BONUS | The One Thing You’ll Regret More Than Failure - Daniel Pink

If you’ve ever thought, “What if I had just gone for it?” today's bonus episode is for you. 🎥 Watch the full episode with Daniel Pink https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUdNi9HT1Tk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUdNi9HT1Tk 📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work":https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast 🎥 Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  What surprised you about what people said they would regret?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Well, I did a few different things to get at this. Like, I'm a big, I mean, like, can I use another 50 cent word? Epistemological, right? So when people say stuff, I always want to know, like, how do you know?

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Right? And I expect anytime I say something for people to also say, how do you know?

• 1:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  And so in the research on regret, there were three legs to the stool. One of them was 60 years of research in a whole variety of academic fields. But I also, for this, decided to do two research projects of my own. One was a quantitative survey, a giant public opinion survey on American attitudes about regret, about which more in a moment. And then I also collected regrets from all over the world. And so we have a database of 26,000 regrets from people in 134 countries. And so what surprised me particularly about that third leg was the universality of it. That really surprised me. I expected much greater variance in what people were regretting. And there was, at the very, very granular level, but there was surprisingly little variation based on nationality,

• 2:02Speaker 01

  relatively little based on gender, a tiny little bit based on age. And so that's the impression that I got from the qualitative survey. In the quantitative survey, which I did, like, a pretty serious piece of public opinion work in order to get at demographic differences. And when we crunched the numbers... There weren't that many. Like, I spent all this time and effort and cash to do this, like, a really good piece of survey research. Oversampling in every category, so we can make claims about, you know, well-educated people, you know, people with high degrees of formal education like this and women like this. And there were very, very few differences. And so, the universality of the language in the qualitative one, and just the fact that there weren't many demographic differences in the quantitative one, surprised me.

• 2:47Ryan Holiday?

  Because people are people, and they're like most people?

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Most people are like most people.

• 2:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  And, I mean, it's really, it's really the case. I really think, what do most people want? Most people want, they want some stability in their life, they want a chance to learn and grow. I think most people are good and want to be good.

• 3:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yep.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  And they want love. And that's true whether you are in Austin, Texas, or whether you are in Kuala Lumpur, or whether you are in Dubai.

• 3:12Ryan Holiday?

  And so, did their regrets reflect choices that took them away from those things?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, pretty much it. So, regrets, see, my argument is that regrets operate like a, you know, a reverse image of what people really want out of life.

• 3:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Okay? So, so the idea is, is that, you know, let's go back to these decisions that we make every single day. So, you know, if you, if you think about yesterday, you know, you made, I don't know, maybe 50, 60 decisions. You don't remember most of them today.

• 3:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Okay? A week from now, you probably won't remember any of them. But there are certain things that you've done or haven't done, decisions or indecisions, actions, inactions, from five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that not only do we remember, but they bug us.

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  That's a very strong signal.

• 3:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Like, that's something to pay, that is a signal to pay attention to. And what it's a signal of is what we value. So, we have this big category of things called foundation regrets. Foundation regrets are, I spent too much and saved too little, and now I'm broke.

• 4:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  I didn't exercise or eat right, and now I'm profoundly out of shape. I never read or studied, and now I'm ill-informed and don't have skills. All right? Foundation regrets are about, I think ultimately about stability. We have a lot of regrets on boldness.

• 4:23Ryan Holiday?

  Not being bold enough.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 4:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Huge.

• 4:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  And it doesn't matter the domain of your life. If only I'd started a business.

• 4:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  You take the number of those people with, I started, my regret is that I started a business and went south on me.

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  You know, 50 to one. I mean, seriously, a huge, I was really surprised by this. Huge numbers of regrets about not asking people out on dates.

• 4:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. You're, you're probably more likely to regret the thing you were afraid to do than the thing you boldly did.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  That is, I don't want to say a hundred percent true, but it rounds to a hundred percent.

• 5:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  I mean, it really does. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you some more about that. I can, I can lock that down. So huge numbers of regrets about, about being, being at a juncture in life where you can play it safe or take a chance. And when people don't play it safe, when people don't take the chance, most people, most of the time regret it. Not all the time, not everybody, but overwhelmingly.

• 5:16Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  We also see in the one demographic difference I found in the quantitative research, and forgive me for getting in the weeds about these two different ways of knowing, but in the quantitative research, the one demographic difference was age. And what you had is that people in their twenties had roughly equal numbers of regrets of action and inaction. And as people aged, thirties, forties, but certainly fifties, sixties, seventies, inaction regrets took over.

• 5:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  You get to your, your fifties, sixties, seventies, it's three to one, four to one, inaction regrets over action regrets.

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe the, the very bold and reckless have died. And so they're a little bit removed from the sample, but I.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  That's a good, that's a good argument, actually, but you know.

• 6:01Ryan Holiday?

  It's probably more likely.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  I don't know if anybody ever died from asking somebody out on a date, though. So, but, cause the thing, but I, there's a, there's a, there's a, the other reason is that when we do things, we can make sense of it, we can find the silver lining in it. But when we haven't done something, particularly done something bold, particularly done something meaningful, it gnaws at us.