A Counterintuitive Strategy for Sharper Decision-Making, Stronger Performance, and a More Meaningful Life. | Daniel Pink

How to have fewer regrets (and utilize the ones you already have). Daniel Pink https://www.danpink.com/ is the author of seven bestselling nonfiction books on a range of topics, from human motivation to the science of timing to a graphic novel career guide. His books include the New York Times bestsellers The Power of Regret, A Whole New Mind, and When—as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human. In this episode we talk about: The myth of the "no regrets" philosophy What a regret actually is The very real benefits of regret The four core regrets people tend to have Tools for dealing with regrets The importance of talking or writing about your regrets How to  create a "failure resume" The Regret Optimization Framework The crucial role of self-compassion and self-distancing And much more Related Episodes: 'When' Can Make a Big Difference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDsAzjLZdH0 Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Additional Resources: Daniel's books https://www.danpink.com/books/ To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

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

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:19Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. How we doing? What do you regret the most? What are the things you've done or failed to do that have caused you the most regret? This is a fascinating, although painful, thing to think about. You might be tempted, in fact, to either not think about it or to go all the way in the other direction and to wallow in shame. That's usually the direction I go in. Neither direction, as you might imagine, is a winning strategy. What you want to do is lean in and learn. Again, that's not avoiding, and it's not wallowing. It's a fruitful middle path. Today, we're going to talk to a really smart writer, a bestselling author, who has written a whole book about how you can harness your regrets in a way that will improve your performance,

• 1:02Dan Harris?

  sharpen your decision-making, and add meaning to your life. He's got tons and tons of thoughtful, workable strategies for not only learning from your past decisions, but also for minimizing regrets going forward. Daniel Pink is the author of seven bestselling nonfiction books. His latest is called The Power of Regret. That's the one we're going to talk about today. In this conversation, we talk about the myth of the no-regrets philosophy, what a regret actually is, the very real benefits of regret, the four core regrets that people tend to have, tools for dealing with regrets, including two tools Daniel calls undoing and at-leasing, the importance of disclosure, in other words, talking or writing about your regrets,

• 1:46Dan Harris?

  how to create a failure resume, the regret optimization framework, and much more. Super quick, right before we dive in here, I just want to remind you to sign up for my new meditation app. It's called 10% with Dan Harris. You can get the app by going to danharris.com. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. We've got a growing library of meditations from the world's best teachers. Plus, we do weekly live meditation and Q&A sessions every Tuesday at 4:00. Join the party. We'll get started with Daniel Pink right after this.

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• 3:18Dan Harris?

  Daniel Pink, welcome back to the show.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  I am so glad to be here, Dan Harris.

• 3:23Dan Harris?

  I feel just the same way. How many people have brought you on the show and said, like, "I have no regrets about booking you on the show"? I mean, how many dumb jokes along those lines have you dealt with?

• 3:32Speaker 03

  You know what? When you had the last name Pink for six decades, you get used to the dumb jokes. It's been 30 years since that people say to me, "Hey, did you ever see the movie Reservoir Dogs?"

• 3:44Speaker 03

  So I have a tough skin for most things, including bad jokes.

• 3:48Dan Harris?

  Got it, yeah. Because I get the, "Oh, I'm 10% happier just seeing you." So I have nothing but sympathy. All right, so on the subject of regret, just a very basic opening question here. Why this subject for you?

• 4:02Speaker 03

  For me, it's because I had regrets. I had regrets of my own. I'm not a person who has epiphanies or pivotal moments in life, but this one sort of came close. A few years ago, our elder daughter graduated from college. And so we're at this college graduation, and it's very long, and I'm spacing out. And I start thinking about my own college experience, which was generally positive. But I had some regrets. I wish I had worked harder. I wish I had taken more risks. I wish I'd been kinder. I'm sort of having this out-of-body experience at this graduation anyway, wondering how this kid who was just born is graduating, how it's possible for someone as youthful and vital as me to have a kid who's graduated from college. But I was thinking about these regrets. And I came back to Washington, where I live, and I very sheepishly...

• 4:46Speaker 03

  Began mentioning them to people because I knew that nobody wanted to talk about regrets. And I discovered that everybody wanted to talk about regrets. That I had this kind of like, you know, you're a journalist. There are certain things where people say, oh, that's really interesting. And there are certain things where people say, oh, my God, I need to tell you, you know? And anyway, to make a long story longer, Dan, I actually threw away a book proposal. I actually stopped working on another entirely different book, wrote a new book proposal and decided to spend a few years exploring regret.

• 5:17Dan Harris?

  When you say you regret not working harder and not being kinder, can you flesh that out a little bit?

• 5:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's take kindness in college and even this is like one of my own big regrets. And I something that I actually think that I have in a positive way have learned from. I've extracted lessons from it and done better later on. But, you know, in college, sometimes people are nice to each other. And I was in situations where people were not being treated well. I wasn't the person bullying them. I wasn't the person mistreating them in any way, but I was there and I knew it was wrong. And I didn't say anything and it still bugs me with regret. The question is, what do you do about that? And this is the whole way that we reckon with regret. You can say, oh, no, no, no, no regrets, never look backward. Or I can wallow in it and say, oh, my God, I am the worst human being there ever was.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Or I can say, wait a second, this is a very strong signal I need to listen to and learn from and do better next time. So that was one on kindness. I was on a trimester system. There are a few trimesters where I didn't go to class that often, where, you know, I was doing other kinds of things that 20 year old men sometimes do. And, you know, in retrospect, I might have during those kinds of moments worked a little harder.

• 6:28Dan Harris?

  So the biggest regrets in your life come from college?

• 6:30Speaker 03

  No, not at all. Okay. No, no, no, it just, it just so happened that the locus, the thing is like, I'm at this graduation. I don't know how old your kids are, but I know they're not as old as my kids, are they?

• 6:40Dan Harris?

  No, my kid is about to turn 11.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Okay, great. All right, so you'll get there. But there are these kinds of moments in a parent's life, and time seems to move really fast. And also, you're in a big auditorium and you're sitting there and it's boring, and your mind starts wandering, and that's what it was. So my regrets are not all about college. I have plenty of regrets about everything in my life.

• 6:58Dan Harris?

  You use this phrase a moment ago, "no regrets." The beginning of your book is a kind of Jeremiah against the philosophy of no regrets. Why is that a wrong-headed? I think you actually say, you call it "life-thwarting nonsense." So what's the beef?

• 7:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. First of all, I just want to acknowledge and tip my hat to the just airdropping that 50 cent word Jeremiah into our conversation. I do admire that.

• 7:28Dan Harris?

  So many people... Actually, I just gotta jump in. I never, I never interrupt guests. I really try not to. But I have to tell you, one of the big regrets in my life is being the kind of asshole who drops too many 50 cents.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  No, I disagree. I actually really like it. I don't know if I've ever said that word. I've certainly written it. And actually, this is completely orthogonal to what we were talking about. It made me think that, oh yeah, it does, that word does come from Jeremiah, the way you pronounce it. I usually see it in writing. So I actually learned something here. Anyway, no regrets. Yeah, you know, here's the thing. It's like, there's this idea out there. You've written about happiness. You've written about like, how do we get, become satisfied in life? And you have obviously a nuanced understanding of that. But there are other folks out there who are sort of peddling this idea that the way to be happy, the way to have a good life is to be positive all the time and never be negative, and to always look forward and never look back. And that's just bad advice. It's unscientific advice. And so here's what we know.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  We have 60 years of research on this emotion of regret. Research in many domains. It's actually started in kind of game theory and economics, but moved to neuroscience and cognitive science. And what we know is that regret is one of the most common emotions that human beings have. It is ubiquitous in the human experience. Everybody has regrets. The only people who don't have regrets are, you know, little kids whose brains haven't developed the capacity for counterfactual thinking, people with certain kinds of neurodegenerative disorders, and sociopaths. Everybody else has regrets. I think the puzzle here... Is that, why? Why would something so ubiquitous be so unpleasant? And the answer is because it's useful if you treat it right. And the way to treat it right is not to say, no regrets.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  I asked for people's regrets from around the world. And I had people literally fill out this survey saying, I don't have any regrets, but 20 years ago, I bullied somebody and I can't stop thinking about it. So you have this kind of performative positivity that I think is not the path to a life well-lived. The idea, again, as I mentioned before, is not to ignore your regrets, put your fingers in your ears and say, no regrets, no regrets, no regrets. But it's also not to be toppled by them and wallowing in them. It's basically to look at them as information, as data. And when we do that, we have a lot of evidence that it's a transformative emotion.

• 9:41Dan Harris?

  I want to go deeper on that, but let me just stay with the life thwarting nonsense for a second.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:45Dan Harris?

  The phrase, no regrets, I've never really used it. So I don't really know what it's referring to. Is it basically saying it's dumb to look back at your, at the dumb stuff you did in the past and regret it? Or is it about living a life where you live so fully that you have no regrets?

• 10:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, so that's a good question. What you typically hear is people who say, oh, I don't have any regrets. I don't have any regrets. It's foolish to think about regrets. It's foolish to look backward. It's foolish to think about things you've done in the past that you regret. I'm positive all the time. I don't have any regrets. This is not true. That's not the way our brains have evolved. Our brains have evolved to experience regret because regret is useful. And so there's some research on this as well. Prospectively, you can live your life to reduce your regrets. But I can pretty much guarantee that most human beings at the end of their lives will still have a few regrets because that's who we are. Because of that, regret makes us better.

• 10:47Dan Harris?

  So either way, you're using no regrets retrospectively or prospectively?

• 10:51Speaker 03

  I'm using it mostly retrospectively. When you say to people, what are your big regrets? And they say, I don't have any regrets because I'm positive and everything happens for a reason. And it is foolish and against my best interest to ever look backward. And I'm just saying, that's. Unscientific. That's a terrible way to live your life. The science contravenes that significantly.

• 11:12Dan Harris?

  It's not only unscientific, but it's especially in situations where, for example, a child is talking to a parent about some mistreatment and that parent is refusing to take accountability because they're embracing a no regrets POV. It's infuriating and unfair.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a great point, too. It's not fair to the people around you. It's we've been sold this bill of goods. We've been sold a bill of goods that the path to a life well-lived is to always be positive and never be negative and to always look forward and never look back. And what the evidence tells us is that we should be positive a lot more than we should be negative. Our positive emotions should absolutely outnumber our negative emotions. But negative emotions are functional.

• 11:54Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  They're there for a reason. I think especially in America, we haven't done a good enough job equipping people to reckon with their negative emotions, to acknowledge them, to name them and to learn from them.

• 12:06Dan Harris?

  Technical question, what is a regret actually?

• 12:10Speaker 03

  So a regret is when you look backward in your life and you wish you had done something. You wish you hadn't done something or you wish you had done something differently. It is different from, sometimes people get confused with between regret and disappointment. And I'll give you a good, a simple example. So I'm looking out my window here in Washington DC and it's actually a nice day. But let's say that it were raining. And at this time I wanted to go for a run, but it's pouring rain and I couldn't go for a run. I can't regret that. Okay, I don't control the rain. Now, let's say that I wanted to go somewhere. I knew it was raining. And I was going to rain. I didn't bring an umbrella. I can regret that because that's on me. There's some agency in it. It's not about external circumstances. It's about your own volition, your own choices, your own decisions, your own actions.

• 12:56Dan Harris?

  You've made a nod to this in this already young conversation several times, but I'd be interested in hearing more about what, again, the book is called The Power of Regret. So what is the power? What?

• 13:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:08Dan Harris?

  What are the benefits of tuning into this thing some of us try to avoid?

• 13:12Speaker 03

  We have this emotion, we have this negative emotion. It's adaptive, it's there for a reason, all right? And it's there because it's an instructive emotion. And what we have is a pile of evidence, mostly from social psychology, showing, for instance, okay, here we go, long line of research, you put people into a negotiation session. They negotiate, they come out of the negotiation. The researchers say, what do you regret doing or not doing in that negotiation? Right? You invite the negative feeling. Those folks do better in the next negotiation. It helps on problem solving, it helps on strategizing. It helps you make better decisions in the future. It helps you find more meaning in life. We have just piles and piles of evidence that when it's reckoned with, it's not dismissed

• 13:54Speaker 03

  and it's not a source of endless pain and smothering. But when we actually reckon with it, it's a transformative emotion. It helps us learn. That's what it's there for.

• 14:06Dan Harris?

  So, for example, on the decision making, if I can keep my regrets top of mind, not in a wallowing way, but in a learning way, well, then I am going to make smarter decisions and make smarter moves in future negotiations, et cetera, et cetera, because I'm aware of past pain points.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  That's exactly right, yes. And it's also, again, I want to go back to this idea of emotions and negative emotions, like emotions are signals, all right? They're there for a reason. We can either ignore them, we can feel them, or we can think about them. When we experience an emotion like regret, what we need to do is use that as a signal. There's actually a good evidence-based way to reckon with that that we can talk about. We have a particular regret. That involves basically treating yourself with compassion, talking or writing about the regret, and then explicitly extracting a lesson from it. But at a broad level, absolutely. These negative emotions are there because they're there, they're knocking on our door, saying, I want to teach you something.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  And then the response is not to, I don't hear a knock, that's a bad response. But it's also like diving under the couch is a bad response too. Open the door. And acknowledge it.

• 15:24Dan Harris?

  I do want to go into that system that you just described, but let me ask one or two high level questions first. In the book, you lay out these four core regrets. Can you walk us through those?

• 15:35Speaker 03

  Sure. Let me tell you how I got there because I think it's going to be instructive. So I set up this thing called the World Regret Survey, where I invited people all over the world to submit their big regret. We very quickly assembled a database of over 26,000 regrets now from people in over 130 countries. When I analyzed those responses, basically short paragraphs from all over the world, we had it in Chinese, we had it in Spanish as well. I found that people ended up around the world with remarkable similarity, having the same four kind of regrets at a deep level. And I think that tells us something there, too. I mean, I can tell you what those are if you're

• 16:11Dan Harris?

  Please.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  So one regret was what I call a foundation regret. A foundation regret are small decisions that people make early in life that accumulate to terrible consequences later on. So I spent too much and saved too little, and now I'm broke. I didn't exercise or eat right. Now I'm profoundly out of shape. We had a surprising number of people. I didn't study hard enough in school. And now it's like, I actually don't have the skills that I need to like do well in life. So that's a foundation regret. Boldness regret. Boldness regret is a big category. People look back on their lives and they remember being at a juncture, a moment where they had two choices. They could play it safe, or they could take the chance. And what's interesting here is that the domain of life didn't really matter that much in all these

• 16:55Speaker 03

  things. The domain of life didn't matter that much. What mattered was being at that juncture and choosing between safety and taking a chance. And overwhelmingly, people regret not taking the chance. Not all the time. Some people regret taking the chance and having it go south on them. But overwhelmingly, people regret not taking the chance. And it manifests itself like this. I stayed in a dead end job rather than starting my own business. I have hundreds of regrets about not asking people out on dates. Hundreds. Astonishing number of those. Regrets about not speaking up for something that mattered. Regrets about not traveling. Basically regrets about wimping out. It really sticks with people. Third category, moral regrets.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  You're at a juncture in your life, you can do the right thing, you can do the wrong thing. And when people do the wrong thing, most of us, most of the time, regret it. Because most of us are good, and most of us want to be good, and most of us feel shitty when we're not good. And so the big things there were bullying, huge numbers of bullying regrets, and an enormous amount of Maryland fidelity. So that's moral regrets. And then connection regrets, the fourth category, are you have a relationship, often not a romantic relationship, but including romantic relationship, but the full spectrum of relationships. It was intact or should have been intact, and it comes apart.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  And the stories that people tell about how these relationships come apart are generally undramatic. They kind of like drift apart. And so one person wants to reach out, and they don't because it feels awkward. They think the other side's not going to care, so they wait, and sometimes it's too late. So I have all kinds of stories about people who wanted to reach out to a friend they knew was not doing well, and they call and they realize the friend has passed away. All kinds of regrets about friendships that have drifted apart, and nobody wants to make the move and say, hey, I'm thinking about you. How you doing? So just to recap here, we've got foundation regrets, if only I'd done the work. We have boldness regrets, if only I'd taken the chance. We have more regrets, if only I'd done the right thing.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  And we have connection regrets are if only I'd reached out. And it's just really remarkable, if I were to show you the data set, it basically looks like a giant spreadsheet, and show you the regrets that people expressed, I don't think that you could tell where they were from. I don't think you could tell a regret from Milwaukee versus a regret from Santiago, Chile.

• 19:21Dan Harris?

  Is there one of these categories that is the most, and this is probably the poor deployment of this word, the most popular?

• 19:30Speaker 03

  The biggest numbers were the connection regrets and the boldness regrets. Again, not to get in the weeds here, I also did a quantitative survey of the American population, basically a giant public opinion survey, very good piece of research, looking at American attitudes about regret. And one of the big takeaways there was, and here I can make this claim very, very, very strong, is that one of the big takeaways there was how much, over time, people regret inactions over actions. That is not even close. That is a slam dunk. It is so overwhelming. In this quantitative work, I looked to see if there were demographic differences in regret between, say, men and women, between people of different races, or even things like introversion, extroversion, belief in God.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  And there weren't very many demographic differences. It was kind of surprising. But when it came to age, huge one. What we had is that people in their twenties tended to have equal numbers of regrets about action and inaction. I regret something I did, or I regret something I didn't do. Over time, as people age, not even close. Over time, people regret their inactions much more than their actions. And that's consistent with the boldness regrets, I should have taken a chance, and the connection regrets, I should have reached out.

• 20:43Dan Harris?

  Yeah, so I guess I'm an outlier. I mean, I'm older, I'm in my mid 50s. My regrets are mostly sins of commission bullying in particular, or insufficient kindness, similar to yours, you know, just moments where I didn't

• 20:56Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 20:56Dan Harris?

  speak up or do a little thing that would have made a big difference for somebody else.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, those are commission and omission. I mean, you have people like me, I'm like, my regrets of kindness are inaction regrets of kindness.

• 21:08Dan Harris?

  Yeah, that's true. Fair enough.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  But Dan, I mean, this bullying thing is a big deal. So in this World Regrets survey, I wanted it to be anonymous. So I asked people for their gender, for their age, for where they are and their regret. But I also gave them, because I needed, I wanted some texture for the writing. I said, I gave them the option of opting in to list their email address if they wanted to do a follow-up interview. They were interested in doing a follow-up interview. Pure anonymity, but they could opt in to give me their email address. Figured if I got a big enough sample, 2% or 3% would give me a lot of people to interview. 32% of people opted in.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  So that tells you like how much people like want to talk about this.

• 21:48Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  You know, it's like, oh yeah, I'm going to share my big regret with a complete stranger. And oh yeah, I'm going to give him my email address and he can talk to me some more about it. Among the many follow up interviews I did, I interviewed this woman 50 years old in Kansas. She talked about bullying a kid on the bus when she was like nine or 10 years old.

• 22:06Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  She was crying in this interview.

• 22:08Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  She felt so bad about doing that. So it's a big deal. We've had people

• 22:12Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  go back and try to find the people they bullied using Facebook or social media. In some cases, the bully is more traumatized than the bullied.

• 22:20Dan Harris?

  I've tried to find this one kid that I bullied and I've also been approached by a kid who bullied me. That was in person. But yeah, I really resonate with that.

• 22:33Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Dan Pink talks about some practical tools for processing failures and screw ups, including the importance of disclosure and creating a failure resume.

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• 24:23Dan Harris?

  So the book gets very practical about how to deal with regrets. So I'm just going to go through, you know, some of your suggestions. You start by talking about this pair of options, undoing and at-leasing. Can you unpack that?

• 24:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that's for action regrets. So one reason that action regrets don't linger as long is we can do something about them. So undoing would be I bullied somebody and then I went back and apologized to that person and made amends. Like you can make somebody whole. I hurt somebody and I made them whole. The other thing that happens with action regrets is there's some really fascinating research on counterfactual thinking here that undergirds this is that with action regrets, you can find the silver lining. Here's what that means. Regret hinges on counterfactual thinking. There are two kinds of counterfactual thinking. You can imagine how things could have turned out better and you can imagine how things could have turned out worse. So how things could have turned out better, that's an upward counterfactual.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  How things could have turned out worse, that's a downward counterfactual. And what we know is that downward counterfactuals make us feel better. They don't make us do better. Upward counterfactuals, regret, help us do better and make us feel worse. They make us feel worse and help us do better. And they make us do better because they make us feel worse. They help us do better because they make us feel worse. But at least, let me give you an example of that. So downward counterfactual is from the survey. I shouldn't have married that guy, but at least I have these two great kids. I married that guy who was an idiot. That's a big mistake. I should never have married him. But at least I have these two great kids. And so you sort of make peace with that. This idea of upward and downward counterfactuals is clear as in this like this study

• 26:06Speaker 03

  from about 30 years ago, 35 years ago, that's been replicated several times, which is you show people in an experiment, photographs of an Olympic medal stand. Okay, the people who are receiving medals in the Olympics. And they have to simply evaluate how happy the people look. Okay, gold, silver, bronze, how happy they look. And so invariably, the person who looks the happiest is the person who won the gold medal. Because they won a gold medal at the Olympics. But the second happiest person is overwhelmingly the bronze medalist. Because the bronze medalist is doing a downward counterfactual, saying, at least I finished third, not like that schmo who finished fourth and doesn't have a medal.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  The silver medalist is the least happy person up there, even though they're in second place, because they're doing upward counterfactuals. Ah, if only I had pedaled harder, I would have gone to gold. Regret is because our, I mean, you know this, our brains are amazing. All right, our brains just do these amazing things. And one of the things they do is travel through time, change events, come back to the present, and it's just incredible. And so it's a superpower in a way. And so, again, upward counterfactuals make us feel worse, but help us do better. But downward counterfactuals are useful. They make us feel better, and sometimes it's good just to feel better, even though it doesn't help improve our performance.

• 27:27Dan Harris?

  Fair enough. Another of your recommendations, and this kind of hearkens back to your articulation of amazement at the fact that so many people not only wanted to fill out your survey, but speak to you, a stranger about it. Another strategy you recommend in the book is disclosure, getting it off your chest.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  Hundred percent. We have a lot of evidence about that. And let's explain why that's the case. That helped me understand this. So certainly disclosure is, there's an unburdening there. You're sort of lifting the weight from your shoulder. And that's certainly true for moral things. But the other thing about the disclosure is that we have research like from Jamie Pennebaker at Texas, showing that when we write about these things, there's evidence that if you write about your regret for 15 minutes a day for three days, it helps defang it significantly. And the reason for that is that our negative emotions are blobby. They're amorphous. They're vaporous.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  And when we write about them or talk about them, when we name them, they become more concrete, therefore they become less menacing. There's research out there showing that writing about your negative emotions is helpful. Writing about your positive emotions isn't always helpful. Because you want to just have that general glowy, amorphous thing. If I were to say, you were to say to me, list 17 specific reasons you love your wife, it sort of takes some of the charm out of it. You know what I mean? And so there is a big argument for disclosure. The other thing that we care about, what we're concerned about with disclosure is that we fear that when we admit our mistakes, when we disclose things that we're not necessarily proud of, that people will think less of us.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  And there's some pretty good evidence that, not all the time, but most of the time, people think more of us. They actually admire our candor. They admire our courage. And so there's a very strong argument for disclosure and just wrestling these amorphous negative emotions to the ground.

• 29:26Dan Harris?

  Just to say to the listener, I interviewed Jamie Pennebaker, who's really the granddaddy of journaling for dealing with difficult emotions. And so I'll drop a link in the show notes if people want to go deep on his work. But Daniel, you talk not only about journaling for 15 minutes over three consecutive days, but, but also about you can call somebody or you can even talk into your voice recorder on your phone. There are lots of ways to unburden.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  Absolutely, absolutely. The key here is going through this kind of transformation process. It's basically taking something that is amorphous and blobby and making it more concrete. And words are more concrete than this kind of dull, vaporous feeling. This is one reason why cognitive behavior therapy often involves naming the emotion that you're feeling. Because when we name things, we sometimes feel like we have dominion over it. And it aids in the sense-making.

• 30:19Dan Harris?

  Absolutely, because you take something that's, it's kind of a background static of regret, or shame, or fear, and you put a name on it, it just feels much more workable.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can see it. You can hold it in your hands, in a way, metaphorically, rather than just feel this menacing cloud above you. And that sense-making is extremely important in looking at it and extracting a lesson that you can apply in the future.

• 30:46Dan Harris?

  Another recommendation in the book is to create a failure resume. What is that about?

• 30:52Speaker 03

  So, this is an idea from Tina Seelig at Stanford, which I love, and I've done. I sort of have a refined, somewhat edited view of this now. So, here's what I did, based on this idea. So, what you do is, you make a resume, you make a list of all of your failures, setbacks, screw-ups, blunders. All right? But you don't leave it there, because it's not an exercise in self-flagellation. Then you have another column, it says, "What lesson did I learn from this?" And then the third column, "What am I going to do about it?" And so, what you do is, you take these things that sort of linger on our head, and you memorialize them, be specific about the lesson you're learning from them, and then have a specific action you can take afterward. Now, doing this over a lifetime, this is

• 31:35Speaker 03

  painful, doing it over a lifetime, I don't recommend that. What I do recommend is, people to take, say, five failures, setbacks, screw-ups, list them, say, "What'd you learn from them?" And then, what are you going to do about it? For me, when I did this more massive, comprehensive list, what I discovered, and it was actually super helpful to me, was that I was actually making...

• 31:57Speaker 03

  Some of the same mistakes over and over and over again. That helped me surface that it really did. Because when you look at the lesson, it's like, oh, here's that lesson again. Oh, here's that lesson again. Oh, here's that lesson again.

• 32:09Dan Harris?

  There's a reason why in the military, they do after action reports.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Exactly. A hundred percent. I'm a big believer in that. I'm also a big believer in, again, using our brains' time travel capabilities of also doing a pre-mortem on things. Our brains are amazing, you know that. So I do a pre-mortem for basically every important project I do. What you do is you think about, you say, it's three years from now. And this project is a complete abject disaster. What went wrong? You get in your time machine, you go to the future. What went wrong? And then you list the things that went wrong. Because in many cases, it's easy to anticipate them. We didn't have enough budget. We didn't get the right people on board. We didn't have approval from the regulators, whatever. Make that list.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  You get back in your time machine to the present and don't do those things. And so a pre-mortem is, I truly do it for every single project that I do. Because we can also anticipate our regrets. That's another thing that we can do. We can anticipate our regrets and construct our present day to try to avoid them.

• 33:13Dan Harris?

  Yeah, so in the book, you use this expression, regret optimization framework. Is that what you're referring to?

• 33:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, regret optimization framework was an idea that was popularized by Jeff Bezos, who famously had a story where he was contemplating starting Amazon. This is back close to 30 years ago. And he was working in this very lucrative finance job. And his boss said, you're crazy to do this. And as the story goes, he took a walk. And he thought to himself, like, what am I going to regret when I'm 80? And he said, I'll regret not taking the shot. So the idea was to optimize for avoiding future regrets. There's a downside of that, too. Because there's some other research, Barry Schwartz is famous for this, of in decision making about the difference between maximizers and satisficers.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  That is, maximizers try to make every decision so that it's the very, very best that they can do. And satisficers make decisions saying, okay, that's good enough. And what the research tells us is that maximizers Do a little bit better, but they're fricking miserable. And so, you know, I think what we want to do in our optimization is we want to avoid big regrets and just satisfying and everything like that. So for instance, okay, true story. So I was in an airport today, I was just flew in today. It's in the Albany Airport. It's 11:30 AM and I'm starving. So I have like Chick-fil-A chicken nuggets. So I sort of regret that, okay? Cause it's not optimal nutrition and I actually don't feel great right now. All right.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  But if at that point I tried to optimize for future regrets, every single decision, you're going to go crazy. And what we should be doing is optimizing for the things we know we're going to regret. And here's the thing, there's a principle of social science minted by Dan Gilbert, which is brilliant. And he says, it's hard to follow. He says, "Most people are like most people." Okay. And most people, because they're like most people, don't realize they're like most people. Most of us are fairly similar. And so I can make a pretty safe bet, what I and other people will regret in the future. And here's what it is. If only I'd done the work, if only I'd taken the shot, if only I'd done the right thing, if only I'd reached out.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  And so what we should be doing is maximizing for those and really just satisficing on a lot more stuff, really just satisficing on a lot more stuff.

• 35:42Dan Harris?

  I buy it. Let's go back to, we've just taken a detour, a good one, into anticipation of regret.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:49Dan Harris?

  Let's talk more about processing of existing regrets. Another thing you recommend, and this seems to come up in at least a plurality of my interviews on this show, but one of the things you recommend is self-compassion. Can you say a little bit more?

• 36:04Speaker 03

  First of all, I'm so glad that it does come up so often because I have to say, when I was working on this, it was actually a new concept to me. I didn't know very much about it. So for your listeners who missed the previous 37 episodes on self-compassion, it's an idea started by Kristin Neff, also at the University of Texas. And it has to do with, what do we do in the face of a regret or in a mistake? And what it tells us is that we should treat ourselves with kindness rather than contempt. I mean, that's basically what it is. Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. You know, a lot of people, especially a lot of high achievers, when they screw up, when they make a mistake, their self-talk is...

• 36:44Speaker 03

  Absurd, it's brutal, it's vicious, it's lacerated. And what Kristin Neff's research tells us is, don't do that. All right, we have research on self-esteem, modest boost. We have research on lacerating self-criticism, does almost nothing for performance. But self-compassion does something for performance. So the key here is when you have a regret, treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Don't treat yourself better than anybody else, but don't treat yourself worse than anybody else. And also recognize that your regrets are part of the human experience. I mean, at some level, you're not that special. Any regret, if I walk down the street here in Washington and just tap someone on the shoulder and say, what's your big regret? I can find that regret in my database in 94 seconds. We're just not that special. So you're not that special.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  Everybody has regrets. Treat yourself with kindness. Don't treat yourself worse than anybody else. That is a way to begin some of this sense-making.

• 37:37Dan Harris?

  What's so interesting about self-compassion, and I'm a major proponent of it, and Kristin has been on the show many times and is a friend, and I, you know, so I'm, I'm, I'm in the tank. What's so interesting about it is it's a paradox in some ways that like, you can't change until you accept yourself. Does that make sense what I'm pointing to?

• 37:57Speaker 03

  I know this is a secular show, but I was gonna say amen. Yeah, that's exactly right. Somehow we've gotten the belief that treating ourselves poor, I think there's a, there's a thing with high achievers too, that they think that lacerating self-criticism is somehow motivating, that it's gonna improve their performance, that being tough on themselves in that way. And there's no evidence of that. I mean, there really isn't. The other way to look at this, the way I look at it, and believe me, I know about lacerating self-criticism, all right? I'm, I have like a, you know, all but dissertation on PhD in, in lacerating self-criticism. And the thing is, if you were to broadcast my self-talk, the way I talk to myself, if I were in an organization, and you were to take my self-talk, the way I talk to myself, and I were to talk that way to somebody else?

• 38:41Speaker 03

  HR would be in my office in 10 minutes. Somehow, we haven't quite done that message. I think it's, it seems maybe for certain people, self compassion seems superficially soft, but the evidence is overwhelming. This is a form as an answer.

• 38:55Dan Harris?

  Hey, man, back at you. Yet another thing you recommend is self distancing. What does that entail?

• 39:03Speaker 03

  Well, here's a way to think about it sequentially. So you start by like exercising some self compassion, by treating yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Then you maybe disclose, you talk about it, you write about it to make sense of it. But what you have to do is you have to extract a lesson from it. You have to learn from it. All right, you can't just say, oh, everybody has regrets. I have a regret. End of story. No, that doesn't make you better. What you want to do is you actually want to think about it saying, okay, what lesson am I learning from this that I can carry forward? And here we confront, which you might have done shows on too, is Solomon's paradox. All right, Solomon's paradox, which is that this principle in psychology, named after surprisingly King Solomon, who was this wise and sagacious guy, who totally mucked up his own life.

• 39:46Speaker 03

  And what it tells us is that human beings are pretty good decision makers, but we stink at making decisions in our own life many times. We're too close to things. We approach our own lives like scuba divers in the water when we should be approaching them like oceanographers. And self distancing is a way to look at our lives in a different way. So there's some research, some interesting research showing that in self talk, if I say to myself, I need to return phone calls and emails faster, or else people think I'm rude. All right, I could say, you need to return phone calls and emails fast. So shift from first person to second person. Or Dan needs to. So that kind of distancing, there's some other, I'll give you the, the single best decision making.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  I'm going to see your Jeremy ad and raise you a heuristic. All right, I'm going to give you the single best decision making heuristic that I know, which is, somebody comes to you for advice. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. And just it helps if you stroke your chin a little bit before I stroke your chin and say, okay, what would you tell your best friend to do? And people immediately know. So when you have this regret, you say, okay, what would I tell my best friend to do in the face of this regret? You can do things like, what would the me of 10 years from now want me to do in this situation? For all of your business listeners, Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, had a brilliant self distancing move where he said that when he was facing a tough decision as an executive

• 41:13Speaker 03

  and he didn't know what to do, he would always ask himself, if I were replaced tomorrow, what would my successor do? And he always knew. And so, again, we're often too close to our, we know too much, we're too invested in the details sometimes to make good decisions about our own lives, particularly things that are painful, that are emotionally fraught. And so explicitly saying, what would I tell my best friend to do? What would I do if I were replaced? What does the me of 10 years from now want me to do? That can be really, really useful. And there's some really fascinating research on that as well, showing the power of that.

• 41:46Dan Harris?

  This is really helpful.

• 41:51Dan Harris?

  Coming up, more practical tools for dealing with regret.

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• 43:03Dan Harris?

  In my mind, there are two bodies of work that have been on parallel paths. And you're probably familiar with both of these bodies of work in psychological research. But they really, they meld well in my mind. So there's self compassion.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:18Dan Harris?

  And in Kristin's work, she recommends often what's called the mindful self compassion break, which consists of three parts. The first is mindfulness, just seeing clearly this is a moment of suffering. The second is, and you referenced this, acknowledging universality, common humanity. I'm not the only one with this problem. And then the third is to talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend. And so that's self compassion. And then there's also the work of Ethan Cross at the University of Michigan, who's also been on the show a couple of times. And he's the one who's really shown that if you talk to yourself using self distancing, and you reference this, you know, using your own name, that it can be more effective. And so it's like the third part of the mindful self compassion break of like talking to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend.

• 44:00Dan Harris?

  And then adding in this distant self talk, to use the term of art, seems to be like to supercharge the whole thing.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  I write about both Neff's work and Ethan's work. And I think they're powerful and I think they go together well. And, you know, I think what's interesting here is that we haven't, we'll throw in Pennebaker and make it a hat trick. You know, we have a lot of research on that. Well, maybe make an observation that might be interesting. So we have evidence of this. We have science behind these things and we know how to do this. And yet we're not equipped to do it and we haven't been taught how to do it. But I think what's interesting is that, that's in the secular world. In the religious world, there are mechanisms, rituals, practices that are rooted in these same kinds of ideas that people do. So in Catholicism, it's confessional. You unburden yourself.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  You transmute your amorphous emotion to a disclosure that says what it is. You know, you get some guidance from an authority on what to do next. Jews have a whole day of the year that is about atonement, where you're forced to reckon with that. There are other rituals in Judaism where you take A mistake or regret, I can't think of what it's called, and you light it on fire and you throw it into the river. And so we have, and some of the, you know, the mindfulness stuff, as you know better than anybody, is rooted in some forms of Buddhism. And so the secular world, though, hasn't equipped us to deal with this universal painful emotion. The religious world has, it's developed these rituals and mechanisms, things like that. But if we look to the science,

• 45:32Speaker 03

  and I think you're exactly right, Neff, Cross, Pennebaker as well, and many, and many other people, it's giving us instructions about how to live our lives more fully, how to live our lives better, when we know that our lives are going to have pain, they're going to have unpleasantness, we're going to make mistakes, we're going to screw up, we're going to feel bad part of the time. And I just feel like, especially in America, we just haven't been taught, in a secular world, how to reckon with that. Which is why, Dan, I mean, it's why your stuff is so popular, because people need that kind of mindfulness. They need a practice, they need a ritual, they need a set of tools to make sense of a complex world, and also to make

• 46:16Speaker 03

  sense of a flawed self.

• 46:18Dan Harris?

  Yep. Well, thank you. And I also, I just do want to acknowledge and agree with your point that there's a lot to be learned, even for those of us who have some wariness when it comes to organized religion, there, there's a lot to be learned. And you, you described the show earlier as secular. I would say it's like, I mean, to a certain extent, yes, but it's like more syncretic, it's like,

• 46:40Speaker 03

  Nice. Okay, it's two to one now.

• 46:42Dan Harris?

  Yeah, you owe me one. It's like, what works? And I'll take it, what works from any tradition.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  And here's the thing, if you look at, like, I'm doing some research now on wisdom. And if you look at what psychologists and scientists have learned about wisdom, and you look at some of the wisdom traditions that were minted well before we had anything close to the scientific method. There's a lot of similarities, you know? And you know, if you look at some of these regrets too. I mean, I think one of the things interesting about these four regrets. It took me a while to get there is that they give us instruction. Okay, so we can have like in a given moment, you can have a regret. You can treat yourself with self compassion. You can disclose it and write about it. You can extract a lesson from it through self distancing. But at a broad level, regret teaches us something else too.

• 47:33Speaker 03

  Because what I discovered in interviewing all these hundreds of people about their regrets is that when we know what people regret the most, we know what they value the most. Right, this is actually really important. Go back to this, all the decisions we make. Yesterday, or today, let's think today. Today, I don't know, I probably made 70 decisions in the course of the day. Tomorrow, I'm not going to remember most of them. But there's certain kinds of decisions and actions and inactions from a year ago, from five years ago, from 10 years ago, that 20 years ago, that not only do you remember them, they bug us. Like, that is an incredibly strong signal. Yeah. And these four regrets that we surfaced in this big world regret survey,

• 48:17Speaker 03

  I think they operate as a reverse image of what people want out of life. What do people want out of life? I think foundation regrets are about stability. A good life is stable. A good life is not precarious. A good life is not wobbling underneath your feet. Moral regrets, a good life is good, right? A good life is true and just. Every religion tradition teaches us that. Boldness regrets, I think that boldness regrets are about mortality, in a sense. We know we're gonna die, right? And you're here for this like vanishingly short amount of time. Like, when are you gonna step up? Like, my God, you're not here forever. Why don't you ask Shirley out on a date? You're not gonna be here forever. Why don't you start that cake baking business?

• 49:02Speaker 03

  Whatever, you know? And then connection regrets are about love. So what do we want out of life? We want some stability, we want some goodness, we want some growth, and we want love. And so again, these negative emotions, particularly this apex negative emotion of regret, is giving us the tools and it's giving us the insights to lead our lives with greater richness, with greater fullness, with greater love.

• 49:26Dan Harris?

  Well said. I just want to touch on a few of more strategic suggestions from you before I let you go. You talk about starting a regret circle. What is that?

• 49:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is something that some people have done. There's certain kinds of group practices that are kind of interesting in here. So what you can do is you basically, you know, gather your friends. Everybody talks about a regret that they have. So what you have is you have the disclosure. You have the sense of solidarity that you're not alone. But what you also have is you're enlisting, let's say you have six people, you're enlisting five other people to help you see what you should do. So you're overcoming Solomon's paradox in that. And so that's one thing. The other thing that you sometimes see, it's a really interesting story. There's been some few feature stories about it, but people doing obituary parties. So that they will gather with their friends and then write their obituary and read it.

• 50:17Speaker 03

  So what you're doing is you are going forward in time and imagining backward. There's a famous story about Alfred Nobel, where he woke up one morning in the late 1800s and in this French paper, he saw his obituary. All right, but they mistook him for his brother Ludwig. So he's a little bit wigged out by reading his obituary. But what he really wigged him out was the headline, which is, forgive my bad French, le marchand de mort est mort. All right, the merchant of death is dead. It's very important when I speak French to sound like Peter Sellers, as you can tell. The merchant of death is dead. And he's like, wait a second, like, I'm this great industrialist. I'm this great human being. And they're calling to me in my obituary, the merchant of death?

• 51:03Speaker 03

  Because he invented dynamite, he had munitions factories, et cetera. Yeah, he's a great inventor, a great chemist. But what he invented were things that went boom, basically. Dynamite, blasting caps. When he finally did die, like 20 years later, to his family's surprise, he changed his will. And didn't leave any money to them, but left all his money to start the Nobel prizes. Because he had that glimpse of his obituary and he knew what people would say about him. So people have sometimes obituary parties where they write their obituary and read it to other people. So there is a sense out there that People do want to reckon with these negative things. They just don't know how. And as you were mentioning before, some of the academic work from people like Kristin and Ethan can really, really help people do that.

• 51:47Dan Harris?

  Last question, because then we're going to run out of time. One of the other things you recommend is to adopt a journey mindset. What does that mean?

• 51:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, there's some interesting research. Jennifer Acker has done some of this research. Basically, there's something called in psychology that we've all confronted called the arrival fallacy, where we think, as soon as I get, I'll give you my own life, okay, arrival fallacy. My first book is, I say, oh my God, I just, I really want to book on the bestseller list. All right. And once I get a book on the bestseller list, I'm going to feel great. All right. So I get a book on the bestseller list and it feels great for a day. And then I'm like, oh shit, what can I do to stay on for next week? All right. And so what you have to do is, is actually not fall for that. And instead, just sort of focus on the journey. And there's some very good, there's some research from Jennifer Acker at Stanford, as I mentioned,

• 52:34Speaker 03

  showing that people who really do say, I'm doing this interview with Dan Harris, not to try to peddle my books to try to achieve some instrumental end, but because it's part of my own exploration of these ideas, because it's an interesting conversation, because I'm on the path to talk about things that really, that really matter. And as cheesy as that sounds, there's some very good evidence that that approach is psychologically healthy.

• 53:00Dan Harris?

  Notwithstanding the fact that you just said what you said as we vector toward our final seconds here, can I just get you to remind the audience of the name of your book? And also your previous books, because people may want to go deeper on this subject and others that you have touched.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  I, the name of this book is The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. And I have a bunch of other books whose titles I don't really want to recite, but you can find them at your favorite bookseller or at danpink.com, D A N P I N K dot com. You know, I've been around for a while. I'm in my mid 50s, which means that I just turned 61.

• 53:40Dan Harris?

  The last thing I just want to say to you is, first of all, it's ridiculous, and this is my fault, that I'm interviewing you about this book three years after it came out. So I just want to beg you, and this is not to shift the blame here, but just to beg you that anything you're doing, anytime, you should pitch me directly or my team because you are on a shortlist of people that I and we will always support. So, please.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  It's very kind of you. I appreciate that. I'm now in my, you know, I'll spare you the full contours of my midlife crisis, but I'm now doing a bunch of different crazy things that I'm not sure will ever work or why I'm doing it. But that's another story. But if I have anything, if I ever have any work product that's worth promoting, I'll call you.

• 54:22Dan Harris?

  I'm your boy. Hit me up.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:24Dan Harris?

  Daniel Pink, huge pleasure. Thank you for making time for this.

• 54:27Speaker 03

  Okay, I really enjoyed it, Dan. Thanks so much for having me. Take care.

• 54:35Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Dan Pink. Awesome to talk to him. Don't forget to check out my new meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris. You can download it at danharris.com. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to check it out before you buy anything. Not only do we have a growing body of guided meditations, but every week, every Tuesday at 4, we do a live meditation and Q&A session. In fact, tomorrow, January 27, the session will be led by Bart Van Melik, who's our Teacher of the Month. Come check it out. We do these every Tuesday at 4 Eastern, and if you don't make it live, we put the video in the app the next day so you can watch at your leisure. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our

• 55:20Dan Harris?

  recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

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