Duke Behavioral Economist: Why You’ll Regret the Risks You Don’t Take | Dan Ariely - EP 811

John R. Miles sits down with behavioral economist and bestselling author Dan Ariely to explore why we often fear the risks we take today but regret the risks we never took—and how playing it safe can quietly keep us from the relationships, passion, and meaningful life we actually want.

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

• 0:01John R. Miles?

  Hey friends, what if your biggest problem isn't that you're not doing enough, but that you've spent too long proving that you are enough? You can be successful, needed, and surrounded by people and still feel completely unseen. That's the problem I explore in my new book, The Mattering Effect. I show you how we become hyper-visible for what we produce, while quietly becoming invisible to ourselves, and introduce the matter framework to help you reclaim meaning, autonomy, trust, time, energy, and reciprocity. Stop auditioning for your worth, start living from it. The Mattering Effect is available for preorder now at matteringeffect.com. What if the things you regret today aren't the things you'll regret most when you look back at your life? When I sat down with behavioral scientist Dan Ariely,

• 0:46John R. Miles?

  we talked about why we tend to regret the risks we take in the moment, but often regret the risks we didn't take when we look back years later. And then he shared what his research is finding about where we're playing it safest. Take a listen to this.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  In the short term, we regret the things that we did, but when you look at it from the perspective of time, you're upset with the risks you didn't take. The biggest gap I find, the area of life that they don't take enough risk, romantic love. And people basically say, not willing to be vulnerable.

• 1:22John R. Miles?

  It's your friend John, and welcome to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've felt the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough.

• 1:42John R. Miles?

  If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it.

• 2:02John R. Miles?

  Welcome back to Passion Struck, episode 811. And today, we're continuing our series, The Adaptive Brain: How Your Mind Learns, Changes, and Heals. Last week, we looked at change from three very different perspectives. Mark Manson challenged us to move beyond insight and actually change our behavior. Dr. David Perlmutter showed us how the biological environment we create can influence the health of our brains. And actor Josh Dumas gave us a very personal look at how the environments we choose can shape the person we become. And today, we're turning to something that sits beneath all of those conversations. How do we make better choices? Because we can know what matters. We can know what we should do. We can even know what kind of person we want to become.

• 2:47John R. Miles?

  And still, our brains have a remarkable ability to steer us in another direction. That's what makes today's conversation with Dr. Dan Ariely so fascinating. Dan is a behavioral economist, professor, and bestselling author of Predictably Irrational. For decades, he's studied the strange gap between what we intend to do and what we actually do, and why we're often far less rational than we think. But one part of our conversation really stayed with me. Dan has been studying how we think about risk, and his research suggests something counterintuitive. In the moment, we tend to regret the risks we take. But when we look back at our lives, we often regret the risks we didn't take. And that raises a much bigger question.

• 3:31John R. Miles?

  Where in your life are you playing it safer than you really want to? We also talk about risk, relationships, work, education, bureaucracy, technology, and even what happens when we become so focused on efficiency that we lose sight of what makes life meaningful itself. So let's dive in. Here's my conversation with Dan Ariely. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

• 4:08John R. Miles?

  I am absolutely thrilled today to have Dan Ariely on Passion Struck. Dan, how are you today?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  I am lovely. I am lovely. First of all, it's a very nice name for a podcast, but I should say that I was thinking about passion since you wrote me, and what element of motivation you chose to capture. There's lots of motivations. And I think it's one of the most interesting ones. It's the top of all motivations, right? It's something that is driven by passion. You can imagine, I want to be professional. You can imagine, I want to do things well. I want to improve. I want to accomplish. There's lots of motivations. Lots of words to describe lots of elements of motivation.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Passion is the highest order, I think. When we get to that one, we've achieved a lot.

• 5:03John R. Miles?

  Thank you for saying that. When I started this journey years ago, the term "passion-struck" wasn't in my vocabulary at all. I happened to be having a conversation with a mentor, and he made this statement to me that, he goes, "John, it seems like what you're describing is people go from being stuck to becoming passion-struck." And I did what anyone would do after he said it. It clicked, and I went to Google to see if anyone owned the domain. And there it was on GoDaddy, and the rest is history.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Very nice.

• 5:37John R. Miles?

  Dan, when I look at your entire body of work, and I have been a fan for a long time, you go from predictably irrational to misbelief to your recent work on social connection. And to me, it feels like you've been studying the same question from different angles. Why do human beings repeatedly move away from the things that would actually make life better? Is that kind of a fair characterization?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  It's fair, but let me expand it a little bit. I think that I started by working on why people do things that are irrational. And very quickly, I learned that irrational is not always not in our self-interest. So I started by thinking about the narrower definition of irrationality.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Why are people influenced by irrelevant options? Why are we attracted to zero? All kinds of things that are clearly not in our best interest. But later on, I moved into describing things that don't make sense for our well-being, irrelevant of whether they are rational or irrational. And if we think about passion for a second, passion is an irrational term. If you wrote a model, often the rational person will go to work to get money to do something else, sit on the beer, drinking beer or something. The model is not, the standard model of labor is not a model that we enjoy labor.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Labor is negative,

• 7:14Speaker 01

  and we do it to get money so that we can do other things. And passion, if we say it's a high-order thing, is a very irrational term. But I moved to embracing those things as part of humanity and saying, okay, so let's look at what makes us human. And what makes us human is running marathons, which is not enjoyable, and climbing mountains, and writing poetry, and doing startups. And if you, my challenge usually to people is to say, "Think about the most important three things you have done in your life. Write them down. And now write next to each of them,

• 7:57Speaker 01

  how many years, months, weeks, days, and minutes they were accompanied by joy versus by tears, frustrations, and so on." And people end up saying, "The things that we are the most proud of are not the things that make the most momentary happiness." Like, this book I wrote did not result in years of laughter. It was frustrating and difficult. And I think that even though it's irrational, it's part of humanity. So going back to your question, I think that my role is to find out what are the things that we do

• 8:41Speaker 01

  that is actually in our long-term well-being, and what are the things we do that are not in our long-term well-being? And how do we do less of the ones that don't serve us and more of the ones that serve us? Because if you look at passion, you can say, hey, people are doing this irrational thing. People go to work, and they love what they're doing. And they spend extra time. And they research at home, and they talk about work with their friends. It's irrational, let's stop it. No, I think it's one of those things that it's irrational, but in a good way, in the way that makes us human. We have a capacity to be kind, and we have a capacity to be generous, and we have a capacity to love, and we have the capacity to care,

• 9:26Speaker 01

  and we have the capacity to be passionate. Let's not turn it off. Let's recognize how important it is, and let's figure out how do we stop the things that we created in society that turn it off? And how do we increase the things that turn it on? And by the way, with passion, or all the words that create extreme motivation, we have sadly created lots of things that turns it off.

• 9:55John R. Miles?

  Yes, we certainly have. And those things that are turning it off only seem to be growing.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  I'll continue. Stop me if you know what you want to talk about. But I started looking during COVID and a little bit after COVID at bureaucratic burden.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  And COVID was an interesting time because lots of companies moved to lots of things online. And online meant procedures. And it's meant doing things without other people and doing it in a self-service way. And procedures are designed for some average case. They're not designed to cover all cases. So I'll give you an example for me. I work at Duke University. Pre-COVID, the people from HR sat not too far from our office. They would sometimes come for coffee. We would somehow have receptions, talk about research or something, and they would come.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  And we knew each other. And when they needed to solve something, like I had somebody in my lab from South America and their visa was delayed or something was happening, I would knock on the door and say, hey, we have a problem. And they would say, okay, let's see what we do.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  During COVID, and I'm telling you this specific example, but it's a representation of lots of things. During COVID, they worked from home. We worked from home. They never came back after COVID. They stayed working from home and everything moved online. And now, when there's somebody with a visa problem, there's a form. And there's nobody to say, oh, I think we should, we could do this, or we could do this, or we could be flexible here, or we could push this here. And as a consequence, and I'll use the visa example, I have many others, but as a consequence, I had people who their visas ran out. We couldn't do anything. And now we have an employee

• 12:02Speaker 01

  that we pay salary for, that we promised them working condition and salary, but also a visa, because they couldn't work without a visa. And now we don't give them visa. And we're saying it's not our fault.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  There was a process, it didn't fit the process. This is what happens when it doesn't fit the process. How motivated is that person now to go above and beyond?

• 12:28Speaker 01

  How, and especially when people work with, in other countries. There are often cases that break the standard mold of employment. Sometimes you need to be on a call very early in the morning, very late at night. What's weakened for us might not be weakened for them. Things change. How likely is somebody going to say, you know what? It's Friday night or Saturday morning or 5:00 AM, but we are connected to the mission. And it ends up that bureaucracy ends up killing people's motivation. I think we have an inner need

• 13:13Speaker 01

  to feel connected to our job and to be passionate about it and to want it. And often, not only we don't fuel and satisfy that need, we do the opposite. I was in a history archaeological museum a couple of months ago, and I had a tour and I got to see all the labs. And first of all, the people, they were amazing. There was one guy who was working, I think, most of the day to remove a speck of rust from an old coin. He didn't want to use chemicals. He wanted to remove it perfectly and to stay with the best specimen after that possible. But I asked him, I said, look, you're talking with very ancient artifacts.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Let's say clay, for example.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  And you have people who lived in a very different period. They didn't have the luxuries we have. What percentage of the work, I asked him, do you think they did to create something functional versus to create something beyond that? Okay, so create a vessel. How much work went to create it a bit more pretty than it needed to be? Or more symmetrical than it needed to be? I asked him, what is the percentage of effort that went not for the productivity itself, but something beyond that? And they said it a lot. They differed of their opinions and so on, but they said that a pot maker in the ancient world

• 14:45Speaker 01

  cared about their reputation. And they cared about the aesthetics. And they care about the symmetry. And they cared about signs of beauty. And they wouldn't let things leave the floor if they did not pass some self-standard that was way more important than just, is this carrying water?

• 15:10John R. Miles?

  We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Dan Ariely. As you're listening today, I'd like you to sit with one question. What risks have you been avoiding that might actually matter to the life you're trying to build? Dan's research reminds us that our minds are often much better at protecting us from short-term discomfort than helping us think about the life we'll look back on years from now. That idea connects deeply with the work behind my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect, coming this October. Because mattering isn't just about being seen by other people. It's also about having the courage to show up for the things, relationships, and purpose that makes our lives meaningful. If you'd like to go deeper, you'll find the companion workbook for the Adaptive Brain series inside The Ignited Life on Substack.

• 15:54John R. Miles?

  You can find links for both The Ignited Life and my book in today's show notes. Now, a quick break for today's sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

• 16:08John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck on the Passion Struck Network. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Dan Ariely. When I look at my own experience, given the view that you were just talking about. At one point in my career, I was a senior executive at Dell. And I had thousands of employees who were working with me. And about 90% of them lived in different geographies than the United States. And so during that period of my life, it was brutal. I was getting up at 4:30 in the morning because I was dealing with Asia and the staff in Europe. I'd then work my whole day, get off of work, and then a couple hours later, I was back at it

• 16:53John R. Miles?

  working with folks I had in China, Malaysia, and India again. And after a while, I just started to question, which really goes to the work I'm doing today.

• 17:08John R. Miles?

  So much of what I was valued for was my utility, the output that I was delivering. But the more I was doing this job, the more I was losing every single sense of who I was and really feeling more and more unseen personally. And my passion was just draining from me more and more every day till I reached a point of existential numbness. And I think this is happening more and more to people as we're losing the deeper needs that we have for identity, belonging, certainty, et cetera. And as I look at AI and what it's doing, I think it's only making it worse. What are your thoughts?

• 17:47Speaker 01

  So let's take AI separately because it's worthwhile talking about it by itself. But let's think about ourselves. And let's say 20 years ago, what would be our expectations for our, from our employers? If something went badly?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  If we got injured?

• 18:14Speaker 01

  If we had a disability? If there was an emergency in the family and we need to take some time off to take care of somebody? If we had some psychiatric episode, whatever it is? What would be our expectations? And we as people, we said, we developed evolutionary. And we developed evolutionary in an environment where the entities that were with us were there for a long time. And we created codependencies. This is friends. I help you, you help me. And we have expectations from friends. Right? If you would call tomorrow to your best friend and say, hey, I'm moving.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Would you come and help me move this heavy table? And they would say, I have a form.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Please submit a request and three copies for this, we'll get back to you. No friendship, you expect? There's a set of expectations. And those expectations have gains and they have costs. They have gains because we expect and we give a lot. If you think about what you give to your friends, we give a lot to our friends. What if you had a friend that you knew that in a time of need, they will do nothing to help you? Here's a friend that are very happy to meet you, very happy to talk to you, but if you ever needed something, they would not be there for you.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  How likely would you be there for them? Not that much. It's just not part of our repertoire. Our repertoire is, we live in a small group of people and we have this bidirectional relationship. And we expect basically what we give. I'm not saying we expect exactly the same thing, but it's mostly the same. Now, as companies have transitioned to being less relationship and more, and more functional, many of us are encountering the situation that says, oh, I had no idea. I thought we were in a different kind of a relationship. And sometimes we learn it about ourselves and sometimes we learn it from other people's experience.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  But all of a sudden, we learn that relationship is very different. And now it is difficult for us to stay passionate. Imagine that being passionate about your work you do is good for the workplace, but it's also good for you. You go happy, you're excited, you're enthusiastic, you have extra energy from yourself. All of those things are happening. It's great. But now imagine I tell this organization that you work for, they really don't care about you. And they actually are putting you in the cubicle. And they give you a number. They move your cubicle from place to place.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  They have these policies that show that they clearly don't care about your time or productivity or don't even want to hear your input. Nobody ever says, thank you. You just hear, don't confuse the facts. You're here for a salary. You're functional.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Cog in a machine. How motivated would you be? And the answer is not so much. In the face of an organization that tells you that you are, they don't care about you, you're just the function that you are. It's very hard to look at organizations as, I said, oh, but I really care. It's fine. I don't think people, many people can be like this. You say, I really care about you. You can really don't care about me. And this would last for a long time, and I'm fine with it. It will not happen. So I think organizations became bureaucratic organizations, communicate to people that we don't trust you.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Please, you can go and have lunch, but we want 17 receipts and proofs. We don't care about your time. Because clearly, what we're doing is not to optimize anything for you. We're doing things from some other goal. And please don't try and do anything different. Do the same thing that we set up for you to do. Everything else is going to be too difficult. Don't even try. Those organizations don't get to get our passion, and everybody loses. Imagine two factories. One factory is able to create motivation and passion, one is not. The factory that has motivation and power, people are happy to go to. Highly productive. Probably stay a little bit extra. Maybe come on the weekend if needed.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  And then the management is happy and the shareholders are happy. What about the organization that doesn't know how to create purpose, motivation, passion? People hate going. They probably come late, leave early, take more days off. If there's an emergency and something needs to be done on the weekend, they don't show up. Much harder to manage people in that organization. Certainly, shareholders are not happy. So I think it's one of those things that companies could be here, and you could be here. And if they're here, everybody is better off. The employees are better off, the management, the shareholders. And if you're here, everybody is worse off. Live a dispassionate life and don't go to work

• 23:37Speaker 01

  for many hours a day, but do the least possible to do and hate every moment. That's the extreme, of course, but anyway, so that, that I think is the place we're going to. And I think we're going there for two main reasons. The first thing is that there are things that are easily measurable, and there are things that are not easily measurable. And we love the things that are easily measurable. What is easily measurable? What time you show up for work? What time you leave? Did you write any emails to anybody else during work?

• 24:21Speaker 01

  You remember all these technologies that surveyed us. Do you look at the screen while you're at work, or are you looking away? We can measure lots of things. And we focus on those things. And what can't we, what can't we measure? We can't measure passion. We can't measure care. I used to run this study, and I would ask people. I said, imagine that your current performance at work is 100. How much lower you can go and not lose your job? And people, quite a lot. I'm at the Halmen now, I can go quite a lot. Which means that at the moment, people believed that they were creating voluntary effort.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  I'm here, I can go to, let's say, 80 without losing my job. It means that all of this thing I'm doing because I want to, not because I have to. And then I would ask them, and how much higher you could go above 100? If you're truly passionate about what you're doing? I said, quite a lot as well. And that's kind of a waste of humanity. And so if we say, what's driving it? I think the first thing is that companies love to measure things. It's easier to measure some things and not others. And the things that are difficult to measure is things like passion. I can measure how many hours you sit by the computer. Very hard to measure your passion.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  And I used to go to Wall Street executives, people who invest in companies, and say, you need to measure those things. You need to measure how connected people feel to the company. How connected they feel to the goal, to the mission, to the direct manager. How much do they feel appreciated, being treated fairly, all of those things. So I have lots of evidence that this, all of this is important. And they would say, we love only measurable things. And I said, I understand. I would love for there to be measurable things, but you're wrong, I would say. So imagine that I asked you two questions. I asked you, how much in pain are you? And I would ask you, how much in love are you with your significant other?

• 26:35Speaker 01

  I said, I don't have an independent way to get those things. There's no neurological way for me to measure pain or love that is better than your number. I can't measure the number of emoticons you send your significant other. I said, but pain on the negative side and love on the positive side, it's an internal state. And you can say, oh, I'm not measuring internal state, but then you're giving up a lot. Like, imagine we thought about humanity without thinking about pain and love. It wouldn't be, it would be the same. So one big part of the puzzle, I think, is that we want measurable things. And some of them, the most important things in human motivation, are not

• 27:20Speaker 01

  easily measurable. Okay, it's not that they are not measurable, they're not objectively measured. They need this subjective element. The other thing that happened is that companies are becoming very concerned with fear rather than progress. Imagine that we're a creature in the jungles. And imagine that we go hunting. And the hunting goes well, and we hunt a rabbit. That's great. Imagine the hunting doesn't go well, and a tiger hunts us. That's terrible. But the good is also only a little good. The bad is really bad. So nature has made us focus more on the bad side and on the good side. Nature's, okay, hunting is great, but you certainly don't want to be eaten by a tiger.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  So let's first worry about the downside. And it turns out that we still walk around with that tool. We're still more afraid of making mistakes than we are to making positive progress. And for organizations, and by the way, it's worse with social media. If you're a CEO of a company and you make a brilliant decision, how much news cover would you have? If you're a CEO of a company and you made a terrible mistake, the opposite of the brilliant one? How much news cover will you have, and how long people remember it? There's something very much about that. So we, as people, don't like risk. We don't like mistakes. Organizations even more

• 28:50Speaker 01

  don't like risk and don't like mistakes. And the organization that is becoming a bureaucratic organization especially doesn't like risk. So think about the bureaucratic organization. A bureaucratic organization really becomes two sub-organizations. One is concerned with the mission. One is concerned with making no mistakes. That's what the bureaucracy is. Everything runs smoothly and no mistake. Imagine that you're a farmer company. You have people who want to invent new medications, take risk, try new things, and you want people who want,

• 29:35Speaker 01

  nobody should ever complain about anything. And as organizations become two sub-organizations, one with the declared goal of the organization, and one controlling the bureaucracy, the bureaucratic one ends up winning. And the bureaucratic one ends up winning because they are closer to the rules of the organization. So there's a rule for a rule, and things go worse. We said that we have this capacity for caring, but organizations have a desire for objective measures which make it tough.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  And organizations develop bureaucracies. And I understand why people develop bureaucracies. It's designed to prevent mistakes. And I study lots of mistakes. I see people making mistakes. But at the same time, bureaucracies with no human judgment end up being not productive organizations. And then, if I may, I know I'm giving a long answer, but the last thing is this question about AI. And I think it's a, of course, there's a lot to talk about, but I would say the following. I would say, one of the things that frightens me about AI is efficiency versus meaning. And that's what you mentioned in your question.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  So imagine, so I wrote a few books. Every book I wrote took me a really long time. I made lots of mistakes along the way. You get the final book at the end, but I went into 17 wrong directions. I started something, I discovered it wasn't right, I went back, I tried something else. The process was very long. I learned a lot in the way, much more than the reader of the book has. But it's a complex process. Imagine I now would work with AI. And I would say, maybe I don't need seventeen versions. Maybe I don't need to make mistakes. Maybe I can just publish two books a year. Why publish one every three years? Let me work faster on this.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  How enjoyable would it be? I think about painting. I don't paint, but imagine people paint. And you feel the feedback from the brush stroke. And you make a mistake and you try and correct it. How is that experience

• 32:10Speaker 01

  linked to articulating a very good probe to Gemini? And having it create the exact painting you want it to do. It produces flawlessly. So I worry that in this day and age, we are going after efficiency. And I understand why. And efficiency has clear, direct, short-term benefits. But I worry about what we're leaving behind. If I started writing with AI, I would say,

• 32:45Speaker 01

  where would I be as a passionate creator

• 32:51Speaker 01

  three years from now? Will I be a good prompt creator? But would they still think about this as my books? Would I know as much? Would I have the same human capital?

• 33:09Speaker 01

  And I'll give you the following thought experiment. Imagine AI is getting better.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  And it's not only software, it's also hardware, so robots.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  And you just happen to have two apartments, one next to each other. And one of them has your spouse. And one of them has a robotic spouse. And the robotic spouse is always nice to you and has no complaints. And you come home at night. And you say, which door do I go into? Do I go into the complex human being? Who might be in a complex mood today? Or do I go into the one that today, for sure, I know will make me feel comfortable? And let's say you go at least occasionally to the AI one. After three years of this,

• 33:58Speaker 01

  how is your relationship? Not so good, because you've made lots of sacrifices in the short term

• 34:06Speaker 01

  to pick something that is fun at the moment, but might be not as fulfilling. But it's not just about the moment. You have destroyed something that can have real beauty from creating.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Anyway, very long answer.

• 34:26John R. Miles?

  I'm gonna try to give my thoughts on a couple of those different areas. First, I'm gonna talk about the work environment. So this is a story. Forgive me for the listeners, because I've talked about this a lot. But before I was at Dell, I was a senior executive at Lowe's. And when I first got there, I inherited this team. I had been there for a couple of weeks. And I get welcomed into the head of HR's office. And she says, John, we have a big issue. And we're gonna need you to fix it. It turns out that they had just done the first ever employee engagement survey in the company's history. And my group was ranked dead last in the company. Out of 350,000 people, my group was last.

• 35:10John R. Miles?

  And as I looked at how to approach fixing it, this was during a time when Dan Pink's book, Drive, had come out. I was reading Chip and Dan Heath's books, et cetera. And so I really started to study Richard Ryan and Edward DC's self-determination theory. And as I got more into it, I realized that the group had competence, but they really had no autonomy or agency over the decisions that they were allowed to make. And they really lacked relatedness to other areas of the business. And most of them, if you look at the concept of a line of sight, had no idea how anything that they were doing was benefiting a customer in the store,

• 35:55John R. Miles?

  shareholder value, or any of the metrics that the company was measuring. Plus, to your point, we were really measuring them on all operational statistics, but we weren't measuring them at all on who they were as people. So I completely changed the scorecard of how not only I was measuring them, but I was measuring myself. And I spent a tremendous amount of my time going into the trenches and just trying to understand the people I was working with and to making them feel like they mattered. We passed down authority into the organization to the lowest level, allowing people to influence the work that they were doing.

• 36:40John R. Miles?

  And then we were measuring, how much did people feel they belonged? How much did they think their managers were listening to their input and valued their input all the way up the chain of command? And when we implemented all these things, within two years, we went from the lowest rank in employee engagement to the second highest of the company. And I think there's something to be said for that. Unfortunately, Lowe's didn't take the findings from what happened and implement it in other groups. Had they done that, I think it could have changed the whole company.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Very important story. I think that implementing is harder than you give it credit. I think you need it to take something like feeling appreciated. I've seen company implementing, make the employee feel appreciated in a very mechanical way. Here, all the list of people, you haven't written a thank you email to them. Go ahead and do that. I think there's a question of how do you implement? And you need the person implementing to really buy into that being important. And not only that, but if you go back to your exercise of implementing those changes,

• 37:59Speaker 01

  this took resources. You looked at the long term, and you're willing to cut down short-term productivity. Because people were busy with other things. They were thinking in a different way. Maybe some people were not comfortable during the initial stage. It's really taking a long-term perspective and hurting some of the things the company could be measuring the short term for long-term, for long-term gain, making it very tough to do.

• 38:30John R. Miles?

  Dan, one of the most essential things that I did during that period is hundreds of employees. And I would write each one of them a birthday card and a Christmas holiday card. But the birthday card, it wasn't just, hey, Dan, happy birthday. I wanted to make sure that person knew that they were seen and valued. So I wrote them very specific observations of something that they had done that really made a difference to how things were unfolding. And I can't tell you how many people, even to this day, mentioned to me the cards that they received, because they'd never gotten one like that before, and they never got one after.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  And now I have to tell you, I hear lots of stories like this. And it's always very sad. And it's very sad, because you say, how can it be that somebody didn't get a card like this? The reality is that when you take the human perspective and you go into the workplace, it is so easy to see how to improve things. Because it feels as if nobody cares. Now, really, what happens is that companies have taken HR department and made them into compliance officers. If you've taken the last module for something or another. But HR department should have come to you.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  You read the research on intrinsic and external motivation and so on. But the HR, it should have been their job. It's not your profession. It should be their profession. They should come to you and say, hey, John, we noticed you're doing so well. You're second from last. Turns out that it's really important theory about intrinsic motivation. Turns out autonomy is incredibly important for this. Here are some things, let's work on that together. When was the last time an HR department did that? It's so, when I see these things, it's wonderful that they work. The social scientists say, oh, look at this tiny improvement. Send a letter, makes a big difference. By the way, for me, one of the things that I found very effective

• 40:42Speaker 01

  was to ask people, what are your five-year career development plans? And what can I do to help you achieve those?

• 40:51John R. Miles?

  Oh, can I? Yeah, can I extend that one? Because we did that, but then we extended it. We said, not just what are your career goals, but what are your life goals? Because I was trying to get, because if a person's not happy outside of work, they're not going to be happy inside of work and vice versa. So I would ask them, are you trying to build a family? Do you have passions like music outside of work? Do you want to go on to continuing education? And the more you leaned into that, and people realized that you cared about them, man, it changed. They opened up in ways that were so tremendous to their commitment to wanting to do more.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fantastic. So it's wonderful as a social scientist to see what kind of small changes can actually be beneficial. And it's sad as a human being, how much low-hanging fruit there is. Because companies are, I don't know whose job it is to think about this. But imagine that we called all the energy in an organization, human capital.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Who is responsible for human capital? We've done a lot of research for a while about the relationship between human capital and stock market performance. And in that process, what I would try to tell people is that I think human capital is an accounting mistake. When a company buys a warehouse, it's an investment. It appears on the books. When a company invests in its people, it's a cost. What if we stop thinking about investing in people as a cost? What if there was another ledger on the annual report and the quarterly report that we talked about our investment in human capital?

• 42:42Speaker 01

  What did we do to get our workforce to be smarter, more talented, more motivated, more excited, less concerned, more committed? Now, not as easy to write as how much money did we pay on the warehouse? But it's an unbelievable thing to think about, that we don't quantify it and that we just quantify all those investments as if it's a loss.

• 43:08John R. Miles?

  I got to work very closely with the head of supply chain and the head of distribution. And this was during a time when Lowe's was building out tons of distribution centers. And I think one of the key successes to the advancement of getting people to do things like improve cycle time, those types of things that workers don't really want to do is the leader who was leading this initiative, Steve Selagi, was huge at making people feel that they were seen by him. And he would walk into these distribution centers that are a million and a half square foot, thousands of employees, and he would know people's names. He would know their wives' names, their kids' names, and he would remember that.

• 43:53John R. Miles?

  And I think because he was so good at that, it got people to believe in him and in the actions. And I don't think if a different leader was doing the same program, they would have had the same result that he did.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  I told you that we've been looking at how companies treat their employees, how the employees react to the company, and what it means for stock market success. The first good thing to say connected to our conversation is that we found that everything that matters is on the intrinsic side, not on the extrinsic side. If you look at payment, titles, health benefit, retirement, these are all nice things to have, but do we see that the directly influence performance as measured by stock market performance? The answer is no. When you look at the intrinsic motivation element, lots of movement. And one of the most powerful one is, do you feel appreciated?

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Just think what it feels like to go into organization feeling appreciated versus feeling that nobody cares.

• 45:02John R. Miles?

  It's huge. It's huge. Dan, there's a question I really wanted to ask you. I've spent years studying the work of Tom Gilovich at Cornell. And I've spoken with Bronnie Ware, who wrote The Five Regrets of the Dying, about the regrets people carry near the end of life. And Tom's research suggests that many of our deepest regrets come from inaction. And Bronnie repeatedly heard that people wish they had lived more authentically and had invested more deeply in relationships as the number one thing, which kind of mirrors the work of Bob Waldinger. Does that align with what you're seeing? And where do you think those regrets actually begin?

• 45:45Speaker 01

  So just to maybe cover for the audience, when you think about regrets from actions versus regrets from inaction, you say, which ones are the most dominant one? So regret from action can be, I asked somebody out and they said no. I shouldn't have asked her out. That could be a regret from action. Regret from inaction could be, I did not try to sign up for this course for improvement, or I did not learn scuba diving, or something I didn't. And Gilovich, by the way, one of the most brilliant people and researchers.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  And he's also, I think, a role model in every possible way as a human being advisor. Really, there's a list of people who are just good in everything. He's there. He's one of the very few. But when you think about action and inaction, you say, what is the mixer of our regret from action to inaction in real time versus when we later look back at our lives? And what Gilovich is showing in such an interesting way is that in real time, we regret the things that we did and end up paying badly. And that's the cost of risk. You do think that are bad and you get a bad reaction.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  But when you look at it from the perspective of time, you're upset with the risks you didn't take. And the question is, why is that? And it turns out that in the short term, we look at the specific action we took and you say, ah, I should have known. This woman that I asked her out and she laughed at my face. I could have seen that sign. I could have seen that. So we focus very narrowly on that one incident. And we say, I can imagine that one incident going a different way. And because of that, we regret actions because within actions, there's nothing, we didn't do anything.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  You can't say, oh, why didn't I take this course yesterday? No, it didn't happen. When we don't do something, we don't do it for a long time. It's not a single moment that you can say, my mistake. So in the short term, we have this, what is called counterfactual thinking. If I did something else, this could have gone elsewhere and we focus on that. In the long term, we don't look at the specific. We look at the general picture. And we say, what kind of life have I lived? Forget the little details, this rejection or that rejection. What kind of life did I live? And I'm doing now lots of research on risk. And I ask people, I say, okay, the scale from zero to 100, where are you right now

• 48:37Speaker 01

  in the level of risk that you take? And where do you think you should be for living a good life? You define it however you want. And people think in general that they're undertaking risk. We're here and we should be taking more risk if we wanted to live a good life. And then I break it by areas of life, in your investments, in your career, in your education, in your relationship with your kids, in your hobbies, the way you eat, the way you sleep, and so on. The biggest gap I find, what people report of the area of life that they don't take enough risk, do you want to guess what it is?

• 49:21John R. Miles?

  Relationships.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Romantic love. And people basically say, not willing to be vulnerable. I'll give you the main version. The main version says, what if she laughs at me? Or what if she's sarcastic? But then, of course, if you go to people at the end of a third year relationship, and you say, what do you regret? I regret never reaching heights of romantic love. I regret not trying.

• 49:56John R. Miles?

  Yeah. That's a huge one. Well, Dan, for those who would love to learn more about your books, your research, everything else, where are the best places for them to go?

• 50:12Speaker 01

  So I have my standard website is danariely.com. D-A-N-A-R-I-E-L-Y.com. All my books are there. I also have a website where I complain about bureaucracy. It's called the Center for Advanced Bureaucracy. And I basically, it's my rent against bureaucracy. But John, I'm writing now about risk. And when I finish, if it's okay, I'll share the book with you, see if you, what you think. Because I think that for human thriving, both organization and us, we have to improve our effort around taking risk and we have to figure out what is holding us back from taking more risk.

• 50:52John R. Miles?

  I would love to read it. I felt like I could have done this interview for another four hours. So I would, I hope over time, there'll be parts two, three, and four to it because I feel like you and I could talk for a very long time on many different subjects.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  I fully agree.

• 51:10John R. Miles?

  Dan, it was such an honor to have you today. And I wanted to thank my friend Nir Bishan for doing the invite to us as well. But thank you so much for coming on Passion Struck.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 51:21John R. Miles?

  I hope today's conversation with Dan Ariely gave you something to think about. For me, the idea that keeps coming back is this, we may regret some of the things we do in the moment, but when we look back over our lives, we may regret even more the things we never tried. That's a very different way of thinking about risk. And it makes you wonder where you might be playing it safer than you really want to. If something from this conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear your biggest takeaway. Share it with me on Substack, LinkedIn, or Instagram. And if you know someone who might need this reminder, send them today's episode. And if you haven't already, be sure to follow Passion Struck on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube so you'll never miss an episode.

• 52:01John R. Miles?

  Because on Thursday, we're continuing the Adaptive Brain series with Dr. Margie Lockman. Margie has spent more than 30 years studying what happens to us across adulthood through the midlife in the United States study, one of the longest running studies of adult development. And she challenges one of the biggest assumptions we have about getting older, that midlife is simply a period of decline. In fact, her research reveals something more hopeful. Midlife can be a time when our sense of control, confidence, purpose, and ability to contribute are actually at their strongest. And she left me with a message I think so many of us need to hear. It's not too late to change and there's probably a lot more life ahead of you than you realize. I think you're going to love that conversation.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Now, we cannot predict how long we're going to live, clearly. But the statistics are such that when you get to 40, 50, you still have plenty of time left and you can make those remaining years really awesome and you can be healthy and happy. I think it's really important to focus on things that you are gaining rather than losing, thinking about the gains rather than the losses, and trying your best to minimize the losses so that you really can live the rest of your life in a really positive way, which benefits not only you, but also those around you who are depending on you, those younger and older.

• 53:21John R. Miles?

  Until then, remember, the risks we don't take can shape our lives just as much as the choices we make. I'm John Miles, and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion struck.