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Key insights from
The Power of Regret: How Looking
Backward Moves Us Forward
By
Daniel H. Pink
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What you’ll learn
I wish I didn’t worry
about what other people think.
My deepest regret of my
fifty-two years of life is having lived it fearfully.
I spent too much time
trying to meet other people’s ideas of normal.
I regret not being
kinder to people. I was too often concerned with being right instead of
being kind.
These are a handful of responses that people submitted to
the World Regret Survey, which collected some 16,000 regrets from
respondents hailing from 105 different countries. A common response to
regret is to “let it go,” but according to serial bestselling author Daniel
Pink, who spearheaded the World Regret Survey, the “no regrets” approach to
life is untenable. Regrets keep us connected to our humanity and give us
the opportunity to become better than we were before. In The Power of
Regret, Pink examines the findings of the World Regret Survey, follows
up with 100 of the respondents for in-depth interviews, and combines his
discoveries with several decades of research on the subject of regret.
Regret is an emotion as powerful as it is misunderstood, and Pink submits
that it carries the potential to make us better.
Read on for key insights from The Power of Regret.
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1. The “no
regrets” mantra has its appeal but is bankrupt at bottom.
No regrets.
The message contains an air of romantic rebelliousness, one that
rejects retrospective hand wringing. It proclaims, “The future is
bright and full of possibilities, the past is immutable and no place for
the living.” There’s a youthful defiance to it, a refusal to succumb to the
finger-wagging authority figures demanding an account of past actions—be
they parents, teachers, or conscience. It’s a message people get tattooed on
their bodies, musicians sing to an angsty audience, and politicians give to
journalists in end-of-career interviews. There is a massive contingency
from different continents, walks of life, and religious and political
persuasions who find common ground in the mantra.
It feels so right, but it could not be more wrong.
Those who champion the “No regrets” mantra usually focus on
the positive range of emotions available to people. And there is certainly
wisdom to that. Emotions like joy and gratitude are good for your
psychological and physical health. But counterintuitive as it may seem,
negative emotions are, too. Hopefully the negative emotions do not outweigh
or suffocate positive emotions, but negative emotions can be clarifying and
ensure our safety. Fear keeps us away from cliff edges or from skating on
thin ice. Anger fine tunes our moral intuitions and convictions, and gives
us the gumption to act. Even disgust buffers us from acting in ways that
betray ourselves and others.
There are plenty of negative emotions, like guilt, shame,
anger, and sadness, but regret is perhaps the most common and powerful. Not
only is regret powerful, it has the potential to be a force for positive
change in the lives of people who harness it.
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2. Research
reveals some unexpected perks to regret.
Far from answering caprice with more caprice, pushback
against the “no regrets” slogan comes from a large and growing body of
research on the subject of regret. Research began in earnest among
economists and social scientists when the Cold War between the West and
Soviets started to heat up with the proliferation of atomic weapons.
Humanity would regret blowing up the world, but economists
realized that insights into regret were not limited to the war room—they
told us about what people in general are like—even when the planet is not
under immediate threat of total immolation.
Seventy years later, two standout themes emerge from the
research into regret: that regret is very human, and that regret improves
us. Most would not put “regret” and “beneficial” in the same sentence, but
there are a number of unexpected perks that surface when regret leads to
action.
1. Regret sharpens decision-making. It often takes
regretful decisions to fine-tune our decision-making and set us on a new
and better course. One respondent to the World Regret Survey described an
incident when she berated her daughter for spilling something on her
uniform before school, but her regret was so great that she has never
raised her voice at her daughter since. Regret cleans up our
decision-making and provides us more options because we see the ones we
default to do more harm than good.
2. Regret enhances performance. When we regret an
action and are forced to reflect on it, we end up being committed to that
new course of action. Greater persistence enhances performance. In
everything from casinos to academics, people who look back on a moment and
say “If only” tend to perform better in future endeavors than people who
look back on a moment and say, “At least….” For example, a study of
scientists applying for a prestigious grant revealed that those who barely
missed acceptance for the grant ended up having more successful careers in
the long-run than those who did receive that grant. The rejected
experienced the pain of regret and used it to redouble their efforts in
future proposals and projects.
3. Regret augments meaning. Numerous studies have
found that reflecting counterfactually about all the other things you could
have done instead of the course you actually chose elevates levels of
gratitude for the road taken. Even when people do wish they had taken
another path, a review of one’s past often reinvigorates the will to live
meaningfully. Instead of thinking about meaning itself, reviewing a list of
“If Onlys” and “At Leasts” guides us to meaning more quickly.
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3. All regrets
spring from failures to meet four basic needs.
When Pink and his team asked people what they regretted
most, thousands of responses poured in. They organized the results
topically and discovered the highest proportion of regrets related to
family and partners, followed by education, career, and finances. Perhaps
these findings are not especially revelatory. You probably would have
guessed something similar. But beneath the topical “whats” is a series of
“whys” that reveal a deeper foundation of human behavior, from which
regrets spring. This underlying structure exists across religious, ethnic,
and political lines, and it gives us more insight into what matters most to
us and what makes life worth living.
Four kinds of regret form the underlying pattern: foundation
regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets, and connection regrets.
Foundation regrets
are regrets of not providing a secure foundation for oneself: dropping out
of school or not taking education seriously, living beyond one’s means, not
taking care of one’s health, ending up broke and in poor health. It’s the
kind of regret Aesop’s carefree grasshopper has when winter finds him
unprepared while the industrious ant enjoys the rest and security at the
end of a year’s toil. It’s a life without wisdom or prudence, where
short-term wins over the long-term and undermines our need for basic stability.
Boldness regrets
are regrets over the things we never did, when we are overcautious and
decide not to take a risk. Research has found we tend to regret the
opportunities we did not take far more often than the opportunities we did.
This is true across the life spheres—from education to career to love. For
boldness regrets, the need is growth. Take the risk.
Moral regrets
are those critical moments when we did not choose the high road. We have
this need to be good baked deep into us, so when we come face-to-face with
the moments when we dramatically depart from our standards and who we
thought we were, we can experience intense regret. Moral regrets make up
only a tenth of the total regrets, but they tend to be the most loaded and
nuanced, and the ones that gnaw at us the longest. What they all boil down
to is, “If only I had done what was right.”
Connection regrets
form the deepest and widest pool of regrets. These regrets are over
relationships that fell apart or drifted away. This could be between
spouses, family members, or friends. For one reason or another, what was or
what should be, just isn’t. A deep sense of loss usually accompanies the
absence of these people in our lives.
Each regret unearths a deep human need. Foundational regrets
reveal the need to be safe and secure. Boldness regrets reveal our need to
grow. Moral regrets reveal our need to be good. With connection regrets,
our need is to be loved.
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4. Your feelings
of regret will help you think and act clearly if you don’t bury them or
glorify them.
There are three ways to respond to regret (and negative
feelings in general):
1. Treat the feeling as something to be ignored.
2. Treat the feeling as something to be felt.
3. Treat the feeling as a catalyst for thought.
It’s been rightly said that thinking is for action. But
where thinking is a primer for action, feeling is a primer for thought.
Ignoring your feelings of regret is a recipe for delusion. You will hang
out on the positive range of emotions, but you will cut yourself off from
real life and deny part of yourself in the process. Stunting these strong
emotions can lead to a range of psychological and physiological
complications: heart problems, migraines, insomnia, digestive issues, and
autoimmune conditions. You risk becoming a Pollyanna or a Dr. Pangloss from
Voltaire’s Candide, a character who papered over catastrophe after
catastrophe with platitudes about how it’s all for the best in the best of
all possible worlds. In some moments, these statements can temporarily
assuage, which has its place, but as a long-term strategy, Pollyanna
tactics block us from confronting real life squarely.
So ignoring feelings leads to delusion. Feeling your
feelings for feelings’ sake will lead you to despair. For those who love
and worship their feelings and take them as the best indicator of who they
are, negative emotions in general and regret in particular are dangerous.
To constantly writhe over past mistakes cuts us off from the ability to
learn from them. Studies have found that people overloaded with regrets are
far more likely to experience anxiety and depression. Ruminators tend to
wilt in the face of setbacks and feel dissatisfied with life.
Feeling should be for thinking, which leads to action.
Rather than ignoring or marinating in regret, regret should provoke
thought. If regret becomes a heavy wet blanket you take with you
everywhere, you are thinking about it too much and you’ll stay stuck. But
in short, powerful spurts, regret can change our course for the better. At
its best and most transformative, regret is a prod with a momentary sharp
stick rather than a suffocating blanket. It should galvanize—not paralyze.
The difference is how we interpret moments of regret. If we internalize
them and make them a matter of identity (“I must be a bad person”), they
ruin us. But localize the regret to a moment in time, and the experience
can teach you. In one case, you are judging yourself without owning your
action; in the other, you are accepting responsibility without judging
yourself. You feel the pang of regret deeply, but it doesn’t linger. And
you feel it so deeply that it leads to action—not inaction.
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5.
Self-disclosure, self-compassion, and self-distance help you blaze a trail
out of the mire of regret.
Looking back on regrets has the potential to propel us
forward, but the power of regret must be harnessed properly if we want
transformation for the better. Apologies are a vital first move if you have
the courage to make one. When moral regrets or connection regrets come from
action (as opposed to inaction), they are more likely to result in
reconnection and reconciliation. The break usually comes from “hot”
emotions like anger, which means there are usually concrete actions that
can be named and acknowledged as destructive and forgiven.
For regrets that are more internal than relational, a
three-step process is helpful. Begin with self-disclosure. Brain imaging
reveals that self-disclosure is something we desire and it delivers a
positive neurological kickback. Food, sex, and money light up the same
areas of the brain as self-disclosure. You might suspect that negative
emotions would be the exception to that rule, but a preponderance of
scientific studies suggests just the opposite: Talking about our negative
actions—whether to another person, voice recording them or simply writing
them down—brings down blood pressure, and allows us to manage life’s
stresses more constructively. Relive the moment briefly and feel the relief
that comes from it. Then turn it into action or it will become rumination.
Try one of the following:
-Take 15 minutes to write down or voice record a detailed
account of your regrets. Do this several days in a row.
-Call a trusted friend and let them know—but put a cap on it
so it doesn’t devolve into rumination and shame.
Follow self-disclosure with self-compassion. When you bare
your soul to yourself and another, you will be tempted to fall into one of
two traps: feeling sorry for yourself, and wrapping yourself in self-pity
or inflating your punctured ego with “At Leasts” to boost your self-esteem.
Some people become addicted to self-criticism and it becomes a warped form
of virtue signaling that seems courageous and authentic, but it leads to
brooding despair rather than the sustained, constructive change we need.
Self-criticism is best directed at particular actions—not life-long
tendencies or core identity. On the other extreme, trying to boost your
self-esteem with indiscriminate positivity from others and self can crush
your empathy, promote narcissism, stoke aggression, and encourage tribal
us-them thinking. Self-compassion is a middle way that keeps us from over-
or underestimating ourselves, from viciously berating ourselves or acting
like it never happened. While acknowledging what happened, self-compassion
is the way of giving ourselves the same kind of understanding we would give
to friends and family, the same compassion we are thankful for when we
receive it from others. By acknowledging that to err is human, failure
becomes normal—not ignored—and its potency is subdued.
To practice self-compassion, ask yourself how you would
respond if a friend or family member disclosed the same thing to you. Would
you berate them the way you are tempted to berate yourself? Probably not,
right? And if you take your regrets as representative of who you are,
rather than regrettable moments, you are identifying with them too closely.
It might be good to ask for a second opinion from a trusted other.
Once you have self-disclosed and extended self-compassion to
yourself, self-distance is another step you can take to minimize the
feelings of regret and strategize for future action. If your friend faced a
regret identical to yours, what lesson would you extrapolate from your
friend’s situation? What would be best for your friend to do? Be as
concrete as you can. Or try putting yourself in a more professional
clinical setting, talking to an expert on regret under sterile fluorescent
lights. What do you think this doctor would tell you? Compose an email to
yourself using professional, clinical vocabulary and cut-and-dried steps
the professional would recommend. Another thought experiment that can give
you some existential breathing room is imagining that you are ten years in
the future and are proud of how you responded to your regret. What was it
exactly that you did?
Regret can be a launchpad, and self-disclosure,
self-compassion, and self-distancing are the steps to leap into a new way
of living. By following this process, regret won’t make you bitter—it will
make you better.
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Endnotes
These insights are
just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of The Power
of Regret here. And since we get a commission on
every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.
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