Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Daniel Pink, How to Understand Your Emotions and Live Your Best Life | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Fri, 17 Jan 2025
As a bestselling author and leading voice on human behavior, Daniel Pink has spent years studying the emotions that shape our lives. But there’s one feeling that seems universally taboo: regret. In a world that often embraces a ‘no regrets’ mantra, Daniel Pink sees things differently. He believes regret can be a powerful guide—a spotlight revealing our true values and priorities. In this episode, Daniel digs into the science behind regret and explains why facing our missteps head-on can help us make better decisions and avoid repeating the same mistakes. In this episode, Hala and Daniel will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (03:21) Daniel Pink's Personal Journey with Regret (05:50) Understanding Counterfactuals and Regret (09:03) The Value of Regret in Personal Growth (19:16) Research on Common Regrets (22:25) Deep Structure of Regrets (26:07) Foundation Regrets: The Impact of Small Decisions (26:45) Moral Regrets: The Weight of Right and Wrong (27:32) Connection Regrets: The Drift in Relationships (30:35) Inaction vs. Action: The Rules of Regret (32:56) Life Lessons from Regret: Reach Out and Take Action (39:10) Dealing with Regret: Inward, Outward, Forward (46:59) The Benefits of Regret: A Path to a Better Life (49:58) Final Thoughts and Advice for a Profitable Life Daniel Pink is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, and thought leader. In 2011, he was named one of Thinkers50’s top 50 most influential minds. He was also the host and co-executive of the television series Crowd Control, a National Geographic program about human behavior that aired in more than 10 countries. Daniel also hosts a popular master class on sales and persuasion. He has written for several notable publications, including Fast Company, The Sunday Telegraph, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Slate, and Wired. He is the author of seven books, the latest being The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. His books have won multiple awards, have been translated into 42 languages, and have sold millions of copies around the world. Resources Mentioned: YAP Episode #50: youngandprofiting.co/42buHsR Daniel’s Book, The Power of Regret: danpink.com/the-power-of-regret Sponsored by: OpenPhone - Get 20% off 6 months at openphone.com/PROFITING Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify Airbnb - Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com/host Rocket Money - Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to rocketmoney.com/profiting Indeed - Get a $75 job credit at indeed.com/profiting Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new All Show Keywords: Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship podcast, Business, Business podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal development, Starting a business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side hustle, Startup, mental health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth mindset. Mental Health & Wellness Mental Health, Health, Psychology, Wellness, Biohacking, Motivation, Mindset, Manifestation, Productivity, Brain Health, Life Balance, Self Healing, Positivity, Happiness, Sleep, Diet
Chapter 1: What is the significance of regret in our lives?
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.
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.
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?
Exactly. So we obviously evolved to have regret for good reason, right? It's kind of a survival instinct, I imagine. It makes our lives better in the end. Talk to us about that. Why do we actually need regret?
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, 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. 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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: How can we transform regret into positive change?
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.
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,
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: What are the common types of regrets people experience?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, so let's talk about that. You say that you discovered regret has both a surface structure and a deep structure, right? So one is really easy to see, easy to describe, and the other one is not so easy. So talk to us about that.
Okay, perfect. You got it exactly right. So let me be less abstract. Let me be concrete here. Okay, here we go.
Okay.
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Chapter 4: How does our understanding of regret influence personal growth?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Mm-hmm.
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Chapter 5: What are foundation regrets and how do they affect us?
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