Look Back To Move Forward w/ Daniel Pink

If you’re a human being, then you’re familiar with the emotion of REGRET. It is IMPOSSIBLE to go through life and not experience regret. Those are the FACTS. The good news is that regret, when managed properly, is HEALTHY. It serves as a COUNTERBALANCE and as a TEACHER. You LEARN more from the things you don’t do and second guess later, than those things you undertake in life. This week, you’re not going to have any regrets when you hear what DANIEL PINK has to say about the topic of regret. Dan’s new book, THE POWER OF REGRET is a deep exploration of how looking backward moves us forward. By the time you’re done listening to Dan’s insights, you’ll know exactly why regret is an often MISUNDERSTOOD EMOTION, and how you use insights into your own regrets to flip the script and lead your BEST LIFE. This is one of seven books Dan has written, including FIVE that are NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERS. His work is so universal that those books have been translated into 42 LANGUAGES and sold millions of copies around the world. He is noted for delving into several parts of the human condition, ranging from CREATIVITY and BEHAVIOR to MOTIVATION, good TIMING, and how to enjoy more CAREER SUCCESS. However, this week, we’re focusing exclusively on regret, and we cover a lot of ground, including:- Four primary human regrets (foundational, boldness, moral, and connection/relationships)- What counterfactual thinking is- How to anticipate and minimize regret- Options for responding to regret- The five sins of regret…and why people get stuck living in regret and how to break out of negative traps so you can start moving forward again. Dan also discusses how to adopt a JOURNEY MINDSET and how to avoid creating a circle of regret validation. It’s not a question of whether or not regret will strike, it’s a matter of HOW YOU’RE GOING TO RESPOND when it does. Daniel Pink has got essential answers you’ll need to navigate those times when regret comes into your life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ed Mylett?

  I hear so many small business owners say the exact same thing. They just never have enough time in the day. Well, I measure time differently. I've compressed, condensed, heck, I've bent time. My first day is 6:00 AM to noon. My second day starts at noon and goes till 6:00 PM. And my third day, 6:00 PM to midnight. I now get 21 days a week. Stack that up over a month, over a year, over five years, and my life's completely different than it would have been otherwise. And if you want to win as an entrepreneur, you have to compress your time too. And you definitely can't afford to waste it. Waiting weeks on a big bank for capital? Your best bet's to work with my friends at Cardiff. They know how to compress time for entrepreneurs. They get your business approved in minutes and funded the very same day. They're America's favorite small business lender, and for good reason.

• 0:45Ed Mylett?

  Over 20 years in business, over 12 billion deployed to small business across America. Stop letting bank delays slow down your momentum. Head to cardiff.co/ed. That's cardiff.co/ed. Cardiff.co. Real growth, fast funding. Cardiff, borrow better.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company, for me, of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  This is the Ed Mileage Show.

• 1:41Ed Mylett?

  Hey, welcome back to the show, everybody. Today is gonna be a really enlightening day for so many of you, because when I read this man's book, it was for me. And so I'm really, really honored to be able to share his thoughts with you. Daniel Pink is my guest today, five times New York Times bestselling author. Guys, by the way, that is not an easy thing to do. And five times, this will be six probably. And I gotta tell you, his background is so diverse and fascinating. We may be able to get into that a little bit. But the book that he wrote is called The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. And when I first heard the title of the book, I was telling Daniel, I go, ah, I'm not having him on. I don't think I agree with the premise of this thing at all. And then I started to read it and it's groundbreaking work. It's stuff you've never heard before.

• 2:25Ed Mylett?

  So if you've got any regrets in your life, or maybe you've been told before, don't ever look back because then you're not looking forward. I think you'll find out that maybe some of that advice may be contrary to what Daniel will share with you and now really what I believe. So Daniel, welcome to the show.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  Ed, thanks so much for having me.

• 2:40Ed Mylett?

  Oh, man, this is so great.

• 2:41Speaker 04

  Thanks for, and thanks for taking time to push past your skepticism. I appreciate that.

• 2:46Ed Mylett?

  Well, I told you, I read the book cover to cover. I read it in a day and a half, and it is a great book, everybody. And I have to tell you, because there's so many things in there that about framing and regret and that I just really had never thought about before. So let's start, first of all, with your overall premise. Why is regret not such a bad thing?

• 3:04Speaker 04

  Well, because, because regret is a human thing more than anything else. Everybody has regrets. It is one of our most common emotions of any kind. It's arguably our most common negative emotion. And even though I don't like regret, even though it's painful, you have to wonder, why is something that is so kind of unpleasant so pervasive? And the answer is because it's useful if we treat it right. And that's the problem, just as you were saying at the top, Ed, that, that this advice that we should never have regrets is nonsense. The advice that we should never look back is nonsense. The advice that we should always be positive is nonsense. What we need to do is get past this false courage of saying no regrets and actually demonstrate real courage by looking our regrets in the eye and doing something about them.

• 3:49Speaker 04

  And, and the science tells us how to do that.

• 3:52Ed Mylett?

  Well, that's the thing. I love you, I love that you said the word science because that's, the book is really not just some philosophy.

• 3:57Speaker 04

  No, no, I don't have any, I don't have any philosophy. I look at the evidence.

• 4:01Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, and we, and it's, it's almost this conversion, you say in the book of like biology, psychology, neuroscience, all in one. And it's, I think it's more the way in which we look back and the processes through which we do it, the filter, the lens, how we process the information is what you really share in the book. So there's, he does these two significant studies that he quotes in the book that are really fascinating about regret, the American regret project. Which is an interesting name for a study. And then the World Regret Survey, it's like 16,000 people in 105 countries. And what you uncover in this thing is that there's basically like four human regrets overall. Why don't you share with us what those are?

• 4:37Speaker 04

  Sure thing. Yeah, yeah. Then thanks for mentioning those pieces of research because again, you know, I do think, you know, I said at the top, like how I appreciate you're pushing past the skepticism. And I think that when, when anybody makes a claim about anything in any of our books, you know, the books that you write or the books that I write or anything. You have to, I think that you want to approach it with generous skepticism and say, how do you know? You know, you're making this thing, how do you know? And so what I, the reason I know this is because I've done, I've looked at about 60 years of science and all those fields that you mentioned. I also did this piece of research called the American Regret Project, which is the largest public opinion survey of American attitudes of regret ever conducted. And I also collected a lot of regrets in this World Regret Project.

• 5:19Speaker 04

  In fact, we're now over, amazingly, we're now over 19,000 regrets from 109 countries. So it's crazy. And so, and so anyway, with that as a backdrop, let me tell you what I found is that I and others had initially looked at what people regret by looking at the areas of life in which they occurred. So I have a career regret, I have an education regret, I have a health regret. And what I found, as you said, is something deeper going on underneath. So the World Regret Survey, the qualitative piece where I've collected just this amazing number of regrets, I found that over and over again around the world, people had the same four regrets. So let me quickly go through them. One, foundation regrets, if only I'd done the work. These are people who regret, who made small, bad decisions early that accumulated into

• 6:02Speaker 04

  bad consequences later on. Smoking, not so much in the United States, but elsewhere. Bad health decisions, other bad health decisions, not working hard enough in school. A lot of people who spent too much and saved too little. That's foundation. Second. Boldness regrets, big category. If only I'd taken the chance. These are people who didn't ask out somebody on a date 20 years ago, who still bugs them. People who didn't start a business, people who didn't speak up, people who didn't travel. That's boldness regrets. Third category, moral regrets. Small category, but really interesting and really painful to people, which is, if only I'd done the right thing. These are people who bullied, who cheated on their spouse, who cheated a business partner,

• 6:45Speaker 04

  who hurt other people. Fourth category, connection regrets. If only I'd reached out. These are about relationships, all kinds of relationships, not only romantic relationships. In fact, mostly not romantic relationships, just a full suite of relationships that we have in our lives that come apart. People want to reach out, they don't because they think it's going to be awkward, and then the relationship drifts apart even more, and then they regret it even more, and sometimes it's too late. And so those are the four things, over and over again, it's remarkable, out around the world, that people seem to regret.

• 7:19Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, and when you look back, you say that, you use the word counterfactuals

• 7:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:25Ed Mylett?

  in the book, and it stood out to me because essentially what I think, I want you to elaborate on that, but yeah, these things where you talk about at least and if only, that's one way to process it, which I think is a tool for everybody to hear right now. But also, you basically say that sometimes we're telling ourselves a story that never even actually happened.

• 7:41Speaker 04

  Oh, completely.

• 7:43Ed Mylett?

  This is fascinating to me because I completely agree with you.

• 7:46Speaker 04

  Well, no, but I mean, what you're getting at is just how freaking amazing our brains are. I mean, the ability to even, if you think about the ability to, the ability to regret something requires incredible mental cognitive dexterity and speed and muscularity. It's one reason why, say, five-year-olds don't experience regret, because their brains haven't developed enough. It's also why people with certain kinds of brain lesions, brain lesions in the orbital frontal cortex, that disturbs their ability to do this kind of thinking, certain kinds of, and it's sometimes Huntington's patients and Parkinson's patients show the same thing. And so our brains are kind of amazing, if you think about what regret does, and we'll get to counterfactual thinking.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  So think about just what regret is. Let's say that I regret, um, let's not making me. Let's take, let's take somebody who regrets not starting a business and staying in a lackluster job. Okay, so then let's call her Maria. So Maria, uh, so what does Maria do to have that regret? First of all, she goes back in time. She gets in her time machine in her head. Beep, she zips back in time to maybe 10 years ago when she was contemplating starting a business. And now she didn't really start a business, so she's gonna negate what really happened. She's gonna do something counter to the facts there. All right, so she does that. That's an incredible form of storytelling right there. It's like, I'm gonna pretend that what really happened didn't happen and the opposite happened. But even more than that, I'm gonna get back in my time machine.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  Beep, zip back to the present and realize that the present is now reconfigured because of what I just did in the imagined past. It's crazy, you know? And so counterfactual thinking is a big part of how we, how we think, how we process in the world. And as you say, there are these two types of counterfactual thinking. One of them is what's called a downward counterfactual. A downward counterfactual is imagining how things could have been better. I like to call those, as you say, and at least. Um, and so this is why, for instance, bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists. Because bronze medalists say, oh, at least I didn't, I'm so pumped, I finished third. At least I didn't finish fourth like that schmo over there who didn't even get a medal.

• 9:56Speaker 04

  Right, so that's, so at least, the thing about at least, downward counterfactuals, at least. At least make us feel better, all right? And so, so I took this terrible job, but at least I made some money. They make us feel better, um, and that's okay. If only's are the other, are the other way, are the other form of counterfactual thinking. Where we do an upward counterfactual. We imagine, again, a world that runs counter to the facts, where things are better. Um, and if that's, if only I had started that business. And if only's make us feel worse. But here's the thing. If only's make us do better if we treat them right. At least make us feel better, but they don't really help us do better.

• 10:38Speaker 04

  If only's help us make us feel worse and make us do better. In fact, they make us do better in large part because they make us feel worse. Because that feeling worse is a signal that something has gone awry.

• 10:50Ed Mylett?

  Okay, this is part of the brilliant part of the work. I'll get the ages wrong probably, but you do say in the book that, you know, five-year-olds haven't developed the ability to do it.

• 10:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 10:58Ed Mylett?

  They're like seven or so, I think. They actually begin to have the ability to anticipate regret.

• 11:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:04Ed Mylett?

  And this is fascinating to me because this part of, you know, the, the looking back and the if only's. But you're, you make a really great point that regret is healthy in the sense that if you begin to anticipate it, it may cause you to take different actions in the present. So let's go there.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 11:19Ed Mylett?

  Huge.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  Absolutely. That's a, that's a huge part of it. That is, again, that this is, this is, our time machine goes in multiple directions, right? So what we can do is we can, we can look forward and try to anticipate our regrets. Now, there's a lot of good research on this and, and, and it's tricky. Because a lot of times, we're not that good at forecasting. We're not that good at, we're particularly not very good at forecasting for ourselves. Uh, and so anticipating our regrets is a generally good idea, but it can go awry. We have to actually put some guardrails up there. So for instance, uh, let me give you an example that I, that I, that it still drives me nuts that people don't realize this, which is multiple choice tests. All right, multiple choice tests. So let's say you're taking a multiple choice test and you're on number seven.

• 12:04Speaker 04

  And you say, okay, number, it, answer is C on number seven. Then you go along, da, da, da, da, da, and you're on number 11 or 12. And you're like, wait a second, I think the answer to number seven might be A, not C. Do you switch your answer? Now, we have evidence on this. We have facts, okay? Again, how do you know? On this one, we have. Evidence that you're, not every time, obviously, but in general, in general, you're better off switching your answer. You're better about switching. You're always better off, not always, I mean, just as a matter of percentages. People are more likely to switch from a wrong answer to a right answer than they are to switch from a right answer to a wrong answer. But, people don't do that. Why? Because they anticipate the deep regret they'll feel if they switch from a right answer

• 12:49Speaker 04

  to a wrong answer, and that deep regret that they anticipate is less than the regret they anticipate from sticking with the wrong answer. And so, they do the suboptimal thing because they're not good at forecasting their regrets. Anyway, that said, so we've got to be careful about this. That said, there's another issue here, too. And forgive me for this preamble, but it'll make some sense once we get to the payoff. We can't anticipate every regret. That's, you'll drive yourself bonkers doing that. You know? So, I can't say, "Oh, my gosh, what shirt should I put on today? Should I put on my blue shirt, or should I put on my green shirt? Which will I regret more? What should I have for, what should I have for lunch?

• 13:33Speaker 04

  Should I have a tuna salad sandwich, or a quesadilla? Which will I regret more?" There's some interesting research on what's called maximizing and satisficing, that when we make decisions, some people want to maximize every decision. "I want the best hamburger, I want the best person to mow my lawn, I want the, I want the, the best color car." And if you maximize every decision, that is almost a guaranteed recipe for being miserable. Maximizers are miserable, because you can't maximize everything. You're always going to fall short, and you're exerting a huge amount of mental and psychic energy, and when every decision feels urgent and cataclysmic. So, what you're better off doing is what's called, on certain things, is what's called satisficing, which is just good enough.

• 14:15Speaker 04

  And, and so, in some ways, I think that, that in some ways, the lesson of life, because we know maximizers are miserable, and satisficers are often happier, is you've got to figure out in life, what do you maximize on, and what do you satisfice on? And, and I think that you maximize on a very small number of things, and here we go, here's where regret teaches us. We can make a pretty safe bet. That the me of 10 years from now anticipating my regrets. So we're going to talk to, we're going to talk to me in 2032. We're going to make a phone call to me in 2032 and say, hey, what are you regretting right now? I think the odds are zero that I will regret anything about what I had for lunch today. I think the odds are zero.

• 14:56Ed Mylett?

  Very good.

• 14:56Speaker 04

  The odds are zero that I will regret buying a blue car or a gray car or a green car, whatever. But I think we can make a very safe bet that I will regret some of the things we talked about. I will regret if I do something today that is the wrong thing to do. That is, I hurt somebody or I do something immoral. I will regret playing it too safe and not taking a sensible risk. I will regret not reaching out to someone. And, and it's like you maximize on those things as you anticipate your regrets. Try to avoid your connection regrets and your boldness regrets and your moral regrets. And just freaking chill out and satisfy something, everything else.

• 15:33Ed Mylett?

  It's so good. I do use the, as you just, I was reading the book, I'm like, I might do this more than the normal person.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 15:40Ed Mylett?

  This whole.

• 15:40Speaker 04

  In what way?

• 15:41Ed Mylett?

  I think it's healthy to anticipate regret. I think everything is regret in context. So I have this overall context, whatever your faith is, I'm a Christian, but whatever your faith is. When I pass away, I have this vision, this belief system that I'm going to meet the ultimate version of me, the destiny version of me, the guy who could have had the moments, the contribution, the memories, the emotions in his life. And I want to meet that guy. And so when I make decisions, I often process it because I, I'll regret if I don't become that guy.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 16:08Ed Mylett?

  Does making this decision move me closer to this person? Will I regret not making this choice or taking this action because ultimately it will put me closer to this person? Or will I regret this choice, this action, this decision? And it will move me further away from getting to this person. So I think oftentimes processing regret through the right context matters. My outcome is to meet that ultimate version of me, that destiny version of me. And so through that outcome and that context, I now make my choices and decisions based out of the regret one way or the other. Is it going to get me there or move me further away? Does that make sense?

• 16:40Speaker 04

  Makes perfect sense. It's actually a really smart idea. It's really, it's fascinating actually, um, Ed, in that one of the things that we know about decision making and, and, and problem solving is that when we try to make decisions for ourselves or solve problems for ourselves, we're generally. Pretty bad at it. And in some ways, we're too enmeshed in the details. And so, there's a lot of research on what's called self distancing. It's where you zoom out. And what you're describing here is actually, it's one I haven't heard of before, but it's actually a brilliant self distancing technique. Is sort of imagine meeting yourself. You're sort of, what you're doing is you're sort of imagine, you're self distancing. It's similar, it's like a first cousin of the, of talking to the you of 2032.

• 17:22Ed Mylett?

  Yes.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  But what you're doing here is actually even more interesting, because you're traveling into the future, but you're also talking to, in some ways, the ideal version of yourself.

• 17:31Ed Mylett?

  Very well said. Self distancing, I love that terminology, okay.

• 17:35Speaker 04

  Well, that's the key, that's the key. And so, you know, we're terrible at solving our own problems. And this is why when we deal with it, when we deal with our regrets, especially when we try to extract lessons from them, we're better off taking a, we're better off taking a step back. So, even things like, you know, when we're deciding what to do with regard to our regret, you know, for you saying, you know, instead of saying, "What should I do?", you should say, "What should Ed do?", you know? Use language of self distance.

• 18:00Ed Mylett?

  Okay, that was big right there. That's big, right there alone.

• 18:03Speaker 04

  It's not, that, listen, that's actually helpful. And there's a lot of research behind that. There's some really good stuff on how, if you're making a decision, ask yourself, "What would I tell my best friend to do?". And a lot of times when people are stuck making a decision, if they say, "What would you tell your best friend to do?", they know immediately. Because there's a great business technique. Andy Grove used, the former head of, former CEO of Intel, used this technique where he was stuck on a decision, and he would say, okay, again, his self distancing technique, "What would my successor do?". And in that case, he almost always knew. And so...

• 18:38Ed Mylett?

  Along those lines, would you elaborate on that? There's, you have a thing in there on Bezos.

• 18:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:42Ed Mylett?

  Something he does with regret that's pretty powerful.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  Well, what Bezos had, what Bezos had is, Bezos had the regret minimization principle, where he says that what you should do in making, you should make your decisions based on minimizing your future regrets. And that's right, to a point. But you can't minimize every single regret, all right? Because you're going to drive yourself nuts. What you should be doing, so I think of it as regret optimization. So, what you should be doing is, you should be... Making forward-thinking decisions to minimize these core regrets, the things we know most human beings are going to regret, not establishing a stable foundation, not taking a smart risk and growing and learning, not doing the right thing, and not connecting to others. And the rest of the stuff, I mean, truly, it doesn't matter. If you think about,

• 19:27Speaker 04

  I mean, just think about this, how many decisions you make in a day? And then go back 10 years from now, go back to whatever it is, you know, we're talking in March of 2022.

• 19:39Ed Mylett?

  Yep.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  So imagine March of 2012, you know, imagine a single day, a random day in March of 2012, how many decisions you made that day? And my guess is that you don't remember any of them.

• 19:50Ed Mylett?

  That's true.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  All right? But the ones that you will remember are the ones that actually affect these big four concerns.

• 19:57Ed Mylett?

  Big four is huge. And then you, some of these surveys, one of them, one of the big categories, I'm not talking about the college one either, the other one is like romantic ones are often huge regrets for people later in life, or ones that are significant. Overall, generally speaking, do people regret more things they did that they wish they didn't do, or things they didn't do? Meaning, not asking someone out, fighting for a relationship when it was broken up, you know, not making that investment. Overall, which one is more prevalent?

• 20:27Speaker 04

  When we're young, there, we have about equal numbers of action regrets and inaction regrets.

• 20:33Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  But once we hit about 30, in our 40s and 50s, 60s, 70s, action regrets totally take over. Action regrets, I'm sorry, inaction regrets totally take over. Inaction regrets are typically double action regrets. And so we're much, in general, we are much more likely to regret what we didn't do than what we did do. And there are all kinds of reasons for that.

• 20:54Ed Mylett?

  Yeah. You say in the book, just looking at this right now, it just made me, it flashed me, I, parts of the book, I'm like drawing on, you know, and that's how I know that's for me, the part of the book that stands out the most. And you say that there's basically three options. This is big, guys, right here. If you're driving, it's like pull over and write it down. If you're on the treadmill, mark this thing right here, right? There's three options for responding to regret. And I'll what you kind of go there because I think this is awesome.

• 21:21Speaker 04

  Sure, sure. So I mean, I think there's a there's a process by which you can you can deal with your regrets. And so, and this is actually important at a broad level. Here's the thing, I don't I don't want to go crazy here because I don't want to go overboard here because regret, just to be very clear, regret does not feel good. Okay, it's a negative emotion. It's never going to it's never going to feel great. It's always going to feel uncomfortable if not painful.

• 21:44Ed Mylett?

  Painful.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  And and so the question that becomes, what do you do with that? So a lot of us just ignore it. And that's a bad idea. There's no growth there. But some of us actually get debilitated by it and we wallow in it. We ruminate in it. We actually luxuriate in it. That's an even worse idea. What you want to do is you want to think about it. And and the problem is is that most of us haven't been taught how to do that systematically. And so to me, the way I look at this now is is that we should have a kind of a three step process. Inward outward forward inward outward forward. So inward, you should is how you reframe yourself and your regret. We should and basically the the TLDR here is treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt.

• 22:24Speaker 04

  The self talk that we use, the way we talk to ourselves is absurd. We are brutal and cruel in talking to ourselves. If we talk to anybody else, if we were in an organization and talk to other people the way we talk to ourselves, we would be fired.

• 22:40Ed Mylett?

  So true.

• 22:42Speaker 04

  I mean, it's ridiculous. So the solution there is don't do that. Instead, treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. This is something called self compassion. Recognize that your mistakes are part of the human condition. And that any mistake that you make is is just a moment in your life, not the full definition from your. So that's the inward look outward look. There's a lot to be said for disclosure. Disclosure is an unburdening. We fear that disclosure disclosing our regrets and vulnerabilities will make people think less of it, less of us. We have 30 years of behavioral science showing that in general, people think more of us for disclosing our vulnerabilities. And the other important thing is that when we this when we take our regrets and talk about them and write about them, we're converting this.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  Blobby emotional abstraction into concrete words. And those are less fearsome. And that helps us make sense of it. So that's and then finally, we were talking about before, you gotta extract a lesson from it. And the way you do that is you take a step back and you think about who the person you're gonna be, what the person you're gonna be in 10 years wants to do. You think about what you tell your best friend to do. You talk to yourself in the third person. You think about what your successor would do, any of those things. And so when we do that, it's not that hard. It becomes a habit. And so these regrets, the thing about it, at some level, what pisses me off is that we've sort of been sold a bill of goods. Where we say, the way, the effective blueprint for living is to never look backward and to say you have no regrets. And that's a bad idea.

• 24:07Speaker 04

  It's not bad philosophically, I mean, I think it is bad philosophically, but it's bad not because it's bad philosophically. It's bad because it runs against what 60 years of science tells us.

• 24:17Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  60 years of science tells us that everybody has regrets. And that done right, regrets can help us make better decisions, become better negotiators, become better strategists, become better problem solvers, become better parents, and find greater meaning in our life. And so when, so, so anybody who proclaims no regrets is sort of saying, no learning, no growth.

• 24:41Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, well, and you call in the book, you call it, I think, disclosure, compassion, and distance. It's like the three terms that you use to describe.

• 24:48Speaker 04

  Right, right, exactly, exactly. Self compassion is how you treat yourself. Self disclosure is sort of the unburdening. And then self distancing is what we talked about before. It's how you extract a lesson from it.

• 24:58Ed Mylett?

  I worry about people looking back in the sense that I think there's two types of people that look back. It's not just the regret. I think you can become a regret, avoid risk, obsessed, which is probably an unhealthy thing. But I think it's the people who go back that just keep replaying the same version of the story repetitively. And don't do what you've said. They've extracted no lessons. The past is important because there's lessons in it, right?

• 25:19Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 25:20Ed Mylett?

  Then the other, then there's the other person who's like, they replay the story of their highlight from high school football. You know, over and over. So brother, you're 40 years old. Let's get out of that past and let's get a vision for the future. So I think sometimes it's not looking back in, in this sense is very healthy. Looking back and just living there all the time.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  No way.

• 25:39Ed Mylett?

  I think is where that comes from. There's something really instructive in the book for me, though. And so, because if you know them in advance, it helps you make the decision. If you know these five things in advance, it's sort of, they become flags when you see them in front of you.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 25:54Ed Mylett?

  It's called the five sins of regret, right? This is big, guys, because when you hear Daniel describe some of them, you can do all of them, brother, whatever you want. You go, yeah, that's one. But for me, I'm like, I'm now sort of, this is sort of in my reticular activating system a little bit, you know? Like, I'm seeing these five things now. As, I read the book about it a week ago. And I've already, I've been in a couple of situations, I'm like, that's sort of one of the five sins of regret right there. And it like stood out to me because it's such a healthy thing to sort of govern choices and behavior. So what are the five sins?

• 26:27Speaker 04

  Well, this has to do with moral regrets. And one of the things about moral regrets is interesting is that, like, you and I and your listeners probably have a consensus about that, that, um, that, that saving money instead of spending it frivolously is a good, is a better way to build your foundation, right? Most of us have an idea that starting a business is bolder than staying in a lackluster job. But when it comes to moral, we don't have a consensus. We have some, we have some consensus. Most of us agree that you shouldn't harm other people, you shouldn't treat other people. But there are other aspects of morality that we don't have full consensus on. And, and what we have to, and so, for instance, I'll give you an example of this.

• 27:07Speaker 04

  So I have a lot of people, Americans, who, who regret not serving in the military. And the reason they regret not serving in the military is not because they missed the adventure, but because they felt like I didn't have, like, I had a duty as a patriot to serve, and I didn't do that, and I let that down. There's some people who think that's not a real moral regret, and those people are wrong. It might not be their moral regret, but it is a moral regret. And so, and so we have that. There are other people in other cultures who think about, um, you know, they, they, they, they feel like they have an incredible duty to their parents in a way that many Westerners don't feel, right? Are those people wrong or right? I don't, they're, they're them, all right? It's like, that's their moral code.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  Uh, we even have just to... Make things even not controversial at all. I have some women in the database who regret having an abortion. And so we have different views, in America especially, we have very divided views on that. There's some people would say, well, that's not a moral regret. And I would say to them, I'm sorry, you don't get to decide what other people's moral regrets are.

• 28:12Ed Mylett?

  Correct.

• 28:13Speaker 04

  We get to decide, and so moral regrets are complicated. Now, again, in most of the moral regrets that I accumulated, they mostly dealt with those areas of harm and cheating. Hurting somebody else, cheating somebody else. One of the things that we have to understand, I think it goes way beyond regret, is that when you look at one person's version of what's moral, it's not going to map perfectly to someone else's version of what's moral, and that's okay. It doesn't mean that one side is a bad person or anything like that. It just means that we have different, as John Height puts it in his book, The Righteous Mind, different moral taste buds.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  And I really encourage your listeners to read this book called The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, which really talks about, it even talks about how we make moral decisions. The way that we think we make moral decisions is not how we really make moral decisions. When we're deciding certain kinds of moral decisions, like do you believe in, you know, abortion is one, same-sex marriage is another one. We like to think that we weigh the pros and cons and then like a judge and then come up with a verdict. That's not it. We make an emotional visceral decision immediately and then use reason to justify those emotional decisions.

• 29:33Ed Mylett?

  Of the five, the one that stood out for me was disloyalty. And I'm not talking about disloyalty like in a romantic relationship.

• 29:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:39Ed Mylett?

  This is the thing that stood out for me. How often do you, at some point in your life, regret a form of disloyalty? Meaning even gossip about a friend when they're not present?

• 29:48Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 29:49Ed Mylett?

  Things like this that are, we do have a consensus on. Almost nobody would tell you it's a good thing to gossip about a friend when they're not present or to speak ill of somebody at any point, particularly not in their presence. And we are all constantly put into situations. See, I think a lot of people think regret, there's these biggies. Oh, my gosh, I got a divorce and I could have saved my merits. Those are biggies. But there's the day to day.

• 30:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:13Ed Mylett?

  And you talked about yourself talk. I have a philosophy about this. You know when you're doing something that you shouldn't do. And every time you do that, it steals a little bit of your identity. It steals a little bit of your self-worth. And being aware of these situations, that you're doing these little cuts that are things you regret as you're doing them, steals something about you that believes you're worthy and deserve to be happy, successful and blissful. And so what you give in the book are these seven techniques you won't regret. So this is sort of how you deal with this stuff, right?

• 30:44Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, there are all kinds of like, yeah, there's like, so something, so we have this method, you know.

• 30:48Ed Mylett?

  It's awesome.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  But there are other kinds of things that I think are very super useful. I'll tell you one, I'll tell you one of my favorites and it's my favorite because I've done it and can testify to the, it can testify to its virtues. Uh, one of my favorites is a, is a failure resume.

• 31:02Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's awesome.

• 31:04Speaker 04

  This is an idea from Tina Seelig at Stanford and here's what it is. So all of us have resumes or, you know, um, LinkedIn profiles or whatever. And our resumes are just these incredible accomplished, you know, list of how all of our accomplishments and achievements and accolades and things like that. A failure resume is the flip side of that where you list for yourself, you can share it with others. I've only done it for myself. Where you can, you list all of your failures, your screw ups, your missteps, your blunders, all that kind of stuff. And what I do, the way I do it is this, so I list that all in one column. And then in the second column, I list what's the lesson I learned from that. And then the third column, I list what I'm going to do about it now. That second column for me was a revelation because here's what happened.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  I would list certain kinds of mistakes and screw ups and things like that and look for the lesson and sometimes here's the thing. There isn't a lesson. Things don't work out. There's bad luck. Nothing you can do about it. That's life, you know, and so, and so that's actually really helpful to understand that now. Because it, because it, because it lets you understand where it actually was your fault. Where, where your decisions were the cause of the, of the problem. And for me, when I looked at that, I realized that I was making the same two mistakes over and over and over again. And, um, and this helped me prevent making those mistakes as all, uh, most of those mistakes again.

• 32:30Ed Mylett?

  Well, I think a perfect example of that is my dad passed away about a year ago. I really regret that my dad passed away. That's not something that I did or caused.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  No.

• 32:38Ed Mylett?

  I still have regret. And I, but what it does do is I look back at that relationship is I'm, I do evaluate, how did I treat him? Was I loyal to him? These other things that you have in the book.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:49Ed Mylett?

  Seventh thing you teach in the seven things you won't regret to deal with it. I just want you to elaborate on this because I don't think, I think what you just said about, hey, not everything happens for a lesson to come out of it, is that you should, the seventh one, adopt a journey mindset.

• 33:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:04Ed Mylett?

  And I think that's important because when you go back and hyper-focus on a particular event, the context of it can be really magnified compared to the entire journey that you're on. So elaborate on that a little bit.

• 33:15Speaker 04

  Well, this is from, drawn from the work of Jennifer Aaker at Stanford. And, and what she has found, and I think a lot of us have had this experience, is that let's say you're driving toward a goal, you're pushing toward a goal, and you achieve the goal. And about 45 seconds after achieving the goal, you're like, oh.

• 33:33Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  You know, you know, and then, and so what's going on there? And what's going on there is that in some ways we're over-indexing on the destination and under-indexing on the journey. It would really matter. And so what you see sometimes is once people hit their goal, hit a particular goal, they lose all future motivation. Not all future motivation, but they lose a lot of future motivation. So they don't sustain that high performance. And what you're better off doing is thinking about your work as a journey where the, the purpose is the, the trip itself. The purpose is getting a little bit better and actually sustaining your focus because you want to sustain your focus. There's, there's another sort of related idea from the work of, guy wrote this book

• 34:15Speaker 04

  maybe 40 years ago, a guy named James Kars, who wrote this book called Finite and Infinite Games that I always think about. And, and his view is this, is that there are two kinds of games. A finite game, the goal is to win. An infinite game, the goal is to keep playing. And what you want is that the people who are happiest in life itself is an infinite game. Life is not a game you can win. It's, it's much more complicated than that. But life is a game that you want to keep playing because of its inherent joy and satisfaction and the contribution that you can make. And so this is another way of, it's, it's another way of, it's another way of thinking about that.

• 34:55Ed Mylett?

  What would you say to somebody who says, I don't, you know, I think you'd be concerned about this too, that validating somebody who regularly lives in regret and doesn't do it the way that you described, they don't frame things correctly, they're not taking lessons from it, they're not extracting different things, and they live there, and maybe they're saying, you know what, I'm stuck here, and how do I move, is it, are you changing the frame, the questions they ask themselves, so there's a lot of people, particularly right now, context of the world, like, you know, why would someone every single day want to get better, because maybe they're at a point in their life, like, hey, I just really regret where I'm at, I thought I'd be further along, I regret this choice, and they just live there, what would you say to them?

• 35:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think what we should do for them is, you know, it's a great question, you know, I think what we have to do is empathize with them a little bit, because I think the reason they're stuck there is that no one taught them how to deal with negative emotions, no one taught them enough what to do, and so I think that in some level, I think they need some coaching, I think they need some coaching in how to do these three steps. And the first thing that I would tell them is, is a little bit of tough love, which is that, you're not that special, all right, you have these regrets, but let me show you these 19,000 regrets I've collected from around the world, a lot of people have these regrets, so, this is not some kind of final judgment on you, this is a, this is part

• 36:22Speaker 04

  of the human experience, and you have a choice about whether you want to respond to this human experience by wallowing and giving up, or by taking some small steps to do a little bit better, so I think that's the first thing, the second thing is that I think you have to make those small steps somewhat, somewhat easier on them, and so, this is another reason why I think it's important for leaders and friends... To talk about their regrets. One of the things that got me interested in this topic, Ed, was that I started thinking about my own regrets, very sheepishly mentioned them to a few people, and found that my mentioning my regrets to them opened the floodgates. They wanted to talk about their regrets. They weren't boo hooing it, they just wanted to have an honest adult conversation about it.

• 37:05Speaker 04

  And so, so, so, just letting people, you know, treating people with kindness, recognizing that they're, that they're not that special, because everybody has regrets, and then, you know, just helping them make sense of it, and try to do one small thing to make things a little bit better. But I think that the kind of people you're talking about need some coaching. They're unlikely to do it on their own. They need a friend, or a spouse, or a boss, or a colleague to help coach them out of it.

• 37:31Ed Mylett?

  Yep, and I, and I'll stick the book, can coach them out of it. I mean, you won't say it, I will. There's a bunch of stuff in there. I say one other thing to people that live in regret. I think the fact that you process regret and experience regret, I think most people don't give themselves credit for it. This is a great indicator of the caliber of person you are, that you're a good person, that you deserve to be successful. The fact of the matter is, sociopaths process no regret. They don't feel bad about any choice, or decision, or harm they've caused somebody. So, the process, the presence of regret in your life is a screaming indicator, you're a good person, and that you deserve to be happy and successful. The lack of any regret, this is, this is someone who's sociopathic,

• 38:11Ed Mylett?

  and it's not who you want to be. And so, just remember this, the fact that you're processing regret is a tremendous indicator that you're a great person, and that you deserve bliss, success, happiness, whatever it is your outcome is.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  The only thing I have to add to that is a single word, which is amen.

• 38:25Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, amen, right, everybody?

• 38:27Speaker 04

  No, that's exactly, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. And the, the absence of regrets, like, people who don't have, like, truly, if you don't have regrets, it's a sign of a, it's often a sign of a grave problem. It's a sign that you could literally have a brain injury. It's a sign that you could have a neurodegenerative disorder. It's a sign that you could be a sociopath. And...

• 38:47Ed Mylett?

  No, but I gotta tell you, I have a couple of people that I thought were friends of mine, and I'd be, I really started to wonder, because when I've watched them harm others, or make poor life decisions for themselves, and they process no regret from it. Which, which, by the way, no regret means no growth, no change.

• 39:07Speaker 04

  Bingo.

• 39:08Ed Mylett?

  At all. And I'm, some of these folks who I really... valued their friendship over time. I'm starting to question their connection with me. Not even things they've done to me, other people, choices they've made. Like, mind, you keep repeating this pattern because you don't regret it and you're devoid of emotion about it. I think good people experience regret.

• 39:27Speaker 04

  I agree with you. I think that moral regrets are somewhat heartening. I kind of like the idea that people are bothered by that they bullied somebody three decades ago. I think it suggests that they know right and wrong and that they want to be and they want to do the right thing. And so in some ways, in some ways, these things are, in some ways, these things are very heartening. And what I say, you know, as you know, from the book is that, you know, these four core regrets that I write about, I think operate as a photographic negative of the good life. That is, all these people who are telling me what they, what they regret most are also telling me what they value most, what matters most to them and what matters to them. Foundations, some stability, boldness, learning and growth, moral, goodness. I think most people want to be good and that a good life is a life where you are actually being good.

• 40:11Speaker 04

  And then connection, which is love. And, and once again, this emotion of regret is, again, it's a powerful emotion. It is, and this is what I'm trying to do here. There's a reason why I chose the title that I did, The Power of Regret, and why I didn't try to dance past the graveyard by not using the R word in the title. I used the R word in the title. I put it in big fricking capital letters right in the center. Because regret clarifies what we, what, what we value and it instructs us on how to do better. It's a powerful and transformative emotion if we treat it right.

• 40:50Ed Mylett?

  You said that you started to write the book. So it's going to be one of my last couple of questions. But you started to write the book because you had shared with some folks the, a couple of regrets of yours and sort of opened the floodgates, almost like if you're vulnerable with other people, they're more willing to be vulnerable with you.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 41:04Ed Mylett?

  Where's the line there, though? To where you create a circle of pity party with.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:10Ed Mylett?

  Right? Because you run, those of you that will Google Daniel, this man's had really a remarkable life and worked with remarkable people, some of the most influential people that have ever been on our planet. He's worked with. And so that's sometimes, I think, contextually, hey, we're at this not level, but we're having this dialogue that's based on a context of our lives. And I sort of think there's a line there where, you know, perhaps you start to create a circle of people who validate your regrets and you validate theirs and then it's

• 41:42Speaker 04

  That's an interesting point.

• 41:43Ed Mylett?

  Circle. What do you think about that?

• 41:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a really good point. I think that I think that is a danger. I think it's a danger because because what you're doing there, I mean, what you're what you're what you're describing there is in some ways, I had never thought about this before until you describe it. But in some ways, what you're describing is kind of group rumination, not individual rumination, but kind of a collective rumination. And rumination is really bad for us. I mean, it really is. When you're caught in that infinite loop of constantly of thinking and thinking and thinking and revisiting and revisiting and revisiting, that is very, very harmful. There's nothing, I mean, truly, there's nothing good about rumination. And so what you're doing there is collective rumination. So in some ways, it's like a rumination contagion.

• 42:21Ed Mylett?

  You got it.

• 42:22Speaker 04

  That is, by my ruminating, I basically contaminate you and you start ruminating. And so, but this is why that process is really important, because when we treat ourselves with self compassion, when we treat ourselves with kindness rather than contempt, when we disclose to make sense of it, when we draw a lesson from it.

• 42:40Ed Mylett?

  Bingo.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  What we're doing is we're interrupting that march to rumination. That is, you can see our brains on this march toward rumination, but what you but but this process builds a wall. And you're like, oh, you're stuck. You're not going to get over this wall. You're not going to get through this wall. You're not going to get around this wall. Because we're not going to let you get all the way to rumination. We're going to convert it into something else.

• 43:03Ed Mylett?

  That's the power of it. It's the for me, it's everything you said, but the lesson. If you're going to be in a group where you're doing this, I was I was yesterday, I flew back on a plane with some guys that are becoming new friends of mine. And we sort of I told them I was going to be interviewing today. And so I phrase the question as some of your great life lessons come from something you regret, and each of us shared it, but what came with it was the lesson. And the lesson, the lesson was illustrative for the rest of us, right?

• 43:32Speaker 04

  Bingo, that's a good way to do it.

• 43:34Ed Mylett?

  And, and, and they hadn't had choices and decisions or lack of choices or decisions, actions or inactions that I hadn't had. And that was valuable to me. Couple of them were much older than I was. And so to learn from kind of the wisdom of their experience. So just that fine line, everybody of sharing this. So I gotta tell you, were you gonna say something about that? I didn't want to interrupt.

• 43:55Speaker 04

  No, no, I, I think it's, I think it's very interesting. I actually like, sort of like the idea. I didn't, I didn't write about this, but it's an interesting way at it of talking about, I think in some cases it's smart to start from the lesson. And then for, for people who are a little bit more enlightened, for people who've done a better job at reckoning with their regrets, starting with the lesson is a good idea. Tell me a lesson you've learned and the regret that produced it. That's a really interesting way to do it.

• 44:19Ed Mylett?

  Yeah. I love this topic and I love your book. And here's the reason why. I want, here's why I wanted to have you on, and then I'll ask you one last question. There's nothing else like it. And it does sort of fly in the face of what I guess is conventional thinking and wisdom, which is don't ever look back. I get interviewed all the time. People ask me if you have any regrets. I say, of course I do, several of them. And it's, it's hopefully why I've grown. If I've done no self-reflection on my life.

• 44:46Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 44:47Ed Mylett?

  Lack of self-reflection creates a complete lack of self-awareness in the present state. So this reflection creates awareness. There's an unhealthy way to do it, which is what Daniel talks about in the book. There's incredibly healthy way to do it. And the other thing is this notion of, you know, people say, well, I don't regret anything because there, I'm where I am because of all these events. How do you know that? How do you know that had you, that you extracted lessons from these things, that you wouldn't be in a better place? You know? Or the exact same place? You don't know that that's true because all these things happen that you're, you're where you are right now. That's just, that's just something people repeat. That's got no validation to it. There's no study about, there's no science behind it at all. So, so guys, it's okay to be looking back at your life and extract the lessons and the emotions.

• 45:31Ed Mylett?

  Powerful part of the book, as I said earlier, is on the anticipation of regret. I love what you said about becoming not too obsessed about that, but there's power of that. Will I regret this getting the ultimate version of it? All right, last question. And thank you in advance, brother. And when you do another one of these, come back on because your work-

• 45:46Speaker 04

  I'll be back.

• 45:47Ed Mylett?

  It's magic, man. Your work is magic. And I love the parts about self-compassion, everything else. Aside from what we've covered, and someone right now is sitting here, they're listening to her. They met you at a Starbucks. They said, hey, man, I loved your book, you know? But I'm sort of stuck and, you know, you and Ed Mylett, you didn't cover this. You know, I'm sure there was something you wanted to say to everybody that he didn't ask you about regret, processing of regret, the power of it. And so I'm going to give you that opportunity right now so they can't ask you that question. What did we not cover that I not ask you that you feel is really important? Everybody understands about the entire topic and the book, in the book or out of the book?

• 46:25Speaker 04

  Okay, I'll tell you one thing. I actually think that it's important. I think one of the lessons of these regrets, particularly when you were, you know, you were talking about which is bigger, inaction or action regrets? And inaction regrets are taken over. I think there's actually something to be said in life for having a bias, a slight bias for action. Not in every single circumstance, but a bias for action. Because what really gnaws at us over time is when we don't act, when we don't ask out that crush, when we don't start that business, when we don't take that trip. And so a general bias for action. But the other reason for that is that sometimes I think we are, we try to plan too much. We're trying to make a career transition or, and we're like, okay, I gotta plan it all out and plan it all out and plan it all out.

• 47:05Speaker 04

  And, and, and I think we've gotten the sequence wrong, like that action is in some ways how we learn, that we learn by acting, that, that, that in some ways by doing something, we know what we learn more about what to do rather than, so, so I want to do it a little less planning, a little bit more acting. And I think that in general, it's the surprise takeaway for me in this, in this stuff is that, that I've tried to learn is that like you gotta have just a bias for action, for, for trying stuff because you're less likely to regret that than you are not acting. But what's more is that acting is a form of learning. It's not separate from learning, it's a form of learning.

• 47:42Ed Mylett?

  Very good. I enjoyed today so much. Like, we've never covered anything like this on the show.

• 47:47Speaker 04

  Good.

• 47:48Ed Mylett?

  And when you're in the inspirational life strategy space, there is this bias towards never looking back. And I want everybody to know this. I've said this before, but the context I've set it in is to go back and replay the video over and over again, which is probably not an accurate story, as Daniel said.

• 48:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 48:06Ed Mylett?

  Probably added to it, and extract no lessons from it, and get no better from it. That's unhealthy. The way we're describing it, and Daniel wrote about it, is incredibly healthy, productive, and growth-oriented. And so, thank you today, brother, very, very much for not only the time, but you know, the other thing, man, I just, you work, you work very hard when someone asks you a question to give the best possible answer you can. It's not autopilot. You're reflective even as you're answering. And I appreciate, that indicates to me you really want to help people and your passion about your work. So, thank you.

• 48:36Speaker 04

  Oh, thank you. Thanks for the great interview. I really, I enjoyed talking to you. Thanks for making me think.

• 48:40Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, it made me think, and I know it's made millions of other people think, "Hey, everybody, if this helped you today, you have anybody you know that's dealing with any form of regret, or they just want to grow and get better, they want to change their life, have them listen to this show, share it with them, fastest-growing show on the planet for a reason. We doubled again in the last 90 days because I get you people like Daniel, and we get good stuff out of them every single time they're here." So, by the way, you can get your hands on my new book, too, The Power of One More. Go to thepowerofonemore.com, preorder it. There's a huge reward and incentive in doing so. God bless all of you. Max out your life.