Transcript of Daniel Pink: Turn Your Biggest Regrets Into the Ultimate Self-Improvement Tool | Human Behavior | YAPClassic

Hey, App Fam, you know that voice in your head that says, ugh, I wish I did this differently? That voice of regret that most of us just ignore. Well, today's guest says that voice is actually trying to help you. Daniel Pink is the bestselling author of multiple books, and today he's gonna be talking about regret and teaching us how regret can make us better, bolder, and more intentional. So listen in, App Fam. It's time to stop running from regret and start learning from it with Daniel Pink. Welcome back to Young and Profiting Podcast, Daniel.

Hey, it's great to be here, Hala. Thanks for having me.

Yes, I'm super excited for this conversation. So last time you were on the show, it was back in December of 2019. It was for episode number 50. It was called The Science of Perfect Timing. And that episode was actually one of my all-time favorite episodes on YAP. Everybody who listened to it loved it. And I have a feeling this conversation is gonna be equally as good because in my opinion, you are the epitome of what a great podcast guest is. You're so knowledgeable. There's no fluff when you talk. Everything is backed up by science and research. And so you are the ideal YAP guest for that reason. And here at YAP, we love to go super deep on a specific topic. Today's focus is gonna be on regrets. You are the author of 7 books and your latest book is called The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. So let's jump right into this topic of regret. Last time you were on the show, we covered your career journey extensively. So anybody who's tuning in and interested in that can go back to episode number 50. I highly recommend that episode. And so Daniel, I'm pretty familiar with with your work.

And usually you write a book because you're very curious about the topic yourself and you start to research that topic. You call this me-search. So let's start there. What was the genesis of this book, The Power of Regret, and what initially got you curious about this topic?

Well, once again, I've fallen down the trap of me-search because that's what this is again. So, well, here's what happened. So I, uh, in 2019, I had one of those moments in life that you, you get to when you get to be my age, I'm in my fifties and I had a kid graduate from college. So that's kind of a jarring experience because you, you wonder like, how did that kid grow up so fast? And, and how am I possibly old enough to have a kid who's graduating from college? And, and in, in the course of this college graduation, which was very long and lengthy, and my daughter's last name starts with P, there was a lot of waiting around, you know, inevitably your mind wanders. And as my mind was wandering, my thoughts I turned to my own college experience and I started thinking about what I regretted. I re— there were a lot of things I regretted. I wish I had worked harder. I, I wish I had been kinder. I wish I had been a little gutsier, you know, taking more risks. So these thoughts were kind of, you know, 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 cuz it's taboo.

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, that it was a kind of topic that, that there was this kind of dam breaking that people said, oh my God, you have that regret. I have that regret too. Let you know. And they wanted to talk about it. And it was, and I think what's interesting from a writer's perspective is that sometimes I'll raise an idea or concept and people are like, okay, that's nice. All right. Whatever. Uh, you know, what are we having for dinner? And, and that's, that happens a lot. And that's cool. But this is one where. People like literally, and I mean this literally, I mean the literal definition of literal. Okay. They leaned in, that is their bodies moved forward in, in wanting to discuss this. And that's a very good sign. And so that took me on this 2-year, 2.5-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.

Yeah. And I feel like I learned so much in this book. Like you said, regret is, is this like kind of misunderstood emotion. And to my surprise, it's very complex and it actually springs from an internal cognitive process. And so in the book, you talk about how humans are kind of like time travelers because our brains have the ability to revisit the past and invent these alternative narratives and scenarios. And so I thought that was really fascinating. Can you explain that to us?

So when we think about what regret is, I mean, it's certainly an emotion and it's emotion that makes us feel bad. But it's also a process that is, and we should kind of be in awe of our ability to process regret. When you think about it exactly as you said, Ka— Hala, when you think about it cognitively, you, you think about what you're doing with regret. Let's use my example. So I say, you know, 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. I negate what really happened, which was kind of being a little bit of a wimp. I think about something and I replace that truth. With a counterfactual. So let's say that I was playing a club-level sport, all right. Rather than just wimp out. All right. Instead of phoning it out, I'm gonna try to become like a very skilled basketball player and risk the injuries and risk the, the, the feelings of stupidity and not being good enough and whatnot, rather than just retreat. All right. So I go back and negate that.

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, you know, coaching a basketball team, or I'm a better leader because I had more experience with a team sport or something like that. 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. Uh, this is one reason why regret is a milestone in our development. That is, little kids can't do this. 5-year-olds don't experience regret cuz they can't think counterfactually. Uh, 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.

Yeah. And I wanna dig deeper on counterfactuals cuz you brought it up and it was a term that I've never heard of until I started reading your book. And it's super interesting. So talk to us about counterfactuals and the main ones and maybe give us some examples.

So basically what it means is that our brains allow us to imagine a scenario that runs counter to the actual facts. So, you know, you can go backward and say, if only I had married Fred instead of Bob. All right. And so, wow, how would my life be different? There are two kinds of counterfactuals here. Okay. So I know you guys like to go deep. So there are two kinds of counterfactuals, uh, that are really important. Uh, one of them is what I call a, what, what, what would you can call a downward counterfactual. Okay. So you imagine how things could have been worse. All right. So you say, uh, 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. All right. Um, so at least at, so at least make us feel better. Now there's another kind of counterfactual, um, if onlys. All right. That's an upward counterfactual where you can imagine how things could have gotten better. It 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, um, 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 make us help us do better in the future. Because they make us feel worse. Hmm.

And regret is an if only feeling, right?

Totally. You're right. Regret is the quintessential if only. It makes us feel worse. This is why it's paradoxical, Hala. 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, the reason for that is that regret is unpleasant, but what we also know from, again, you know, if you look at 50 or 60 years of research in neuroscience, in cognitive science, in developmental psychology, which I mentioned before in, um, 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 5 years old, which I guess that's not a bad sign. Like you'll, you know, you gotta grow up. Um, 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 the, and, and, 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, it's kind of a survival instinct. I imagine it makes our lives better in the end.

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? Okay. It must do something. It must have some benefit to us. Right. And you got it exactly right. The benefit that it has is that 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, on many things. And here's the key. If we reckon with our regrets properly. We don't ignore them. We don't put our— 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. All right. We use them as signal, as information, as evidence, as, as data. When we do that again, We have that, 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, um, session. Then they, they do their negotiation. They come out, the, the experimenter 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, right? What happens next? They do better in the next negotiation. It helps us become better problem solvers. Uh, 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. Uh, it helps us find greater meaning in life. 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.

When I was studying you, I heard that one of the main reasons why you went on this journey is because you heard this like no regrets kind of philosophy and culture that was going on, how everybody just wanted to be positive. You know, you're supposed to just, accept your journey for what it is and never look back about the mistakes you made and just everything happens for a reason type mentality. So let's talk about that before we go even deeper on regrets and how to like, you know, evaluate them right or wrong ways to do that. But let's talk about that first. What's wrong with the no regrets worldview?

Okay. There's a lot wrong with it. And, and, but I'm gonna try to be kinder and gentler in, in, in how I, and how I bash it. The problem is that it is a woefully misguided philosophy for a life well lived. Uh, and the reason for that is this. I, I'll give you an example of it. All right. So I have the people who I wrote about, you know, from the book who get these tattoos that say no regrets. 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 know, like, like you gotta believe in something to have it tattooed on your body. Right. So, so, but here's the thing. 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 the, 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.

We, and, and I think it's an American problem more than others. We Americans have a problem with negative emotions. We don't know what to do with them. Here's the thing. Just go back. Just 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. Okay? Positive emotions are great. Gratitude and joy and elation, and they're great. Okay? 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. All right? 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. Do I want to go— if somebody, if somebody knocks at my office door, some weird person knocks at my office door and goes, hey Dan, I'll give you a, um, a, uh, an operation.

Okay.

We're gonna open up your head, but it's gonna be completely no, no pain. We're gonna seal it back up perfectly. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna do a little tweak in your brain to ensure that you never experience fear again in your life. Do you want that? Do I want that operation? Absolutely.

Absolutely not.

Of course not. Because I don't, cuz, cuz when I'm in a burning building, I wanna experience fear so I get the hell out. Right? Like it, it's helpful. Again, I don't wanna be burdened by fear. I don't wanna experience fear all my, all the time. That's debilitating. I don't wanna experience, you know, think about an emotion like grief. The reason we experience grief is be, is because we experience love. Okay. So I don't wanna banish grief. I don't wanna banish negative emotions. I want to actually reckon with them. And 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, when, when you line up the emotions, all right, when you line up our negative emotions, you know, we're gonna do a little police lineup, fear, guilt, shame, you know, but you know, all that, 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-indexed on positivity.

We think we have to be positive all the time. And when we, and when we're not, when we're not, uh, 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, that's terrible because not only does it make me, is it inherently like 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.

Yeah. And like you said, regret is so common and it's universal and it's normal, right? It's a normal feeling to have. It's just about how you manage it, how you process it, and what you do with that information.

Amen.

So in this book, you did a lot of research yourself, but there was also years of research prior to that about regrets and the common regrets that people have. So can you talk to us about the research that was available before you started and then maybe why you ended up doing more research and what you found?

Yeah. So, um, 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, the big— this is American sample— the, the, that Americans, oh, they have education regrets. Education is the biggest regret that Americans have. Scientists believe that for 20 years. And then some, 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 these, these re— all this research in hospitals, or maybe health would be the greatest regret. If you had done it in banks, maybe, you know, whatever. So it's like, huh, maybe there's not something there. And so in, 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, that's the lay of the land. And so I said, I'm gonna 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 over 4,500 Americans modeling the, the, the sample, sort of, or 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. All right. 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, 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.

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 So easy. So talk to us about that. Okay, perfect.

That's exact. You got it exactly right. So we're looking at these, uh, 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. I mean, here's a weird one. It's like, uh, from, 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, like even if you Google, if you not Google, but if you go into the database and search a phrase like study abroad, you get like hundreds of hits. I couldn't, it's crazy. So, okay. So that's an education regret. Okay. People say, ah, I, 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 da da da da da da da. And now I wish I had taken that, you know, now I wish I had studied abroad.

I've heard that so many times too, which is just so random that I've heard that regret so many times.

But you know what? It's a big deal, man. You know, I have to say I was blown away by that. I actually think that there is a, I would say, and this is, you know, for the entrepreneurial YAP listeners out there, I, I think there's a bit, there's a business, um, 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, I really think there's a, there's a viable business in there, but okay. So, 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 really wanted to, 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. 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. 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. So on the surface, it's career is different from romance is different from, um, uh, 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 Bolder regrets are one of 4 of these deep structure core regrets that people all over the world seem to have.

Yeah. And I, I feel like it makes sense to go through all 4 of them and then I have some other questions, uh, about them.

Okay. So we got, so we got the bonus regrets. One category are what I call foundation regrets. Foundation regrets are if only, cuz 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. Um, and now I don't have enough money and, or now I'm broke. Um, surprising number of regrets about people who didn't work hard enough in school. Ugh, 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. Uh, a lot of regrets about, about health in this way too. If only I had eaten better, if only I had exercised, 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. Um, again, these small decisions, like no single one is, is cataclysmic. It's like, oh, I ate, you know, I ate a whole bag of Cheetos once.

All right. That, that's like, people don't regret that. They, they, they, they regret eating unhealthily for a year, 2 years, 5 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. Uh, cuz I think most of us are good and want to be good. And when we not good, we feel crappy about it. And so these are regrets that people have about, oh my gosh, the two big ones here, marital infidelity.

Woo.

I had a lot of people like basically confessing on this World Regret Survey. It was like an online confessional. Uh, 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, third, fourth category, connection regrets. Connection regrets are about relationships, uh, and not only romantic relationships and, and really not even mostly romantic relationships, just the full suite of relationships in our lives. Um, 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 and, or should have been intact, was intact, and it comes apart. And I think what's interesting is that if, again, if you read story after story, oh, 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. They say, I was such good friends with Hala 10 years ago and I haven't talked to her for so long.

Yeah, 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 gonna be so awkward cuz I haven't talked to her for 10 years. It's gonna be so awkward. I don't wanna do that. And besides, She won't care. So I don't do anything. And then 2 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 gonna care even less. And so we don't do anything. And the, and sometimes it's too late. Um, and so, and that's a big mistake. Let me just double-click on that for a moment. 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, like way less awkward than we 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. Awkwardness is not a strong enough signal to stop you from doing something.

Second thing is that we say people, uh, but Hala's not gonna care. People are, people almost always welcome it. We're completely wrong on both fronts. We think it's gonna be awkward and they're not gonna care. And when we do it, it's not awkward and they always care. So connection regrets are, if only I had reached out. So let me quickly summarize those. Um, we've got foundation regrets, if only I'd 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. And it's that deep structure that really matters. That deep structure is really universal. You see these every, in every country, at every age, at every gender identity.

Yeah. And you know, if I remember correctly, connection requests are the most common regret. And I think especially in COVID, this is relevant. I think a lot of us, you know, weren't hanging out with our friends for a couple years. A lot of our friends moved away. I feel like this is your sign, guys, if you're thinking of an old old friend that you haven't talked to in a while, make sure you reach out to them. You know, don't have any regrets about that. So I'd love to hear about inaction and action and what we need to know about that in terms of regret.

I'll give you a little bit of insight in how the sausage is made. So at one point I had a chapter called The Rules of Regret, where I was gonna say, unpack, 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 5 rules or 7 rules or whatever? And so I have this giant full, I'm fairly, I'm sort of a mix of like digital and analog. I still use a fair amount of paper cuz I prefer to read on paper. I use pencil and I, you know, do that kind of stuff. So I have this like these giant bulging folders of research and I was like, okay, I'm gonna crack the code. I'm gonna 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. 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.

All right. And, um, and, and here there is a, there is a distinct difference in age. Okay. In my American Regret Project, which is a giant public opinion poll, I, I put together such a large sample in order to try to find demographic differences in what people regretted. So thinking that whites would have different from, uh, regrets from people of color, people with lot, lots of formal education would've 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: 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. 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 3 to 1 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 love them. I regret that I didn't stand up to an injustice. That's what we regret. Inaction over action as we get older.

And I'm curious to understand, because you did all this research, you heard about so many different regrets. You really started to understand the science behind it and why we have regrets. What were some of the big life lessons that you learned about it that aren't, may not really be scientific or anything, but just life lessons that you're gonna carry through?

This is, 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 to that juncture, that you have the answer to the question, reach out. Truly, when in doubt, reach out. If you arrive at that juncture and you're wondering, the question is answered. Always reach out. I, I'm dead serious about that. There is, there is, I've seen too many, I've heard too many stories where it didn't happen and, and, and, and then something horrible, uh, arises and. It ends up not being possible. Somebody dies. I have so many stories like that. Always reach out. I'll give you another one, Andy. Let's go, 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. Um, that is for, you know, so, so for just like for trying stuff.. Um, and again, it goes to the awkwardness. So, so, so, I, I, I think that awkwardness is a, is a, is, is a weak excuse. All right.

Um, I think fear is a stronger excuse. I think feelings of awkwardness, do what you can to push past those. Um, uh, sort of a bias for action. I'm a happily married guy from, of, uh, of 27 years, but I'll give you, I'll give everybody who's listening, all the YAP listeners, some romantic advice. Okay. Ask the person out. All right. If I'm dead serious, if you're wondering whether he, she, or they, you should ask him, him, her, or, or them out, do it, 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. You're exactly where you were before you asked. But here's the thing. Now, you know, and you've, you've taken your shot. So I think, you know, if there's one takeaway here is that ask the person out, just slight bias, slight bias for action. Don't take awkwardness as a meaningful, as a meaningful signal. Um, always reach out. The other thing is I'll give you one, I'll give you one more life lesson here too, is that there's something to be said for, um, you know, when you're making a decision to consult your future self.

So if you're stuck, you know, another thing to do would be, you know, call the, you know, 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, think about, you know, let's say that you're, let's say that you're 28 years old. All right. If you're at a juncture and you think, God, should I do this unethical thing or should I not? I guarantee you, if, unless you're like, you know, 98% of us, 38-year-old you wants you to do the right thing. So that's another, You know, if you're stuck, you know, think about what the you of 10 years from now wants you to want you to do. And the you of 10 years from now is really looking out for your best interest. And here's the thing. 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, the me of 10 years from now isn't gonna care what I have for dinner tonight. It isn't gonna care what t-shirt I wore today, but it is gonna care.

Did I do the work and build a stable foundation for myself, for my family, for my team? It is gonna care of, did I use my, you know, opportunity, this vanishingly short amount of time that I'm alive to like learn and grow and do something and contribute? It's gonna care if I, 10 years from now, if I do the wrong thing, I have to confront the me of 2032, who's gonna be wagging his finger at me saying, shame on you. Why'd you do the wrong thing? And it's gonna care if I don't reach out and build relationships of, of love and connection and affinity and belonging.. And, um, you know, and, and again, it's not, it's not super complicated, but it, but I think the cool thing is, is that this emotion that we, that we often try to avoid is giving us this very, very clear window into what makes life worth living.

Yeah. And I feel like for me, the big kind of takeaway that I'm getting from all this is having this bias for action, because like you said, the biggest regret is inaction. And we can't, most of the time, if we do something and we find out the answer, we're not looking back. Back and saying, if only this, if only that, you just, that's what happened and you just get over it and move on and you don't ruminate and think about it forever. So speaking about ruminating, there's right ways and wrong ways to deal with regret and dealing with regret is critical for us, like moving in a positive way forward in our lives. So talk to us about the right way and the wrong way to deal with regret.

The wrong way is pretty obvious. The wrong way is to simply ignore it. That's a totally bad idea. All right. And it doesn't work over the long term. Uh, another bad idea is to wallow in it, um, is to stew over it. And so, so the right way to do it is to try to avoid especially that second path. And the way I look at this, this process is, is, is inward, outward, forward, inward, outward, forward. Cause the first step is to, is to look inward. So let's say you have a regret or even more broadly, you make it, you make a mistake. The way in the face of regrets, in the face of mistakes and screw-ups, the way we talk to ourselves is incredibly harsh. Like if you looked at, if you listen to like people's self-talk, it's brutal. You listen to my self-talk, you'd think I was a lunatic. You know, the way I talk to myself is just, is just cruel. I would never talk to anybody else that way. And what the science tells us is don't do that. Um, there's very little. Evidence that that's effective in enhancing your performance.

And a better technique than self-laceration is what's called self-compassion, which is work pioneered by Kristin Neff at the University of Texas about 20 years ago. And the principle's 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, But don't— there's no, that's not true, 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, any YAP listener out there who has a regret, I'll find almost the identical regret in my database in 90 seconds. Okay. Like it's part of the human condition. And the also thing that I think is really important is that a regret is A moment in your life. It's not the full measure of your life. We sometimes will make these, 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. Um, it's not accidental that 21,000 people around the world told a complete stranger their big regret.

'Cause I 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, you know, sort of uncorked this bottle where, you know, people want to talk about it. And, um, but the, the other thing I think is, is, is actually really important is that has to go, goes back to emotions. Um, and, and how we deal with emotions. Emotions by their very nature are abstract. They're, they're, 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, when we, or even when we, we don't have to even tell anybody else. When you write about them privately, we take this abstraction and make it concrete that we, we, we turn it from these blobby thing into concrete words, which are less menacing. And, um, it helps us make the sense making, begin the sense making process inward, outward, forward. And then the mo— the other thing that's really important though, So we reframe inward, we express outward, but we also have to move forward.

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 your, our own problems. So a really good technique is essentially to, it, 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, in the second person. What should you do? Or even better, your third person. What should, you know, you, if you yourself talk to me, what should Holly do? Not what should I do? What should Holly do? I gotta tell you the single, 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? Whenever you, Whenever we do that, 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. And I say, what would you tell your best friend to do? And they say, oh, well, I tell her bobbity bobbity bah. And it's like, all right, you kind of answered the question there.

So, um, for, for your, for the business people in the, in your audience, um, Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, has a brilliant, had a brilliant technique where he said he was, 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. And so, so, 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 we can then, you know, instead of getting, instead of trying to bat away this negative emotion or getting brought down by it, We basically, you know, hop on it at like a surfboard and ride it, ride it into, um, better health, higher productivity, more meaning in life. Um, and more effectiveness, especially at work.

Yeah. I'm curious, why is it so much easier to give advice to other people and to like kind of pretend that you're giving advice to your best friend? Like, why is it so hard to give advice to yourself?

We're too caught up in the details of our life. We, at some level, we know too much. And that blinds us from the big picture. You know, it's like, it's like trying to understand, okay, I, I wanna study the ocean and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna become, I'm gonna scuba dive. All right. To try to understand the ocean. It's like, well, now I'm immersed in everything. If you really wanna understand, like, what does the ocean look like? Where are its, what are its boundaries? How's it configured? You wanna be an oceanographer. You wanna get up like in a helicopter and go above there. Uh, 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, we see the big picture. We see what's, we see what's really going on. We can bring those techniques to bear on our own problems, but we have to be deliberate and intentional about that. Even that thing that I suggested before about, uh, talking to yourself 10 years from now, that's a, that's a form of self-distancing. Two takeaways from this.

All right. For your listeners. One, ask them out. Two, if you're stuck on a decision, ask yourself, what would I tell my best friend to do? And then do that.

Yeah, I think that's really good advice. And so regret is a very negative emotion. People don't like to feel that way. Sometimes they, they wallow in their regret. And you talk about something called mental subtraction that can help us feel better in the moment when we're having a regret. Could you explain that to us?

So I, I, I give you an education regret of mine, which is that I regret having, uh, gone to law school, um, in general and probably gone to law school when I did. Okay. That's not like, that's not a cataclysmic regret. It's not my biggest regret, but I, it's, it's illustrative here. Okay. But here's the thing. I met my wife in law school. So what I can do is I can say, well, I'm gonna, 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've met my wife. I don't wanna live in that world. All right. I, I'm, I'm willing. And, and so it's a way to find a silver lining, particularly in action and action regrets. And this is, this is, this goes back to this, this hidden, this architecture with action regrets. We can find the silver lining. We can, we can, we can at least them, we can see a benefit in them. All right. Which is why we can process them and make, and make sense of them. Some action regrets. We can also undo. So those people who I talk, this, those, all those people who have bullying regrets, moral 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. 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 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 and inaction regrets dominate.

This is so interesting, Daniel. So let's wrap up the conversation. And I feel like a good way to round this out is to talk about the benefits of dealing with our regrets and the benefits of regrets in general. How can us, you know, doing what you just mentioned, you know, self-distancing, analyzing, trying to change our behaviors based on our regrets, how can that actually help us in life?

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, uh, are, are like a, a reverse image of a life well lived of, of a good life. And what we know is what people want out of what people want out of life in general is, you know, foundation regrets are they want a degree of stability. Uh, a good life is not precarious. They want, um, boldness is about the chance to learn and grow and do something and not like waste your time here and just do something. Uh, moral regrets are about goodness and, and, and, uh, connection regrets are ultimately about love. And so as you think through your, your decisions, you can anticipate your future regrets. 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 be, 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 take, you should really like maximize on, but the other stuff, Good enough is good enough. Um, you know, like, 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. Future you is not gonna care this year, whether you bought a blue car or a gray car. Future me, as I said earlier, is not gonna care whether I wore that blue shirt today or I wore a yellow shirt today. There's so many, think about, 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. And so if we really focus our efforts and our attention on, on these kinds of things, on building a solid foundation, on learning and growing, on being good and moral and truthful and doing the right thing and on building relationships of You know, love and belonging. I think that regret gives us this path to do things better.

I, I give you one other tip here that I think is useful, cuz again, less, less abstract and more practical. One of the, one of the most useful things to do is, 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 'em what you learned from it and tell 'em what you're gonna 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. It's part of the human being.

Yeah. And Young and Profits, I loved his book, The Power of Regrets. So make sure you guys go get that. There's lots of exercises that you can do to understand what your regrets are, how to deal with them. So I highly recommend that. I'll put that in the show notes. Daniel, I always ask the same two questions at the end of the show for all of our guests. Then we do something fun at the end of the year. So the first one is, what is one actionable thing that our Young and Profits can do today to become more profiting tomorrow?

Listen more and talk less. 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. Uh, we don't actually work hard at listening. We, no one has ever taught us how to listen. You know, when we're in elementary school, they teach us how to read and that, you know, they teach us how to write, but no one ever teaches us how to listen. They think, cuz we have ears, we know how to listen. And most of us are not very good listeners. And so. One way to listen better is to talk less and listen more.

I love that. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And profiting does not need to be related to finances.

It's gonna sound strange, but I think it's, uh, to be generous, um, to help other people, to, you know, to use a Boy Scout thing, to, to leave the, to leave the campsite better than you found it. Um, 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, but more than anything else, it, it allows you to look at your life and on a, on a day, on a week and say, I did something. I contributed. I made the world a little bit better.

I love that. And where can our listeners go learn more about you and everything that you do?

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.

Amazing. We're gonna link all that in the show notes. Dan, thank you again for coming on Young and Profiting Podcast.

Always a pleasure.