret. And I discovered, as I said at the very beginning of our conversation, that everybody wants to talk about regret because, as you said, it's normal. It's universal.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's part of the human being.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Listen more and talk less.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I feel like so much of the work that we do obviously involves groups and other people. And most of us are not very good listeners. We don't actually work hard at listening. No one has ever taught us how to listen. When we're in elementary school, they teach us how to read and they teach us how to write, but no one ever teaches how to listen. They think because we have ears, we know how to listen.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And most of us are not very good listeners. And so one way to listen better is seriously, I say this after an hour yapping, is to talk less and listen more.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And how am I possibly old enough to have a kid who's graduating from college? And in the course of this college graduation, which was very long and lengthy. And my daughter's last name starts with P. It was a lot of waiting around. Inevitably, your mind wanders. And as my mind was wandering, my thoughts turned to my own college experience. And I started thinking about what I regretted.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's going to sound strange, but I think it's to be generous, to help other people, to use a Boy Scout thing, to leave the campsite better than you found it. I really think that that is the way to live a good life. It allows you to profit in all senses of the word. I think it has a professional benefit over time, certainly not in the short term. Over time, it has a professional benefit.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But more than anything else, it allows you to look at your life on a day, on a week, and say, I did something. I contributed. I made the world a little bit better.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
you can go to my website, which is danielpink.com. D-A-N-I-E-L-P-I-N-K.com. I've got a free newsletter. I've got free resources. I got all kinds of groovy stuff.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
There were a lot of things I regretted. I wish I had worked harder. I wish I had been kinder. I wish I had been a little gutsier, taking more risks. So these thoughts were kind of tiptoeing through my head when I came back. And I wanted to discuss them with other people. But I knew that nobody wanted to talk about regret because it's taboo.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So against my better judgment, I very, very, very, very, very sheepishly mentioned a few of these regrets to a few people. And I discovered that everybody wanted to talk about regret. That it was a kind of topic that there was this kind of
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
damn breaking that people said oh my god you have that regret i have that regret too like you know and they wanted to talk about it and i think what's interesting from a writer's perspective is that sometimes i'll raise an idea or concept and people like okay that's nice all right whatever uh you know what are we having for dinner and that's that happens a lot that's cool
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But this is one where people like literally, and I mean this literally, they leaned in, that is their bodies move forward and wanting to discuss this. And that's a very good sign. And so that took me on this two and a half year journey to try to make sense of this emotion, which I think that we've misunderstood profoundly. And that also gives us hints about how to lead a better life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So when we think about what regret is, I mean, it's certainly an emotion, and it's an emotion that makes us feel bad. And we should kind of be in awe of our ability to process regret. When you think about it cognitively, let's use my example. So if only I had taken more risks when I was in college, okay? What I do is I go back in time to when I was in college, all right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I negate what really happened, which was kind of being a little bit of a wimp. And I replaced that truth with a counterfactual. So let's say that I was doing something a little gutsier, like playing a club-level sport rather than just wimp out, all right? So you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to actually try to become like a very skilled basketball player and risk the injuries and risk the
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Feelings of stupidity and not being good enough and whatnot, rather than just retreat. So I go back and negate that. So not only that, but I come back to the present. Now my present is reconfigured because I've changed the past. And now suddenly, I don't know, I'm like coaching a basketball team or I'm a better leader because I had more experience with a team sport or something like that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And so it's really this incredible process that we go through where we get in the time machine, we go backward, we negate what happened, we get back in our time machine, we go forward to the present, and the present magically looks different because of what we've done in the past. This is one reason why regret is a milestone in our development. That is, little kids can't do this.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Five-year-olds don't experience regret because they can't think counterfactually. It's also why people with certain kinds of brain damage and brain lesions can't reason counterfactually. The more I think about what our brains can do, the more I'm kind of in awe of this lump in our head and how powerful it is.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So basically what it means is that our brains allow us to imagine a scenario that runs counter to the actual facts. There are two kinds of counterfactuals here, okay? So I know you guys like to go deep. So there are two kinds of counterfactuals that are really important. One of them is what you can call a downward counterfactual, okay? So you imagine how things could have been worse.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So you say, oh, okay. I regret that I married Bob, but at least I have these two great kids, okay? So you find the silver lining, okay? It could have been worse. I could have married Bob and not had any kids. So at least make us feel better. Now, there's another kind of counterfactual, if-onlys.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
That's an upward counterfactual, where you can imagine how things could have gotten better, could have been better. So you say, oh, if only I had married Fred instead of Bob, I would be living in a nicer community. I would have a happy marriage. I would be financially secure, et cetera, et cetera. You imagine how things could have been better. Now, if-onlys make us feel worse.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But here's the dirty little secret. If-onlys make us feel worse, but they also help us do better in the future. And they help us do better in the future because they make us feel worse.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Totally right. Regret is the quintessential if only. It makes us feel worse. This is why it's paradoxical, Holly. This is why people don't like it. This is why people like to proclaim, I don't have any regrets. I never look backward. I'm always positive. And the reason for that is that regret is unpleasant. But what we also know
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
From, again, if you look at 50 or 60 years of research in neuroscience, in cognitive science, in developmental psychology, which I mentioned before, social psychology, a lot of experiments in social psychology as well. What it tells us is that regret is ubiquitous. It is everywhere. Everybody experiences regret. It's one of the most common emotions that human beings have.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I can't emphasize that enough. Everybody has regrets. If you don't have any regrets, it's a warning. It's a bad sign. It means that you could be five years old, which I guess that's not a bad sign. You know, you got to grow up. It could mean that you have brain damage or lesions on the orbital frontal cortex of your brain or early onset Huntington's or Parkinson's.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It could mean that you're a sociopath. Those are truly the only people who don't have regrets. The rest of us have regrets. It's one of the most common emotions that human beings have. And this is sort of a puzzle, right? It's like you have this thing that is widespread, but it makes us feel crappy. So you have to ask the question, well, why does it exist then?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Exactly. That's the point. So we're not perfect organisms at all. We're not perfectly efficient, but there are adaptations that we've had. So you have to figure like, why does something that make us feel bad? Why is it everywhere? It must do something. It must have some benefit to us, right? And you got it exactly right. The benefit that it has
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
it helps that if we treat our regrets properly, it helps us do better. And not only a little bit, and not only on a few things, but a lot of bit on many things. And here's the key. If we reckon with our regrets properly, don't ignore them. When we feel a regret, we don't put our fingers in our ears and say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't hear anything. That's a bad idea.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But also, and this is also important, Hala, we don't wallow in them. We don't ruminate on them. We don't stew over them. We confront them. We use them as signal, as information, as evidence, as data. When we do that, again, we have the research showing that it can help us become better negotiators.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So there's a lot of experiments where you put somebody in a negotiating session, then they do their negotiation, they come out, the experimenters say, okay, I want you to think about what do you regret doing or not doing in that negotiation? So they encourage people to invite this negative feeling. What happens next? They do better in the next negotiation. It helps us become better problem solvers.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It helps us avoid cognitive biases like confirmation bias and escalation of commitment to a failing course of action. There's some interesting research among executives showing that executives who actually sort of embrace and acknowledge their regrets are better strategists than those who simply try to skate past them. It helps us find greater meaning in life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And so what we have here, again, just to distill this, make it a little bit simpler, is this. Regret makes us human and regret makes us better. Everybody has regrets. And the reason everybody has regrets is that if we treat them properly, they're incredibly useful.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Okay, there's a lot wrong with it. But I'm going to try to be kinder and gentler in how I bash it. The problem is that it is a woefully misguided philosophy for a life well lived. And the reason for that is this. I'll give you an example of it. So I have the people who I wrote about, you know from the book. who get these tattoos that say no regrets.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So they believe in this philosophy that you should always be positive, never be negative, always look forward, never look back. They believe in this credo, this philosophy so ferociously, they have the message enshrined on their bodies. That's a commitment, man, all right? Like you got to believe in something to have it tattooed on your body, right? But here's the thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If you say no regrets, you say, I never look backward. You might as well get a tattoo that says no growth, no learning, no progress. Nobody's getting tattoos like that. And so it's really, really misguided. The key here is what we do with our regrets. And this is, I think, a bigger problem that we have, Hala, which is this. And I think it's an American problem more than others.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We Americans have a problem with negative emotions. We don't know what to do with them. Here's the thing. Just go back again. Positive emotions are great. I want to have a lot of positive emotions. I want you to have a lot of positive emotions. I want all the listeners to have lots of positive emotions. OK, positive emotions are great. gratitude and joy and elation. They're great, okay?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Amen.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah. So I was also curious about what people regretted. I was really curious about that. And the reason I was curious is that when you looked at the existing evidence, most of it in social psychology, initially researchers said, oh, this is an American sample, that Americans, oh, they have education regrets. Education is the biggest regret that Americans have.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Scientists believe that for 20 years. And then Somebody finally realized, like, wait a second, all these studies showing that education is the biggest regret were done on college campuses with college students. And so, you know, if you had done all this research in hospitals, maybe health would be the greatest regret. If you had done it in banks, maybe, you know, whatever.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So it's like, huh, maybe there's not something there. And so actually not that long ago, 16, 17 years ago, researchers started doing more systematic looks at what people regretted. And they found that people regret a lot of stuff. It was all over the place. They have career regrets. They have romance regrets. They have finance regrets. They have health regrets. They have family regrets.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's all over the place. So that's the lay of the land. So I said, I'm going to try to crack the code here. And so I did something called the American Regret Project, which is the largest public opinion survey of American attitudes about regret ever conducted. We did a brilliant, gorgeous survey of nearly 4,500 Americans modeling the
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
the sample, sort of configuring the sample so that it reflected the glorious diversity of the United States of America. And so I asked these people, tell me one of your big regrets. And then I had them put it into those categories, career, finance, romance, whatever, because I said, I'm going to figure this out.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I found after careful deliberation and data analysis that people regret a lot of stuff. It was all over the place. So now that's the bad news. The good news is that I also did another piece of my own research, something called the World Regret Survey, where I simply set up a website, worldregretsurvey.com, where I gathered regrets from around the globe.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And we now have a database of over 21,000 regrets from people in 109 countries. It's incredible. And once I looked at those, okay, just basically just people offering their regrets, but by the thousands all over the world, and I didn't ask them to categorize it. I just wanted to know their age, their gender identity, and their location.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When I started reading through those regrets, I didn't read through all 21,000, but I did read through the first 15,000 of them. What I discovered is that there's something else going on, that trying to understand what people regret by those categories that I initially had thought is not the way to look at it, that there's something bigger and more interesting going on beneath the surface.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Okay, perfect. You got it exactly right. So let me be less abstract. Let me be concrete here. Okay, here we go.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We're looking at these regrets that are coming in from all over the world. I'm reading them one by one, trying to make sense of them. It's fascinating to hear people all over the world disclose a big regret. So let me give you an example. So I have, again, the volume here is helpful. So I have lots of regrets. of people who say, I mean, here's a weird one.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's like, from American college graduates, I am stunned by the number of regrets that American college graduates have about not studying abroad when they were in college. I couldn't believe it. Like, even if you Google, not Google, but if you go into the database and search the phrase like study abroad, you get like, Hundreds of hits. I couldn't, it's crazy. Okay. So that's an education regret.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Okay. People say, ah, I wish I had studied abroad. I was a little bit too scared to go away. And, you know, I thought I would miss people and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And now I wish I had taken that, you know, now I wish I had studied abroad.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But you know what? It's a big deal, man. I have to say, I was blown away by that. I actually think that there is a, and this is for the entrepreneurial Yap listeners out there.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I think there's a business, a travel agency serving basically 30-somethings and 40-somethings, 20-somethings, 30-somethings, 40-somethings who wish they had studied abroad and didn't and now have a little money in their pocket. I really think there's a viable business in there. But that's an education regret. Okay, so then I have a lot of regrets. Okay, let's go back to entrepreneurship.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I got lots of regrets, again, all over the world, where they basically say this. I really regret staying in this lackluster job. I always wanted to start a business, but I never had the gumption to do it. Okay, that's a career regret. Then I have, and this is again, volume, volume, volume, hundreds, and I'm not kidding around, hundreds, that basically go like this.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Well, once again, I've fallen down the trap of me-search because that's what this is again. So here's what happened. In 2019, I had one of those moments in life that you get to when you get to be my age. I'm in my 50s and I had a kid graduate from college. So that's kind of a jarring experience because you wonder like, how did that kid grow up so fast?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
X years ago, there was a man slash woman who I really liked. I wanted to ask him or her out on a date, but I was too chicken to do that. And now I've regretted it 10 years later, 20 years later, 30 years later. Okay, that's a romance regret. So we got an education regret. We've got a career regret. We've got a romance regret. But here's the point I'm making in this little diatribe here.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Those are all the same regret. Those regrets on the surface, they're in different categories, but they're the same regret. You're at a juncture in your life and you have a choice. You can play it safe or you can take the chance. And overwhelmingly, When people don't take the chance, they regret it. And that's what I call a boldness regret.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So on the surface, it's career is different from romance, is different from education. But one layer down, it's the same regret. If only I'd taken the chance. And what I found is that that is one of boldness regrets or one of four of these deep structure core regrets that people all over the world seem to have.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah, rock and roll.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Cool. One category of what I call foundation regrets. Foundation regrets are if only, because remember, regrets, as you said earlier, regrets are if onlys, all right? So foundation regret is if only I'd done the work. If only I'd done the work. So these are regrets that people have. Okay, a lot of regrets about, I spent too much and saved too little.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And now I don't have enough money and now I'm broke. A surprising number of regrets about people who didn't work hard enough in school. Oh, if only I'd listened to my parents and worked harder in school, I'd have a little bit more of a stable footing in the job market. A lot of regrets about health in this way too.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If only I had eaten better, if only I had exercise, I wouldn't be out of shape and unhealthy today. So it's small decisions early in life that accumulate to really nasty consequences later in life. Again, these small decisions, like no single one is cataclysmic. It's like, oh, I ate a whole bag of Cheetos once. People don't regret that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
They regret eating unhealthily for a year, two years, five years, 10 years, and it adds up and it's hard to undo. So foundation regrets, if only I'd done the work. Third category, we got boldness too. We got moral regrets. Moral regrets are, if only I'd done the right thing. Again, you're at a juncture. You can do the right thing. You can do the wrong thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When we do the wrong thing, most of us regret it because I think most of us are good and want to be good. And when we're not good, we feel crappy about it. And so these are regrets that people have about, oh my gosh, the two bigger ones here, marital infidelity. I had a lot of people basically confessing on this world regret survey. It was like an online confessional.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then also a shocking number, shocking to me, number of people who regretted bullying other people when they were younger. So bullying and marital infidelity, if only I'd done the right thing. Finally, Fourth category, connection regrets.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Connection regrets are about relationships and not only romantic relationships and really not even mostly romantic relationships, just the full suite of relationships in our lives. And what happens is that you have a relationship that was intact or should have been intact. with a parent, with a sibling, with a relative, with friends, with colleagues.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And how am I possibly old enough to have a kid who's graduating from college? And in the course of this college graduation, which was very long and lengthy. And my daughter's last name starts with P. It was a lot of waiting around. Inevitably, your mind wanders. And as my mind was wandering, my thoughts turned to my own college experience. And I started thinking about what I regretted.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It was intact, and it comes apart, or should have been intact, was intact, and it comes apart. And I think what's interesting is that, again, if you read story after story, the way a lot of these relationships come apart is not dramatic at all. There's no big fight. There's no screaming or yelling. It's just like this drift that takes place over time. And here's what happens.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
somebody wants to reach out okay so let's say you know like man i was such good friends with holla 10 years ago i haven't talked to her for so long i should really reach out to her and then i say oh man no but if i just reach out to her now it's going to be so awkward because i haven't talked to her for 10 years it's gonna be so awkward i don't want to do that and besides she won't care so i don't do anything and then two years from now i say
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
oh man, I was such good friends with Hala 12 years ago. I really should reach out to her. But oh my God, it's even more awkward now and she's going to care even less. And so we don't do anything and sometimes it's too late. And that's a big mistake. Let me just double click on that for a moment.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
That's a huge mistake. We have piles of evidence showing that when people do reach out, it's way less awkward than they think. We're completely over-indexed on awkwardness. My view in general in life, reading the research, is that if you're feeling awkward about something, just fricking push through it. Don't let awkwardness, feelings of awkwardness, be that barrier.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Awkwardness is not a strong enough signal to stop you from doing something. Second thing is that we say people, but Hala's not going to care. People almost always welcome it. We're completely wrong on both fronts. We think it's going to be awkward and they're not going to care. And when we do it, it's not awkward and they always care. So connection regrets are if only I had reached out.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So let me quickly summarize those. We've got confoundation regrets if only I had done the work. We've got Boldness regrets, if only I'd taken the chance. We've got moral regrets, if only I'd done the right thing. And then we've got connection regrets, if only I'd reached out. And just remarkable universality all over the world. These are what people regret.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And it's that deep structure that really matters. That deep structure is really universal. You see these in every country, at every age, at every gender identity.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Okay. Really important. I'll give you a little bit of insight in how the sausage is made.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So at one point I had a chapter called the rules of regret, where I was going to say, here's how regret works. Like we're just basically pull up the hood. These are the rules of regret. This is how regret works. Okay. And I was like, okay, should there be five rules or seven rules or whatever?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I had this like these giant bulging folders of research and I was like, okay, I'm going to crack the code. I'm going to figure out the rules of regret. And I started going through the research and I'm like, oh, there's one rule. And the rule is, there's a big difference between regrets of action and regrets of inaction. Everything comes back to that difference.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the architecture of regret, the difference between regrets of action, I regret what I did, and regrets of inaction, I regret what I didn't do, is huge. And here, there is a distinct difference in age. In my American Regret Project, which is a giant public opinion poll, I put together such a large sample in order to try to find demographic differences in what people regretted.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
There were a lot of things I regretted. I wish I had worked harder. I wish I had been kinder. I wish I had been a little gutsier, taking more risks. So these thoughts were kind of tiptoeing through my head when I came back. And I wanted to discuss them with other people. But I knew that nobody wanted to talk about regret because it's taboo.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So thinking that whites would have different regrets from people of color, people with lots of formal education would have different regrets from people with less education, men would have different regrets from women, blah, blah, blah. There were very few demographic differences. I was kind of shocked by that. But the one had to do with age, and it's this.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
People in their 20s tended to have equal numbers of regrets of action and inaction, equal numbers of regrets about what they did and regrets about what they didn't do. But by the time you hit basically your late 20s and certainly into your 30s and 40s and 50s and beyond, it's not even close. By the time you get literally to your late 20s, the inaction regrets take over.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When you get to my age, okay, and I'm basically like double the age of somebody in their mid to late 20s. When you get to my age, it's like three to one inaction regrets over action regrets. Overwhelmingly, over time, we regret what we didn't do. I regret that I didn't reach out. I regret that I didn't start that business. I regret that I didn't tell that person that I loved them.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I regret that I didn't stand up to an injustice. That's what we regret, inaction over action as we get older.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I'll tell you a few of them. I mean, you hinted at one of them just a few moments ago, Hala, which is that, let's take these connection regrets. This is my philosophy now, okay? So let's say you're at a juncture and you're wondering, ah, should I reach out to this person or should I not reach out to this person? If you have arrived at that juncture, you have the answer to the question. Reach out.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When in doubt, reach out. If you arrive at that juncture and you're wondering, the question is answered. Always reach out. I'm dead serious about that. I've heard too many stories where it didn't happen and then something horrible arises and ends up not being possible. Somebody dies. I have so many stories like that. Always reach out. I'll give you another one.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Andy, let's go back to inaction and action. I think that there's a lot to be said for, in general, having a slight bias for action. That is for, so for just like for trying stuff. And again, it goes to the awkwardness. So I think that awkwardness is a weak excuse. I think fear is a stronger excuse. I think feelings of awkwardness, do what you can to push past those. Sort of a bias for action.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I'm a happily married guy of 27 years, but I'll give everybody who's listening, all the Yap listeners, some romantic advice, okay? Ask the person out. I'm dead serious. If you're wondering whether he, she, or they, you should ask him, her, or them out, do it. The worst thing that can happen is that the person says no. And you know what happens when the person says no? You're fine. Life goes on.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So against my better judgment, I very, very, very, very, very sheepishly mentioned a few of these regrets to a few people. And I discovered that everybody wanted to talk about regret. That it was a kind of topic that there was this kind of
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You're exactly where you were before you were asked. But here's the thing. Now you know. You've taken your shot. So I think if there's one takeaway here is that ask the person out. Just slight bias for action. Don't take awkwardness as a meaningful signal. Always reach out. The other thing is, I'll give you one more life lesson here too, is that I think there's something to be said for...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
when you're making a decision to consult your future self. So if you're stuck, see if you can sort of send a text or make a phone call to the you of 10 years from now. So think about, let's say that you're 28 years old, all right? What does 38-year-old you want you to do? 38-year-old wants you to put a little bit more money in your 401k and spend a little less money at Applebee's.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
That's what you're... That's what 38-year-old you wants you to do. If you're at a juncture and you're saying, God, should I do this unethical thing or should I not? 98% of us, 38-year-old you wants you to do the right thing. The you of 10 years from now is really looking out for your best interests. And here's the thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Well, the other thing is also, we can make a pretty safe prediction about what the you of 10 years from now will care about. And it's not most things. The me of 10 years from now isn't going to care what I have for dinner tonight. It isn't going to care what t-shirt I wore today. But it is going to care, did I do the work and build a stable foundation for myself, for my family, for my team?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It is going to care of, did I use my opportunity, this vanishingly short amount of time that I'm alive to like learn and grow and do something and contribute. It's going to care if I, 10 years from now, if I do the wrong thing, I have to confront the me of 2032, who's going to be wagging his finger at me saying, shame on you. Why'd you do the wrong thing?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And it's going to care if I don't reach out and build relationships of love and connection and affinity and belonging. And again, it's not super complicated, but I think the cool thing is that this emotion that we often try to avoid is giving us this very, very clear window into what makes life worth living.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
damn breaking that people said oh my god you have that regret i have that regret too like you know and they wanted to talk about it and i think what's interesting from a writer's perspective is that sometimes i'll raise an idea or concept and people like yeah that's nice all right whatever uh you know what are we having for dinner and that's that happens a lot that's cool
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But this is one where people like literally, and I mean this literally, they leaned in, that is their bodies move forward and wanting to discuss this. And that's a very good sign. And so that took me on this two and a half year journey to try to make sense of this emotion, which I think that we've misunderstood profoundly. And that also gives us hints about how to lead a better life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Okay, it's a great question. So I think that the wrong way is pretty obvious. The wrong way is to simply ignore it. That's a totally bad idea and it doesn't work over the longterm. Another bad idea is to wallow in it, is to stew over it. So the right way to do it is to try to avoid, especially that second path. And the way I look at this
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
process is inward, outward, forward, inward, outward, forward. Because the first step is to look inward. So let's say you have a regret or even more broadly, you make a mistake. In the face of regrets, in the face of mistakes and screw ups, the way we talk to ourselves is incredibly harsh. If you listen to like people self-talk, it's brutal.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If you listen to my self-talk, you'd think I was a lunatic. The way I talk to myself is just cruel. I would never talk to anybody else that way. And what the science tells us is don't do that. There's very little evidence that that's effective in enhancing your performance.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
A better technique than self-laceration is what's called self-compassion, which is work pioneered by Kristen Neff at the University of Texas about 20 years ago. And the principle is pretty simple. Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Don't treat yourself better than anybody else. There's no evidence, oh, I should treat myself special. I should, you know, that's not true.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But don't treat yourself worse than anybody else. Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Recognize that regrets are part of the human condition. Any YAP listener out there who has a regret, I'll find almost the identical regret in my database and 90 seconds. It's part of the human condition. And the other thing that I think is really important is that a regret is a moment in your life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's not the full measure of your life. We sometimes will make these broad assessments of our entirety based on a single thing in a single moment, and that's unhealthy. So that's inward. So you reframe inward. Second thing is outward. There's a strong argument to be made for disclosure. Disclosure is a form of unburdening.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's not accidental that 21,000 people around the world told a complete stranger their big regret because they wanted to talk about it. Just like what I was saying at the top of the show, Hala. It's like I mentioned my regrets very sheepishly and suddenly like this sort of uncorked this bottle where people want to talk about it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But the other thing I think is actually really important is that emotions by their very nature are abstract. They're vaporous, they're blobby. That's what makes positive emotions feel good, but it's what makes negative emotions feel bad. And so when we talk about our negative emotions,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
or even when we don't have to even tell anybody else, when you write about them privately, we take this abstraction and make it concrete. We turn it from this blobby thing into concrete words, which are less menacing. It helps us begin the sense-making process. So we reframe inward, we express outward, but we also have to move forward.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the way we do that is we have to extract a lesson from that regret. And we tend to be pretty bad at solving our own problems. We're good at solving other people's problems, terrible at solving our own problems. So a really good technique is essentially to, it's what's called self-distancing, is basically get some distance from yourself. So you can do things like talk to yourself in the,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Second person, what should you do? Or even better, your third person, what should Holly do? I got to say, the single best decision-making tool that I know of when you're stuck is to ask yourself, what would I tell my best friend to do? I have people come to me saying, Dan, I should do this or should I do that? I'm just so torn. I don't know what to do.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I say, what would you tell your best friend to do? And they say, oh, well, I tell her, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, all right, you kind of answered the question there.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So for the business people in your audience, Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, had a brilliant technique where he said when he was stuck on a business decision as an executive, he would say, okay, if I were replaced tomorrow, what would my successor do? And he always knew.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So again, so if we reframe inward, express outward, and then move forward by self-distancing, we begin to sort of develop that as a habit. And then instead of trying to bat away this negative emotion or getting brought down by it, we basically hop on it like a surfboard and ride it into better health, higher productivity, more meaning in life, and more effectiveness, especially at work.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
we're too caught up in the details of our life. At some level, we know too much, and that blinds us from the big picture. It's like trying to understand, okay, I want to study the ocean, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to scuba dive to try to understand the ocean. It's like, well, now I'm immersed in everything. If you really want to understand, what does the ocean look like?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
What are its boundaries? How's it configured? You want to be an oceanographer. You want to get up like in a helicopter and go above there. And that's a better, often a better problem solving technique. We just know too much about ourselves. We're too caught up in the gory details where with other people, we see the big picture. We see what's really going on.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I really think that's it. Now, we can bring those techniques to bear on our own problems, but we have to be deliberate and intentional about that by doing these kinds of sort of like Jedi mind tricks to self-distance. Again, talking to yourself in the third person, even that thing that I suggested before about talking to yourself 10 years from now, that's a form of self-distancing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And again, truly two takeaways from this for your listeners. One, Ask them out too. If you're stuck on a decision, ask yourself, what would I tell my best friend to do? And then do that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So when we think about what regret is, I mean, it's certainly an emotion, and it's an emotion that makes us feel bad. And we should kind of be in awe of our ability to process regret. When you think about it cognitively, let's use my example. So if only I had taken more risks when I was in college, okay? What I do is I go back in time to when I was in college, all right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Sure. That's another really good point. There's a technique, some good research on this called mental subtraction of positive events. It allows us to feel a greater sense of gratitude. It's also a way to reckon with regret. I give you an education regret of mine, which is that I regret having gone to law school in general and probably gone to law school when I did. That's not a cataclysmic regret.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's not my biggest regret, but it's illustrative here. But here's the thing. I met my wife in law school. So what I can do is I can say, well, let me mentally subtract that event. Imagine a world where I didn't go to law school. That's a world where I never would have met my wife. I don't want to live in that world. With action regrets, we can find the silver lining. We can at least them.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We can see a benefit in them, which is why we can process them and make sense of them. Some action regrets, we can also undo. All those people who have bullying regrets, more regrets, it's an action. I bullied somebody. Many of them. go back 20 years later and apologize to the people they bullied. And so they're trying to undo that kind of regret.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I have a guy in the book who has a no regrets tattoo, and he goes to get it removed. So with action regrets, we can mentally subtract certain positive elements of them. We can at least them, we can undo them. And therefore we can tamp down how much they bug us. That's why over time, action regrets recede, inaction regrets dominate.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
On a number of different dimensions. Number one is that we know from these four regrets, if we know what people regret the most, we know what they value the most. So regrets are a negative, a reverse image of a life well-lived, of a good life. What people want out of life in general is they want a degree of stability. A good life is not precarious.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Boldness is about the chance to learn and grow and do something and not waste your time here and just do something. Moral regrets are about goodness. Connection regrets are ultimately about love. And so as you think through your decisions, you can anticipate your future regrets.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the way to do that is to really maximize on things that, you know, if you're making a decision, it's like, is this going to build my foundation? Is this going to help me learn and grow? Is this the right thing to do? Is this going to help me build connections and affinity with people I care about? Those kinds of things you should really like maximize on. But the other stuff,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Good enough is good enough. I know we're not supposed to say good enough is good enough, but good enough is good enough for a heck of a lot of things. So again, let's go back to future you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Future you is not going to care this year whether you bought a blue car or a gray car. Future me, as I said earlier, is not going to care whether I wore that blue shirt today or I wore a yellow shirt today. There's so many decisions that we make that we don't even remember, we don't even care about. But there's some that stick with us. And we have a sense of the things that matter most.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And so if we really focus our efforts and our attention on these kinds of things, on building a solid foundation, on learning and growing, being good and moral and truthful and doing the right thing and on building relationships of love and belonging, I think that regret gives us this path to do things better.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I'll give you one other tip here that I think is useful because it's, again, less abstract and more practical. One of the most useful things to do is to do what I did a couple of years ago, which is that push past the awkwardness, And if you have a team that you work with or a group of friends, tell people about one regret that you have. Tell them what you learned from it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I negate what really happened, which was kind of being a little bit of a wimp. And I replace that truth with a counterfactual. So let's say that I was doing something a little gutsier, like playing a club-level sport. rather than just wimp out, right? So you know what I'm going to do?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Tell them what you're going to do about it. And I can almost guarantee that you will have one of the richest, most interesting conversations you've had this year. Because I was wrong. I thought nobody wanted to talk about regret. And I discovered, as I said at the very beginning of our conversation, that everybody wants to talk about regret. Because as you said, it's normal. It's universal.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's part of the human being.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Listen more and talk less.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I feel like so much of the work that we do obviously involves groups and other people. And most of us are not very good listeners. We don't actually work hard at listening. No one has ever taught us how to listen. When we're in elementary school, they teach us how to read and they teach us how to write, but no one ever teaches how to listen. They think because we have ears, we know how to listen.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And most of us are not very good listeners. And so one way to listen better seriously, and I say this after an hour yapping, is to talk less and listen more.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's going to sound strange, but I think it's to be generous, to help other people, to use a Boy Scout thing, to leave the campsite better than you found it. I really think that that is the way to live a good life. It allows you to profit in all senses of the word. I think it has a professional benefit over time, certainly not in the short term. Over time, it has a professional benefit.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But more than anything else, it allows you to look at your life on a day, on a week, and say, I did something. I contributed. I made the world a little bit better.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
you can go to my website, which is danielpink.com. D-A-N-I-E-L-P-I-N-K.com. I've got a free newsletter. I've got free resources. I got all kinds of groovy stuff.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I'm going to actually try to become like a very skilled basketball player and risk the injuries and risk the feelings of stupidity and not being good enough and whatnot, rather than just retreat. So I go back and negate that. So not only that, but I come back to the present. Now my present is reconfigured because I've changed the past. And now suddenly, I don't know, I'm like,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
coaching a basketball team, or I'm a better leader because I had more experience with a team sport or something like that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And so it's really this incredible process that we go through where we get in the time machine, we go backward, we negate what happened, we get back in our time machine, we go forward to the present, and the present magically looks different because of what we've done in the past. This is one reason why regret is a milestone in our development. That is, little kids can't do this.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Five-year-olds don't experience regret because they can't think counterfactually. It's also why people with certain kinds of brain damage and brain lesions can't reason counterfactually. The more I think about what our brains can do, the more I'm kind of in awe of this lump in our head and how powerful it is.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So basically what it means is that our brains allow us to imagine a scenario that runs counter to the actual facts. There are two kinds of counterfactuals here, okay? So I know you guys like to go deep. So there are two kinds of counterfactuals that are really important. One of them is what you can call a downward counterfactual, okay? So you imagine how things could have been worse.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So you say, oh, okay. I regret that I married Bob, but at least I have these two great kids, okay? So you find the silver lining, okay? It could have been worse. I could have married Bob and not had any kids. So at least, so at least make us feel better.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Now, there's another kind of counterfactual, if-onlys. That's an upward counterfactual, where you can imagine how things could have gotten better, could have been better. So you say, oh, if only I had married Fred instead of Bob, I would be living in a nicer community. I would have a happy marriage. I would be financially secure, et cetera, et cetera. You imagine how things could have been better.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Now, if-onlys make us feel worse. But here's the dirty little secret. If-onlys make us feel worse, but they also help us do better in the future. And they help us do better in the future because they make us feel worse.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Totally, you're right. Regret is the quintessential if only. It makes us feel worse. This is why it's paradoxical, Holly. This is why people don't like it. This is why people like to proclaim, I don't have any regrets. I never look backward. I'm always positive. And the reason for that is that regret is unpleasant. But what we also know
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
From, again, if you look at 50 or 60 years of research in neuroscience, in cognitive science, in developmental psychology, which I mentioned before, social psychology, a lot of experiments in social psychology as well. What it tells us is that regret is ubiquitous. It is everywhere. Everybody experiences regret. It's one of the most common emotions that human beings have.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I can't emphasize that enough. Everybody has regrets. If you don't have any regrets, it's a warning. It's a bad sign. It means that you could be five years old, which I guess that's not a bad sign. You know, you got to grow up. It could mean that you have brain damage or lesions on the orbital frontal cortex of your brain or early onset Huntington's or Parkinson's.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It could mean that you're a sociopath. Those are truly the only people who don't have regrets. The rest of us have regrets. It's one of the most common emotions that human beings have. And this is sort of a puzzle, right? It's like you have this thing that is widespread, but it makes us feel crappy. So you have to ask the question, well, why does it exist then?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Exactly. That's the point. So we're not perfect organisms at all. We're not perfectly efficient, but there are adaptations that we've had. So you have to figure like, why does something that make us feel bad, why is it everywhere? It must do something. It must have some benefit to us, right? And you got it exactly right.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
The benefit that it has, it helps that if we treat our regrets properly, it helps us do better. And not only a little bit and not only on a few things, but a lot of bit on many things. And here's the key. If we reckon with our regrets properly, don't ignore them. When we feel a regret, we don't put our fingers in our ears and say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't hear anything.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
That's a bad idea. But also, and this is also important, Hala, we don't wallow in them. We don't ruminate on them. We don't stew over them. We confront them. We use them as signal, as information, as evidence, as data. When we do that, again, we have the research showing that it can help us become better negotiators.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So there's a lot of experiments where you put somebody in a negotiating session, then they do their negotiation, they come out, the experimenters say, okay, I want you to think about what do you regret doing or not doing in that negotiation? So they encourage people to invite this negative feeling. What happens next? They do better in the next negotiation. It helps us become better problem solvers.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It helps us avoid cognitive biases like confirmation bias and escalation of commitment to a failing course of action. There's some interesting research among executives showing that executives who actually sort of embrace and acknowledge their regrets are better strategists than those who simply try to skate past them. It helps us find greater meaning in life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And so what we have here, again, just to distill this, make it a little bit simpler, is this. Regret makes us human and regret makes us better. Everybody has regrets. And the reason everybody has regrets is that if we treat them properly, they're incredibly useful.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Okay, there's a lot wrong with it, but I'm going to try to be kinder and gentler in how I bash it. The problem is that it is a woefully misguided philosophy for a life well-lived. And the reason for that is this. I'll give you an example of it. So I have the people who I wrote about, you know from the book, who get these tattoos that say no regrets.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So they believe in this philosophy that you should always be positive, never be negative, always look forward, never look back. They believe in this credo, this philosophy, so ferociously they have the message enshrined on their bodies. That's a commitment, man, all right? Yeah. Like you got to believe in something to have it tattooed on your body, right? But here's the thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If you say no regrets, you say, I never look backward. You might as well get a tattoo that says no growth, no learning, no progress. Nobody's getting tattoos like that. And so it's really, really misguided. The key here is what we do with our regrets. And this is, I think, a bigger problem that we have, Hala, which is this. And I think it's an American problem more than others.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We Americans have a problem with negative emotions. We don't know what to do with them. Here's the thing. Just go back. Again, positive emotions are great. I want to have a lot of positive emotions. I want you to have a lot of positive emotions. I want all the YAP listeners to have lots of positive emotions. Positive emotions are great. gratitude and joy and elation. They're great, okay?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
They're part of what makes life worth living. But here's the thing. People shouldn't have only positive emotions. That's not healthy. It goes back to what you were saying before. We have adapted to the world. Negative emotions are adaptations. So if you think about this, I'll give you an example. All right, let's take fear. Fear is a negative emotion.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Do I want to go, if somebody knocks at my office door, some weird person knocks at my office door and says, hey, Dan, I'll give you an operation. Okay, we're going to open up your head, but it's going to be completely no pain. We're going to seal it back up perfectly.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And what we're going to do is we're going to do a little tweak in your brain to ensure that you never experience fear again in your life. Do I want that operation?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Of course not. Because when I'm in a burning building, I want to experience fear so I get the hell out. It's helpful. Again, I don't want to be burdened by fear. I don't want to experience fear all the time. That's debilitating. I don't want to experience, think about an emotion like grief. The reason we experience grief is because we experience love. So I don't want to banish grief.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I don't want to banish negative emotion. I want to actually reckon with them. I like what you said at the top of the show, Hala, is that there's evidence here, okay? This is not some kind of philosophy of mine. We have 50 or 60 years of evidence telling us that when you line up the emotions, all right, when you line up our negative emotions, we're going to do a little police lineup.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Fear, guilt, shame, you know, but that regret ends up being the most common and the most useful if we treat it right, if we treat it right. And again, we haven't been treating it right because what's happened is we're totally over index and positivity. We think we have to be positive all the time. And when we're not, especially younger people,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When they say, when they feel negative, they feel regret, they feel bad, they say, wait a second, I'm feeling regret, I'm feeling bad. That's terrible because not only is it inherently unpleasant, but I look around and everybody else is perfect. There must be something wrong with me. And they get brought down by that rather than saying, A negative emotion is a knock at the door.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. Someone's trying to tell me something. Let me listen, not drown it out, not get freaked out by it, but listen to it, learn from it, and do better in the future.