How To Overcome Regret - Daniel Pink

Daniel Pink is a psychologist, speaker and an author. Regret is the most common negative emotion humans talk about. It's even the second most common overall emotion which we talk about after love. And yet our relationship with it is pretty terrible. Having no regrets is not only a bad tattoo from the 90's but also a philosophy that robs us of valuable insights from life. Expect to learn the most common types of regrets people have in life, whether action or inaction is the cause of most suffering, how Daniel suggests we can grow past our regrets, why never looking backward is limiting our growth, how people believe in both free will and things happening for a reason and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Get a free v60 brewing kit and 40 filters from Pact Coffee at https://www.pactcoffee.com/ (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy The Power Of Regret - https://amzn.to/3I0UUx9 Follow Daniel on Twitter - https://twitter.com/DanielPink Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #psychology #regret #growth - 00:00 Intro 00:22 Modern Society’s Issue with Regret 06:55 The Opposite of Regret 15:36 Painful Inaction & Moral Regret 25:14 Dealing with Negative Emotions 37:59 Connection Regrets 43:00 Agency 50:40 Value of an Enemy 55:47 Where to Find Daniel - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  People who are healthy, people who learn and grow and progress, see their lives in terms of redemption narratives. Not as perfect, but as better as going in that kind of trajectory. And so when we think about these, our lives in narrative terms, we inevitably have to ask the question, okay, my life is a narrative. Am I the author of that narrative? Or am I a character in that narrative?

• 0:21Chris Williamson?

  What's modern society's problem with regret?

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Uh, we, we, we dismiss it as something that should be avoided rather than embrace it as something that can actually change our lives. And I think it's part of a bigger problem with modern society in that we, we don't know how to deal with negative emotions. We think that negative emotions make us weak. We think that negative emotions are dangerous, when in fact, negative emotions can make us strong. Negative emotions can make us better, particularly our most common negative emotion, regret.

• 0:53Chris Williamson?

  That's the most common negative emotion?

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's some interesting research, starting in the 1980s, where they, a social scientist named Susan Shimonoff, who did research in, in the US, where she recorded everyday conversations among people. And then they took the transcript of these conversations and they coded the conversations for the emotions that were expressed. The most common negative emotion people express is regret. The second most common emotion overall that people discuss is regret. The, the, it's second only to love. So regret is, regret is a ubiquitous emotion. Everybody has regrets. The only people who don't have regrets are people with some kind of problem. People who have neurodegenerative disease or people who are sociopaths. Otherwise, everybody has regrets.

• 1:40Chris Williamson?

  Why is it so common?

• 1:43Speaker 00

  Well, that's a great question. And, and I think that's the puzzle that, you know, I'd love your listeners to, to linger, have your listeners linger in their head for a little bit. Because here you have this emotion that is unpleasant, right? Okay, so let's not, regret, regret doesn't feel good. Regret feels bad. It feels bad. It's a negative emotion. And yet, it's ubiquitous. So that's a great, that's a great way to frame the issue. Why is it hard to, why is regret both hard to take and hard to avoid? And, and there's a little bit of a paradox here, because you say, well, wait a second. We, human beings are wired for pleasure. We seek pleasure. Why is, is something that's so unpleasant, so ubiquitous? And the answer is... It's good for us. It helps. It's useful. It's there for a reason.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  And what we know from 50 years of science is that our cognitive machinery is pre-programmed for regret. Regret is actually an important and integral part of how our brains work. And so when we embrace this idea that we shouldn't have regrets, that we shouldn't look backward, that we should dismiss negative emotions, we are doing ourselves a grave misservice.

• 2:46Chris Williamson?

  How's the brain programmed for regret?

• 2:50Speaker 00

  Well, you have to say, the brain is programmed for regret because regret helps us learn. Okay, so just think about this. Let's use an analogy, all right? Imagine if we didn't, let's go back to this big issue of negative emotions, okay? Imagine if we didn't have the emotion of fear.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  We wouldn't survive, right? You're in a, your hotel is on fire. I'm not scared of a burning building in New York City. And you end up melting on your, you know, your desk chair in some hotel, right? All right. You know, imagine, imagine a world without grief, which is a terrible emotion, right? But imagine if we didn't experience grief. The reason we experience grief is because we experience love, right? Grief is teaching us something. It tells us something. And regret teaches us, regret, regret clarifies, it's part of our cognitive machinery because regret, more than any other emotion in our life, clarifies what we care about and instructs us how to do better. If we treat it right. We don't always treat it right.

• 3:50Chris Williamson?

  Clarifies what we care about and instructs us to do better?

• 3:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:57Chris Williamson?

  So it's, it's to do with, it's both a forward and back?

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it's, it's, that's a great point. It's, it's both. Okay, and those two things are inextricable. What regret does is that we look backward, feel the stab of negativity for something we did or didn't do for a decision we made or didn't make. All right? That stab of negativity clarifies what matters to us and instructs us about what we do next. And so, and it's, it's interesting you picked up on that because it's, it's integral to our understanding of regret and it's integral to understanding how in some ways majestic and extraordinary it is that we can experience regret. This is one reason why the five-year-olds, for instance, don't experience regret because their brains haven't

• 4:46Speaker 00

  developed enough. With regret, let's, let's say. Let's say that um, let's say that um, I regret, I don't give me your guy, I I regret that I didn't um, I I regret that I didn't study um, accounting when I was, when I was younger, okay?

• 5:02Chris Williamson?

  No one, no one has ever said that.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  Okay, so give me some, give me something else. I regret, okay, perfect, I regret, okay, great, I regret that I didn't study philosophy when I was younger, okay? So think about, think about what I had to do with that, first of all, I go back in time to when I was in university, which is thirty-five years ago, right, so I'm go, I'm already, I've already sort of cognitively gotten in a time machine, zip back there, I know what really happened there, but I'm also gonna use my incredibly inventive mind to negate what really happened, so I'm gonna, so I'm a fabulous too, I'm gonna tell an entirely new story where I studied philosophy, right, then, I'm not done, all right, then, I get back in my time machine

• 5:47Speaker 00

  and I zip to the present, all right, and I say, whoa, if only I'd studied philosophy, and as I did in my recreated past, I'm now arrived at it, at a present, but the present has been reconfigured because of my past decisions, and I'm now a more enlightened person, I'm now more attractive to women because I can talk about Hume and I can talk about Spinoza, uh, I I have a better sense of what my life is about and and and so, and so it's about time travel and fabulism and it is incredibly cognitively sophisticated.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  It is very hard for me to imagine another species doing that, I mean that very seriously. I think that we we we know, we're we're learning a little bit more about animal emotion and cognition, um, and and we know that that, we we know there's some animals that seem to experience grief, we know that most animals experience some kind of attachment and something akin to love, uh, but regret, it's just too cognitively sophisticated, it's one of the things that makes human beings unique, and and so why has it, why has it maintained, why has it not been washed out through evolution? It's actually been enhanced through evolution because it's useful.

• 6:55Chris Williamson?

  What's the opposite of regret, is it gratitude?

• 7:02Speaker 00

  No, I think the opposite of regret is maybe rejoicing.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  I think the opposite of to regret something is to rejoice it. To say, "Oh, I'm so glad I made that decision. I'm so glad I didn't study philosophy because I'd be a barista right now. I'm so glad I didn't study philosophy because Schopenhauer had no idea what he was talking about. You know, I'm so glad I didn't..." You know, it's a rejoicing.

• 7:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I was just wondering why... Well, we have a negativity bias. And learning lessons from what's effective is important, but it's less effective... It's less important than learning the things that could have killed you or went, you know, terrifyingly wrong. So I'm trying to think about how, if there's a scale, or if, you know, if a little bit of rejoicing can dampen the pain of regret at all.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  Well, yes and no. I mean, there are things that you can do. Okay, so let's take a step back. So in the broad architecture of regret, there are often two kinds of regret. Regrets of action and regrets of inaction. Regrets about what you did and regrets about what you didn't do. All right, so with action regrets, you can... You have some options with an action regret. Let's say that I have hurt somebody. I can try to make amends. I can try to make restitution. I can apologize. With certain action regrets, let's say, "Oh, my gosh, I can't believe I painted my house orange." Well, you can repaint your house a more congenial color.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  So you can undo certain action regrets. The other thing you can do with action regrets, which you're hinting at, Chris, is that you can mitigate some of the pain by what I call at-leasing them, which is... And this is what I mean by that. Our ability to process regret is... Logicians, philosophers, along with scientists, call counterfactual thinking. We can summon a world that runs counter to the actual facts. All right, and so there are different kinds of counterfactuals. You can do an upward counterfactual, imagine how things could have been better, "If only I'd studied philosophy." All right, that makes you feel worse, but it makes you do better. You can also do a downward counterfactual. Well, at least I studied accounting and I have a good job.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  Um, so you can do a downward counterfactual. This, the, the classic example of this is, is with, um, is why in the Olympics, um, bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists routinely. If you look at their faces, bronze medalists say, oh, at least I got a medal unlike the schmo who finished fourth. Silver medalists are saying, oh, if only I'd kicked a little harder, I'd have a gold medal. Alright, so, so, so what we know, getting back to action and inaction regrets, is that with action regrets, we can at least, we can say, and I have, and I've collected all these regrets from around the country, around the world, rather, and you, you can say, oh, well, I, I regret marrying that idiot, but at least I have these three great kids. Um, and you can, and, and the thing about these downward counterfactuals, these at least, is that they make us feel better.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  They don't necessarily help us do better, but it's okay to feel better. I mean, sometimes that's actually useful.

• 10:11Chris Williamson?

  What were the most common regrets that you found?

• 10:15Speaker 00

  Well, let me, instead of asking that question directly, let me stay on brand and give you a lengthy, discursive and contextual preamble before answering the question. Um, so what I did is, on that one, is, so, in order to research this book, one of the things that I did is I looked at the academic research. I did my own public opinion survey, quantitative survey of the US population. And then I also collected, um, you know, in, in the book itself, we had fifteen thousand, we're now over eighteen thousand. Eighteen thousand regrets from people all over the world. And what I found is that around the world, people have the same four core regrets over and over and over again. And they're less about the domains of people's lives than they are about something underneath that's going on there.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  So let me give you one of those, these four core regrets to try to exemplify that. Um, I have a lot of regrets about people who regret, um, uh, not traveling, not traveling enough. Okay, so that's like in the, in the sort of personal category, oh, I had a chance to go to Greece, but I didn't do it. I had a chance to, I had a chance to study when, uh, overseas when I was in university and I didn't take the chance. Okay, a lot of, a lot of people regret not studying abroad in university. Alright, so that's an education regret. Then I have lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of regrets all over the world, where someone regrets finding somebody attractive.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Wanting to ask them out, not doing it, and then regretting that that that that chickening out. Okay, so that's a romance regret. And then I have lots of regrets about people who say, I stayed in this crappy job, but what I really wanted to do was start my own business, but I didn't have the guts to do it. That's a career regret. But to my mind, those are all the same regret. Those are a regret. You're at a juncture, you can play it safe, you can take the chance. You don't take the chance and you regret it. So one category of boldness regrets, which are, if only I'd taken the chance. And then there's there's three others that I'm happy to talk about, too.

• 12:09Chris Williamson?

  And that's an inaction regret, that first one.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  The boldness one is definite. Boldness is almost always an inaction regret. They're they're they're actually relatively few. It's interesting question. They're relatively few people. I mean, again, I got this massive database of regrets. There are people who regret acting too bold, but they are the distinct minority. I would say there's a I mean, I I don't forty to one ratio, fifty to one ratio of people who regret of between people who regret not acting bold enough and people who regret acting too bold.

• 12:44Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me like

• 12:45Speaker 00

  It's overwhelming. It's overwhelming.

• 12:47Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me like maybe maybe adventure is is kind of like a little bit of a common theme in that boldness stuff that you're thinking about. Look, this, if only I'd been a little bit braver, maybe I would have had new experiences, seen new people, had a different sort of life.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  I I think it's partly adventure. I think that it is. I think there's even something bigger than adventure going on, Chris. And it's in um, um, I'll I'll see your I'll see your adventure and raise you mortality. I I think that at some level, all of us human beings are conscious that we're mortal, that we're not here forever.

• 13:25Chris Williamson?

  It's an existential thing.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that it is part, I, I think that it's partly existential. It's basically saying, we are here on this planet for an astonishingly brief amount of time. So when am I going to do something? When am I going to see stuff? When am I going to learn? When am I going to grow? There's a, there's an emerging field in psychological science that around the concept of something called psychological richness. That not only do we want a pleasant life, but we want a psychologically rich life that which would include things like adventure. And I think that's what's driving that. I think that's what's driving the boldness regrets.

• 13:58Chris Williamson?

  Well, I suppose the thing with the boldness regret is that if I've behaved this way in the past, I'm concerned that if I continue to behave this way in the future, as life continues to become less and less and less available as we get older and we're getting closer toward death. That's where the existential thing comes in, right? Look, I did this thing in the past and if I continue to do this thing in the future, as life gets even more sparse and there's even less life for me to have, I'm going to potentially fritter away more of my days not doing things that actually fulfill me existentially.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  I think you're spot on and I have data to prove that because on that. So it's the, so the second piece of the, the research that I did was a, was a large public opinion survey, quantitative survey of the US population. So we surveyed 4,489 Americans, asking them all kinds of questions about regret and what it means and what they regretted. And, and, and what I was really looking for were demographic differences. Do men have different regrets than women do? Yeah, um, and the demographic differences were much less pronounced than I would have expected, except on what you're talking about. And it's this. When we are young, say in our twenties, people tend to have equal, roughly equal numbers of action regrets and inaction regrets.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  But as we age, it's all inaction, not all, but it's inaction regrets take over for exactly the reason that you're saying, I think, is that the finish line is a little bit closer and people say, holy smokes, I still haven't done that. I gotta step up.

• 15:34Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of common meme culture, you know, to talk about you're supposed to, you never regret the things that you do, only the things that you didn't do. I think I've seen that posted around on the internet a lot. I don't know. I don't know why. It's not true. It's not that you never do, but I don't know why people have picked up on that particular mechanic, that there is a skew toward inaction being more painful, or at least more prevalent than action.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's more prevalent. I'm not sure it's always more painful, but it's but it's more prevalent. I mean, there are all kinds of reasons for that. One of them is that, as we were talking about earlier, is that with action regrets, you can actually, you can do something about them. So, you know, so I got a guy in the book who got a tattoo that said, no regrets, then regretted it and got it removed. Okay, so that's a way of undoing, you know, like action regrets, you can, you can, you can, you can sometimes do something about it. So you can resolve them. And inaction regret, let's say I regret never visiting Turkey. All right. How do I, I can't, there's only one solution to that, you know, I gotta go do it.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  And if I don't do it, I'm still hit by that. And the other thing is that people tend to be bothered by the what ifs. And what's interesting about some of the boldest regrets and some of the other regrets is that people were less outcomeist than I expected. They weren't saying, I should have asked her out on a date, I should have asked him out on a date, not because they say, oh, and as a consequence of that, I would have had this blissful marriage and did it. They just, they're not saying that. They're saying, I just want to know what would have happened.

• 17:11Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so a lot of this is, is closing that sort of zygonic loop a little bit. It's wanting to just lock that off so that they know what would have happened. Yeah, I think about this a lot. So here's some bro science cod psychology for you, coming straight out of the research lab that is my brain. I'm pretty sure that there is something called an anxiety cost. So opportunity cost is going to the theme park or going to the gym. You choose to go to the theme park. The cost of going to the theme park is not going to the gym, right? That's opportunity cost. I'm pretty sure that there's an equivalent that occurs when.

• 17:47Chris Williamson?

  For instance, in your daily routine, everything that you need to do is a part of your daily routine sets when you wake up on a morning. Let's say that you're going to meditate and take the dog for a walk and go to the gym and do some other things. The longer that you wait throughout your day until you do that thing, the more time of your day is spent ruminating and thinking about the fact that you still need to do that thing. So let's say that you'd gone to the gym and walked the dog and done your meditation first thing in the morning. You could have basked for the remainder of the day reveling in this sort of productive glow that you've had. Well, look, I've already done those things. I don't need to take my time thinking about that. However, if you don't go to the gym until 6:00 PM, you will spend a non-zero amount of time earlier in the day thinking, oh, I've still got to go to the gym. I've got that thing to do.

• 18:29Chris Williamson?

  I can't believe I got that thing to do. And that, to me, is the anxiety cost. So the sooner that you can get certain tasks done, the sooner that you can, the equivalent could be done with thinking about asking a girl out. There's a girl in college that you really want to ask out. You could spend the next two years of college thinking about asking her out, or you could do it now, stress test the idea, and you won't have to ever think about that anymore. Now, that, to me, that anxiety cost is such a motivator. You think, look, if I just go and do the thing, and it seems, given the fact that action and inaction skews toward inaction being more prevalent, it seems like that might help to actually push people. Okay, I'll just do it. I'll just do it. I know that inaction is a more

• 19:11Chris Williamson?

  consistent regret than action ones, and I know that I'm not going to have to think about it again. If I just get it done, she might have halitosis. She might be a total bitch. I'll ask her.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  So here's the thing. I think that one of the lessons of this is that we should have something of a bias for action. And because, for a couple of reasons. Number one is that I think we've under, there are a few reasons why I think we should have a bias for action. Number one, for exactly the reason that you're saying, that it extinguishes the what-if question. And the what-if question can linger on us as a, I mean, you're essentially describing it as something of a cognitive tax. It's a tax on our, on our attention. It's a tax on our willpower. It's a tax on our...

• 20:01Speaker 00

  You know, ability to focus in a way. So, and so the the action extinguishes that. The other thing which I think we we totally underestimated is how much action helps us learn. That is, we we tend, we we sometimes have the sequence wrong. We think that the way you do stuff is you learn how to do it and then you do it. But a lot of times, doing stuff helps us learn what to do and how to do it. It's certainly true when we're thinking about our, it's certainly true when we're thinking about our life course, or when we're thinking about what to do with our lives. We tend to say, okay, I got to plan this out and then I'm going to do it. But the way you discover what it is you want to do is by doing stuff.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  And so I think a lesson of these boldness regrets is that we should have, you know, I don't, I don't think a wild bias toward action, but we should have a bias toward action, because action extinguishes our what if, and it helps us learn in ways that we don't often realize.

• 21:00Chris Williamson?

  What was the next category of regrets after boldness?

• 21:02Speaker 00

  So another, another category of regret are what I call foundation regrets. Foundation regrets are people who regret, say, spending too much money and saving too little. People who regret not taking care of their health. People who regret not working hard enough in school or university. People who make these small decisions. They're, they're, they're largely about conscientiousness, about prudence. Small decisions early that have, that accumulate and have pretty nasty consequences later on. And, and so foundation regrets, if boldness regrets are, if only I'd taken the chance, foundation regrets are, if only I'd done the work. And what they show is our need for stability. A good life has, is not precarious.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  It's hard to have a good life if you're uncertain, if your platform is wobbly. And people do regret making bad, small decisions that have a collective force of weakening their foundation, of, of, of giving too much precariousness to their life.

• 22:00Chris Williamson?

  It's so interesting how these regrets in retrospect are reminding us of a lot of things that we're told when looking forward. You know, you need to look after your health. You should be going to the gym. You should be careful about how you spend your money. And in retrospect, we're being taught that this is like mimetic evolution is providing us with, okay, what are the things that after the entirety of life still stick in somebody's mind is the thing. Now, that's not to say that the things that they say that they regret would have actually improved their lives had they have done them, but they certainly wouldn't have regretted them anymore.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  You got it exactly right. This is the part we were talking about earlier. Regret is clarifying. The stuff that sticks with us teaches us what we value, what we value. And I think that what we value is stability. We value stability, but we also value boldness. At the same time, those things are perfectly compatible. And what regret reveals, and I say this in the book, is what these four regrets reveal in some ways is a photographic negative of the good life. That is, I got these 16,000, I mean, again, 18,000 people who are telling me what they regret the most. But by doing that, they're telling me what they value the most. And these four core regrets tell us what people value the most. And two of the things they value is they want some, people want a good life that has some

• 23:18Speaker 00

  stability to it. But a good life also has some growth and some psychological richness and some existential excitement and adventure to it, as you're saying.

• 23:27Chris Williamson?

  What's the next category?

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Moral regrets. Those are regrets where people are at a juncture in their life. They can do the wrong thing. They can do the right thing. They do the wrong thing and they regret it. And these are things like, the two biggest areas are bullying in school, huge numbers of that, and then marital infidelity, things that... That that violate either that person's individual moral codes or a broader moral code. Um, and and I think that that suggests that people actually, and I'm convinced of this, I I think most people, I really do. Most people want to be good. I'm convinced of that. Um, that we not not, you know, we can, we can, I I mean, I think there's an evolutionary argument for that.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  For, um, uh, but I think that most of us want to be good and most of us, not every single person, every single time. But most of us feel pretty bad when we we we don't act well. We don't, we're not good.

• 24:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I mean, the the regrets aren't signaling to a group. You know, maybe it'll make you act in a certain way, but it's very much an internal singular.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  That's a very good, it's a very good point. That's a really, really, that's a very, very good point about that. And that's, that's a great point, actually. And that's why it is, that's a great point. That's why it's so instructive, because it's it's inherently not performative. All right. So the the expression of no regrets is a performance. If I say to the world, I have no regrets, I never look backward, that's performative, I am performing courage. But when I feel regret and it's coming this way, there's no performance there. It's an honest signal to yourself.

• 25:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's an honest signal. You can have a fair bit of faith that the things that you regret are things that you actually regret. Now, did you find, uh, can you imagine that certain people may overly regret? People may, um, tune up.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 25:23Chris Williamson?

  Tune up their regrets too high.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  There's no question about that. And this is, this is because we haven't been taught effectively how to deal with negative emotions. Um, and so, so on one pole, you can ignore your negative emotions. That's a bad idea. That leads to delusion. But on the other pole, you can wallow in them, you can ruminate over them. Uh, that's a bad idea, too. Uh, because that leads to despair. What we should be doing is we should be confronting our negative emotions. We should be thinking about our negative emotions and we should be applying a systematic way to enlist these negative emotions to help us live better in the future. That's, that's the key. And the trouble is, nobody ever teaches us how to do that.

• 26:03Chris Williamson?

  So there there's a, there has to be a distinction between sort of reflection and rumination.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Rumination, rumination is terrible for us. Um, but the reason that people, a reason that people ruminate, a main reason that people ruminate is they don't know what to do when a negative emotion comes in. Because we're so over-indexed on positivity. People think that if they're experiencing a negative emotion, oh my god, everybody else is so positive, there must be something wrong with me, and that can bring them down. What's more is that when they experience a negative emotion, because they're human, they haven't been instructed on what to do with a negative emotion. Um, and there are ways that we can process negative emotions far more effectively, and you can arrest that march toward rumination.

• 26:46Chris Williamson?

  What should they do then? What should people do?

• 26:48Speaker 00

  Oh, well, there's all coming, there are a bunch of things that we can do on that. I mean, there's, there's, I mean, I like to look at the process as inward, outward, forward. Inward, outward, forward. So inward, what you have to do when you experience a regret is you need to practice something called self-compassion, which is a line of research that began 20 years ago by Kristin Neff at the University of Texas. Basically, it's this, when we look at, you know, and I'm sure your listeners are probably big violators of this, when we make mistakes, when we screw up, the way we talk to ourselves is brutal. We lacerate ourselves, we criticize ourselves in such cruel terms that I can't imagine that most of us would ever talk to another human being the way we talk to ourselves.

• 27:31Speaker 00

  All right? Don't do that. There's no evidence that's effective. Um, there's no evidence that that kind of severe self-criticism improves performance. In a sense, it's, to what you were saying earlier, it's a little bit performative for yourself. You're basically virtue signaling to yourself about what a badass you are, and it, but it doesn't improve performance. What improves performance, and, and, and I encourage your listeners to look at this research on self-compassion because it's powerful, is what improves performance is this. Treating yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Basically, treating yourself with the same kindness you would treat somebody else who you came to you with this kind of thing. Recognizing that your mistakes and your missteps are part of the human condition, that you're actually in some level not that special.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  That if, that if you have a regret about, oh, I should have started a business, you're not alone. If you have a regret about mistreating somebody, you're not alone. It's part of the human experience. And the third thing is that, um, these regrets, these mistakes, these missteps, these screw-ups, they're a part of your life. They don't fully define your life. Um, and they're a moment in your life. And so, when you do that, when you sort of reframe how you think about it inward, that makes the way for, that paves the way for... Um, you know, the other parts of the reckoning process. Okay. So that's inward. That's inward. Yeah. Outward disclosure. Disclosure.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  There is a law, there is a strong case to be made for disclosing your regrets.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  For a couple of reasons, you know, here's the thing. Uh, let me give you an example. So I got these eighteen, okay, so, so I put up this site with like two tweets. I have fifteen thousand regrets from people all over, all over the country, all over the world. Fifteen thousand people saying, hello, yes, hello, complete stranger. I would like to tell you my biggest regret. All right. So that's kind of wacky in itself. Then I also um had a, uh, you know, in the, in the form, I said, you know, if you wanted to, because I'm, you know, because I'm a writer and I'm, I'm writing a book about regret. And I said, if you wanted to, if you, if you'd like to be contacted for a follow up interview. Uh, please include your email address. You feel free to include your email address. Otherwise it was anonymous. I thought that maybe five or six percent of people would include their email address. Thirty-two percent included their email address.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Thirty-two percent said, yes, I want to tell my, a complete stranger my, my regret and I want him to email me so we can talk more about it. Okay, that's, that's telling us something right there. And so what is it about disclosure? Okay, we got the inward reframing, let's go outward. Disclosure isn't unburdening. There's no question about that. But the other thing about disclosure, and this is extremely important, is that disclosure is an integral part of the sense-making process. And the reason for that is that the way we construe, there are different ways we can construe things. We can construe them, to oversimplify a bit, at an abstract level or a concrete level. And there are advantages and disadvantages on those different levels of construal. So negative emotion, emotions in general, but negative emotions especially are abstract.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  They're blobby, they're amorphous, they feel menacing because of that. When you convert those menacing emotions to words, spoken or written.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  They're more concrete. Concrete things are less medicine. So you defang them in a way. And then the fact that they're in language allows you to begin making sense of them. So that's disclosure. So, so if you're, if you're, if, if they're, we, we, we, we overstate how much disclosing our vulnerabilities will affect how people think of us. In general, there's thirty years of research saying that when we disclose our mistakes and our screw-ups and our vulnerabilities, people actually think more highly of us, not less highly of us. Um, so, but even if you're skittish about disclosing, what you should be doing is, just, I mean, if you write about your regret for fifteen minutes a day for three days, that's an incredibly potent way to make sense of the regret. So that's outward. The next step is forward.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  You gotta extract a lesson from it. You gotta extract a lesson from it. And the way we extract lessons is, is by getting some distance from it. It's pretty clear, it's essentially incontrovertible, that we are better at solving, we stink at solving our own problems and are pretty good at solving other people's problems. And that's all, that's all because of distance. So you can do things like talk to yourself in the third person. There are a lot of research on that. So, so for you, if you have a regret, instead of saying, what should I do, you should say, what should Chris do? Um, there are things, uh, you can use our time travel skills. And you can say, you're deciding what to do or how to, how to extract a lesson from this regret.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  Make a phone call to the Chris of twenty thirty-two and say, hey, Chris of twenty thirty-two, what do you want me to do in response to this regret? The Chris of twenty thirty-two has a pretty frickin' good idea because he's not enmeshed in the Chris of twenty twenty-two. Um, you could even do something like the, the tech, just the very simple technique of saying, this is good for all decisions. You're in, you're trying to decide what to do. Ask yourself, what would I tell my best friend to do? When you, but when you, when you do that, people always know what to do. What would I tell him? So that's this, and so you wanna, uh, reframe, treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. You wanna disclose in order to concretize it and make sense of it, and then you wanna take a step back and extract a lesson from it that you can apply it next time.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  And when we do that, negative emotions, they still hurt a little bit, but they don't destroy us, and we actually kind of, we, we, in some ways, we co-opt them. We, we, we enlist them. Integrate them. To make us better, and we, and we avoid repeating those negative emotions later on.

• 33:08Chris Williamson?

  Did you look at when it comes to disclosing a difference between writing for yourself versus writing for someone else, speaking to yourself versus having a conversation with somebody else?

• 33:20Speaker 00

  I didn't look at that. A lot of the research on writing is writing only for yourself. And the disclosure, so when we talk about disclosure, the verbal disclosure is almost always to somebody else, but at the same point to yourself. The written disclosure is almost always only to yourself. So I don't know about whether, you know, writing an essay and publishing an essay about your regrets. My hunch, and it's only a hunch, is that it would be as useful, if not more useful, than simply speaking about it. Because the very act of writing is a form of sense-making. And so you might make greater sense of it by writing about it. And then the

• 34:02Speaker 00

  disclosure gives you both the unburdening and allows you to build affinity and in some ways puts your issue out to other people who then you can enlist in deciding what to do and figure out what to do next.

• 34:15Chris Williamson?

  I really like the disclosure element of that, that concretizing and defanging of whatever it is that you feel. I think I accuse the American imperial measurement system of basically being the same thing, that you guys don't actually know how much something weighs. It's just a notion about what it might be. It's in this region, right? You know, it's pounds, it's stones, it's a whatever. Like, it's just a thing. And I kind of feel like undisclosed thoughts a lot of the time are ideas. It's one of the reasons that I love writing a newsletter. I never had a newsletter for ages. And now it's just a thousand words at the end of the week, but it forces me to concretize something that I've really been thinking about for the last week. And I speak, I speak for, you know, hours, hours, four or

• 34:57Chris Williamson?

  five hours a week on the show. It's different. Something different.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 35:01Chris Williamson?

  Between writing and speaking.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  There's a greater, there's a greater rigor to it.

• 35:07Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yes, yes.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Particularly when you know it's going to be consumed elsewhere. And this is something that I just, this is something that I discovered. Long ago, it's actually one of, no joke, one of the most important lessons I've learned, which is that writing, we tend to think that what you do is you figure stuff out and then you write about it. But writing itself is a form of figuring out. Writing itself is a form of figuring out what you think. And again, the broader kind of academic term I always use for that, because I think it's useful. I don't know if anybody else cares, but it's sense-making. We're trying to make sense of things. And the way that we make sense of things is by, is by being able to shift between these two levels of construal,

• 35:51Speaker 00

  between looking at things abstractly and looking at things concretely. The same thing is true when it comes to the research on self-distancing and problem-solving. You know, one of the things we have to do there is that we want to construe things. When we look at our own problems, we're like scuba divers, right? Scuba divers don't know anything about the ocean. But they know a little bit about the ocean, but what they know is like what's around them right there. They have no sense for the sweep for the ecosystem of the ocean. So you don't want to be, when you, when we go into our own problems, we are scuba divers. And the way you solve problems is you want to be an oceanographer. And so you need to actually affirmatively take steps to zoom out and look at things differently.

• 36:31Chris Williamson?

  Is sense-making in the literature now as a term?

• 36:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, it's not my term. It's there.

• 36:38Chris Williamson?

  It's a term that gets used a lot in the space that I'm in, in the podcasting space. It's mostly to do with cultural issues. What does it mean to understand how the world operates outside of institutions when you can't trust the news organizations and the government and blah, blah, blah. But it's interesting to find out that it's actually a legitimate term that exists within the literature, too.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, there's, you know, there are some interesting papers in organizational behavior about sense-making in organizations. Carl, for your listeners, Carl Weick, W B I C K, has done some work on how we make sense of, how we make sense of situations as groups, how we make sense of events and situations and emotions as organizations. So it's a, it's a term. But I, but I think that it, I think that what, I think human beings are sense-makers. We have this very confusing, chaotic world that we're trying to navigate. And we're trying to figure it out. We're trying to make sense of it. And the way you make sense of things is not singular.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  That is, you don't do it only abstractly, you're only concretely. You do it both. You don't do it only on the specific or only on the general. You do it both. Um, you don't do it, you don't, you don't, you do it not only looking back, but also looking forward. That is, you need some dexterity in order to make, in order to make sense.

• 37:59Chris Williamson?

  What is the fourth category of regrets?

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Fourth category are connection regrets, and these are regrets about relationships, all relationships, not only romantic relationships. In fact, most of them were not romantic relationships. Relationships about among, um, you know, parents to kids, kids to parents, siblings, relatives, friends, neighbors, colleagues. And essentially the story there is that you have a relationship that was intact or should have been intact. And it comes apart and it usually just drifts apart. It doesn't explode apart and it drifts apart. One side wants to reach out. It doesn't because they say, ah, it's going to be really awkward to reach out and the other side's not going to care. And so it drifts apart more and the trouble there is that they're wrong.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  It's, reaching out is often not awkward at all and the other side almost always cares. And so the connection regrets are if only I'd reached out. And they reflect our need for affinity, for connection, for love.

• 39:02Chris Williamson?

  I bet as well, if you were to ask the people that said, they won't care if I reach out. And you said to them, well, what about if they reached out to you? How would you feel? These people would say, well, I'd love it. It'd be fantastic. It'd be, it would be brilliant. It would, it would, it would completely erode all of the, the worry and the concern.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  And yet they are unable, unable to extrapolate from their experience because we tend to think that we are much more special than we really are. You know, I mean, one of, one of, one of the, one of the things that we, one of the things that we labor under, one of the things that constrains us uh, in our ability to navigate the world and make sense of it is something called pluralistic ignorance. Where we think that we have a belief, but no one else shares it. Um, no one else is, I'm so special, no one else shares that belief. I mean, you see it, you see it in, I mean, I always, I always think, I, I, I think about it in, I think about it in school. So professor gives a lecture and, and she says, are there, are there any questions? And, you know, you're saying, oh my God, I'm totally confused. I don't understand this, I don't understand that.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  But no one else is asking questions, so they must understand, and I don't want to look like an idiot. When in fact, they, you didn't say, well, maybe they're thinking the exact same thing. They don't want to look like, like, like an idiot. So we tend to think that we are much more special than we really are.

• 40:15Chris Williamson?

  But it's safe to assume, i- i- if you have a thought, it's safe to assume that some non-zero number of other people have also had that thought.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  Or, or, or might be having that thought right now. Um, and so, you know, we have to be, again, it's part of this toggling and this sense making. Sometimes you are unique. Sometimes what you're feeling and thinking and seeing is unique and idiosyncratic to you. Sometimes it's extraordinarily common and it's much more common than we, it's much more common than we think. We have sort of an illusion of our own, you know, our own specialness. And, and again, I don't want to hamper anybody's self-esteem listening to this. You're all very special, but you're also like a lot of other people, unlike a lot of other people.

• 41:02Chris Williamson?

  I'm surprised by the, well, actually, before I say what I'm most surprised by, what were you most surprised came up as a common regret?

• 41:12Speaker 00

  I'm not surprised, I'm not sure I'm surprised by any particular thing that came up. I think what I was surprised by more was the universality of these regrets.

• 41:20Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 41:20Speaker 00

  By how common they were across, especially across nations. How, how little seeming national difference there was in a, in a lot of these regrets.

• 41:29Chris Williamson?

  I'm surprised by the bullying. I'm surprised by how many, by how many people, it makes sense in retrospect, I didn't bully anybody in the school, so I, maybe it's just my, um, lack of pluralistic ignorance.

• 41:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I just, it, it surprises me that that many people felt like they'd bullied someone. I don't know how many bullies there were in my school, maybe. But I suppose you don't, it's not like you need to be a bully. It's not, it's not like it's some label, hello, I am the bully, I will punch you in the face. It's one incident perhaps that sticks with people. They'll have done one thing at one time. Stole money from some kid's lunchbox one day and that's the thing that stays with them. It can have been a perfect student throughout all of time, except for that.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  I, I was a little surprised by that, but when they first started coming into the database, but then it's like, this is a, it's a very common regret. And, and at some level, I'm kind of heartened by it. I'm kind of heartened by the fact that people who've mistreated others regret it 10 years later, 20 years later, 30 years later. I mean, it suggests that they've learned something, that, that, that their values are being clarified and that it's giving them some guidance on what to do next.

• 42:39Chris Williamson?

  It is, it is strange. I wonder what someone is, is hoping to do there. Look, I hurt somebody in the past. If I do this again in future, this isn't the sort of person that I want to be. I, I have this vision of myself as a integral, integrity laden human that is going to feel proud. Yet it's, it's an interesting one. Does agency relate to regret at all? The ability to have impact on a situation or not?

• 43:09Speaker 00

  Agency is, is critical to regret. Agency is, is, is essential to regret. You can't have regret if you don't feel, if you don't have any agency. So, you know, you can, you can, you can look at it like, okay, so, um, you know, I'm looking out the window here in Chicago and it's not, it's, it's a very overcast day and maybe I would prefer that it was a sunny day, but I can't regret that it's not sunny. I'm disappointed that it's not sunny, but I can't regret that because regret requires agency. I don't control what, whether the sun shines or not. Um, and so, agency is, agency is incredibly important. That's one reason why it hurts so much is because it's your fault. Disappointment is not your fault.

• 43:51Chris Williamson?

  The, the line, the line gets blurred though, between what we know is our fault and what we know we have agency over and what we don't. If you get hit by a car, your belief that I could have, would have, should have looked to the left, reversed back from the, you know, and then some catastrophe occurs, you can regret that despite having not had any agency over this idiot driver that just hit you, but believing that you did.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  Exactly right, and sorting that out is incredibly important. And let me give you an example of that from the survey, from the quantitative survey. So I was, I wanted to tease out this question of agency. And I also wanted to tease out this question of if you believe, if you believe purely in fatalism, then you don't have regret. You know, because if you have a purely fatalistic view of the world, you, there's no, there's no agency and therefore there's no regret. And so I wanted to see where people, what the, what the ratio is. So, so I asked in this quantitative survey of the US population, I asked a question about free will. I said, I, I said, you believe in general that people have free will, that they have some control over, you know, what they do, how they do it, okay?

• 45:01Speaker 00

  Huge majority said, yes, I believe in free will. Okay, then else when the survey, I asked the, sort of sneaked in the opposite question, which is, do you think that in general, everything in life happens for a reason? It's a more fatalistic thing. And almost everybody said yes. And so what you had is people believing in both of these things. And it's frustrating, okay? You're, you're rubbing your face in frustration. I buried my hands, my face in my hands in frustration, thinking this is contradictory. But it might not be, because that's what our lives are. Like, we don't, there aren't clear, I mean, you said it just now, there isn't, there can be a fuzzy border between where we have agency and where we have not. And sorting that out is part of it. And so you have these people who believe both in free will and that everything happens for a reason.

• 45:45Speaker 00

  I think that that's part of what it takes to navigate our lives. And that's one of the other things that regret teaches us. It forces us to sort that out. Where did I have agency? Where was I a victim of circumstance? You can look at this in narrative terms, too. I mean, Dan, Dan Adams, who is a, who is a personality psychologist at Northwestern University, up the road from where I am right now. He says that we forge our identities in narrative terms. And, and there are two kinds of narratives in our lives. One is what he calls a contamination narrative, which is where things go from good to bad. The other is a redemption narrative where things go from bad to good. And people who are healthy, people who learn and grow and progress,

• 46:28Speaker 00

  see their lives in terms of redemption narratives. Not as perfect, but as better, as going in that in that kind of trajectory. And so when we think about these our lives in narrative terms, we inevitably have to ask the question, okay, my life is a narrative. Am I the author of that narrative? Or am I a character in that narrative? And the answer is yes. You're both. And you have to try to sort that out. And that is, you know, again, this is like, we're we're we're having, you know, the sense making hour with Chris Williamson. But that is also a part of what it takes to make sense of the world. Where do you have agency? Where do you where you know? And I think what's interesting about this emotion of regret that is unpleasant and that we try to avoid and that we try to bat away

• 47:13Speaker 00

  is that when we actually reckon with it, it leads us into discussions like this. It leads us into discussions about what we can control and what we can't. It leads us into discussions about how we make sense of our life. It leads us into discussions about what makes life worth living. And so if we actually treat this emotion like grownups rather than run away from it or ruminate over it, it it is instructive and it's clarifying.

• 47:34Chris Williamson?

  Is there an implication in this that the way we should live life is in a way that minimizes our regrets in future?

• 47:43Speaker 00

  I think that's true to a a point. Because you can't minimize every regret. That's the key. You can't minimize every regret. So if you're trying to go around minimizing every regret, you're gonna go you're gonna go nuts. You have to be able to minimize the right regrets. And once again, these this chorus of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen thousand people is telling us what they regret. And they tend to regret the same thing. So so, you know, if you say, okay, what am I gonna have for dinner? I'm gonna try to minimize my regret about having dinner. So I'm gonna I'm gonna have more regret about having fried chicken? Or am I gonna have more regret about having meatloaf tonight? The you the the me, let's say, let's take me. The me of five years from now is not gonna give a shit one way or another. I can guarantee you that. Like, if I could get the me of twenty twenty seven on the phone

• 48:28Speaker 00

  and call him up and say, okay, he's gonna say, Dan, I don't care. I have completely forgotten that evening five years ago. It has no material effect in my life. But if I say I'm here in Chicago and let's say I have an old friend in Chicago and I haven't talked to him for a while and I said, oh, I should reach out, but it's gonna be kind of weird if I reach out. Uh, okay, I'm not gonna, the, the Dan of twenty twenty seven will tell me, hey dude, reach out. Because I'm gonna regret this in five years if you don't reach out right now. And so we should try to minimize our regrets, but we should try to minimize the right ones. And it ends up being a relatively small set of regrets that we should be minimizing. So we should be in

• 49:10Speaker 00

  some sense maximizing on minimizing those regrets and essentially saying good enough is good enough. And, you know, whether you have fried chicken or meatloaf tonight, whether you buy a gray car or a blue car, uh, those kinds of things ultimately don't matter. The you of the future is not gonna care one way or another.

• 49:26Chris Williamson?

  I would say that over a shorter time span, you may be able to see those uh, come out a little bit more tightly. You know, when you're looking at anything over twenty years, you, you, there's maybe, what, between five and a hundred decisions that are probably going to stick out that you might actually be able to remember. But if you were to say, I'm supposed to be on a diet, I'm on a diet because in future I want to be somebody that's fit. I have the choice this evening between some nice steamed salmon and asparagus or the fried chicken. What would me tomorrow want me today to do? To me, me tomorrow is going to say, well, I feel a bit lethargic here and, and I, my performance in the gym wasn't very good and I didn't sleep too well.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  I, I, I agree with that. I agree with that. I mean, I think that, that the, the perspective changes with, with a little bit with the distance, but I think that future you, I think that future you is generally interested, generally has your best interests in mind. I really do. Um, I think that the situation there is, is in that particular instance is to change the choice architecture. So you don't even, so you don't even have to make a decision. So the only thing, exactly. The only thing you're offered is something that is good for you.

• 50:36Chris Williamson?

  I asked Jordan Peterson this question the other day, I'm gonna ask you as well, because I feel like it it kind of relates to what we're talking about here. I asked him whether there is a value in life of having a nemesis, of having an enemy, someone or something that motivates you, because many of us, me included, try and live a life of peace and not make enemies of people or things or ideas or groups or whatever. But I can't deny myself that when I have resentment in my heart, there is an extra degree of fire that gets lit underneath me, that I want to prove that person or idea or thing or whatever, wrong, that that amount of motivation and drive comes from a place that is really, really difficult for me to tap into.

• 51:16Chris Williamson?

  And it's the juvenile, lower resolution, shitty vibration version of myself. However, it's true, right? When I resent something or someone, I put my foot down on the gas. And I'm wondering whether, to tie it into what we've spoken about today, whether regrets can also fill that hole, whether regret can act as that fire, it can almost act as a, not an ideological nemesis, but like a, you know, a nemesis against the situation that you've been in the past.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I think that, let's, let's, let's, let's take on this, this notion of nemesis. And, and we could think about it in terms of our personal lives, but we can also think about it in, in a broader narrative. Why do so many stories hit the hero against the nemesis? Because what is that, what's the, what's the narrative function of that nemesis? The narrative function of the nemesis is to clear, is to, is to present an obstacle in the way of a goal. And it's also to clarify who the hero is. And so-

• 52:14Chris Williamson?

  Not that, it's not that.

• 52:16Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. And so, it's, so if one feels that one has a nemesis, and that, and you're reasonably psychologically well adjusted, you're not creating phantoms and this, you know, and you're not paranoid. If you feel like you have a nemesis, that is telling you something. If, if something presents as a nemesis, it's telling you what you value.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  And not that, as you say, and it's also telling you what your goal is, which is to bypass that nemesis or to overcome that nemesis. So it can be clarified. This is in some ways why something like envy, which is a pretty bad emotion to have, there's not a lot of positive in.

• 53:01Chris Williamson?

  It's pretty useless as well, yeah.

• 53:03Speaker 00

  And but but envy can be clarifying, that if you feel envy, you say, okay, what am I really envying here? Like, why am I feeling this way? What is it that is causing this envy? And it's a clarification of, it's a clarification of what you value. I think with envy, it's an interrogation of what you value rather than a clarification of it. You have to ask yourself, okay, why do I feel envy? What is it? Do I admire this person's clothing? Do I admire this? Do I admire this person's, I don't know, professional success? Do I admire this person's wealth? And how, and you have to interrogate that? How important is that really to, how important is that really to me? But, but, but, but again, I, it's an interest, it's, it's, it's an interesting question. I don't, I don't, I

• 53:47Speaker 00

  don't know if I have a nemesis. I never, literally never thought about that. But I guess if I do have a, a nemesis, it would be

• 53:59Speaker 00

  things that we believe that aren't, that just aren't true. And trying to, except bugs me. If, when we believe that no regrets, and you should never look backward is an appropriate and healthy blueprint for life, that's just wrong. And so maybe that, that false belief is a negative. You know, things that, things that are, things that people believe that just are not true, maybe operates as a nemesis for me.

• 54:24Chris Williamson?

  It's so strange, because regret as a topic is an uncomfortable one. It's, it's, it's not nice for people to experience. It's not that even thinking about regrets as a topic itself is generally kind of a bit icky and discordant. And yet, you have convinced me that it's a gift. You've convinced me that what a regret does is it shows us the direction in which we don't want to go in future. And that even at the time, the way that we interpret situations is often at the mercy of our cognitive biases and what we see and what we blah, blah. But over time, with the benefit of a little bit of perspective, you actually end up thinking, okay, well, what are the things that stuck about? What are the things that I actually did or didn't care about?

• 55:09Chris Williamson?

  What are the things that I actually wish that I had or hadn't done differently? And those that arise, you don't need to do sense making in the moment because your system has filtered everything out, except for the stuff that is left. You know, like somebody that's sifting for gold or whatever in a river. Okay, what's left? What's left is the thing that didn't go away with time. That's the thing that you still need to work on in future. This is going to be the same thing if the situation happens again.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  Amen, hallelujah.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  I have nothing to add to that. It's perfectly said. You're exactly right.

• 55:46Chris Williamson?

  Daniel Pink, ladies and gentlemen. People want to keep up to date with what it is that you're doing. Why should they harass you on the internet?

• 55:53Speaker 00

  They can go to my website, which is danpink.com. D A N P I N K dot com. We got a newsletter, all kinds of other stuff. We use lots of free resources on the website, information about the books, all kinds of groovy stuff.

• 56:07Chris Williamson?

  Dope. Thanks, Dan.

• 56:09Speaker 00

  Thank you, Chris. That was super interesting.