Transcript for “The Power of Regret” with Daniel Pink
Join our host Don MacPherson and best-selling author Daniel Pink as they discuss leadership and more in Season Six of 12 Geniuses.
You might know Daniel Pink for his books such as Drive and To Sell As Human. His latest book is called The Power Of Regret and debuted at #3 on the New York Times best-seller list.
In this episode, Daniel and Don discuss how people can overcome their own regrets and how it can be used to improve performance. They also talk about how leaders can use regret as a teaching tool and motivator, along with the merits of asking about regret in a job interview.
Join us as we discuss the topic of regret.
Don MacPherson:
Hello, this is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. I have the incredible job of interviewing geniuses from around the world about the trends shaping the way we live and work. The focus of Season Six is leadership and today we're meeting up with bestselling author, Daniel Pink. You might know his books like Drive, To Sell Is Human, When and A Whole New Mind. His latest book, which debuted at number three on the New York times bestseller list is called the Power of Regret. In our discussion, we talk about how people can overcome their own regrets to unlock improved performance, how leaders can use regret as a motivator and teaching tool, and we even talk about the merits of asking about regrets in the job interview. Dan, welcome back to 12 Geniuses.
Daniel Pink:
Don, I'm so glad to be back with you.
Don MacPherson:
You are the author of many books, but a new book called The Power of Regret. I'm just curious, because you've been on the show before. It's been about two and a half years since we last talked. I know that when you are writing a book, this is no small feat. You spend a lot of time researching it and writing it. It becomes your baby. Why did you choose the topic of regret?
Daniel Pink:
Yeah, it's interesting, Don. When you and I talked, and your listeners won't know this. You and I are talking right now via video conferencing, but the last time we talked, we were actually in my office, which is the garage behind my house. You know this; I'm telling this to the listeners. The garage behind my house in Washington, DC. That was March of 2019. At the time, I was actually working on an entirely different book. What happened is that a couple of months after that, our eldest daughter graduated from college. I'm at her college graduation and I'm having a kind of out of body experience in two dimensions. One, I can't believe this kid is 22. She was just born. It's like, whoa, what the heck's going on? Any parent has that. Then being sort of more narcissistic, I guess, or more sort of self focused, I said, wait a second. How is it even possible for me to have a 22-year-old kid graduating from college? Because I'm like 28. I just graduated from college a few years ago, myself.
It's this long graduation. I'm thinking of these like weird thoughts. I started thinking about, wait a second, I just graduated from college. I started thinking about my college, like what I did in college. I'm like, oh man, I wish I had worked harder. I wish I had been kinder to people. I wish I had taken more risks and I just came back. It just was top of mind and I started talking to people about it, and I found that people were leaning into this conversation in a way that just shocked me. Truly, instead of recoiling, they wanted to talk about it.
As a writer, that's always a really interesting sign. So I started looking at ... said, well, let's just see here. Because I was sort of doing a half-ass job on this other book. I started looking at the research. I said, wow, this is really interesting. I think that in many ways we've gotten this whole emotion entirely wrong. I started thinking it through, and then I finally, about a month later, I emailed my editor and said, "Hey Jake, I got some good news and some bad news. Bad news is that I think I'm going to stop working on this book that you think I'm working on. The good news is that I think I got something way, way better." So, that was the genesis of it. So you were just literally weeks before everything exploded.
Don MacPherson:
What I found very fascinating about the book is that you actually spearheaded two studies.
Daniel Pink:
Yeah.
Don MacPherson:
I'd like to talk about those two studies. There's the American Regret Project and the World Regret Survey. Could you talk a little bit about what those are and what you learned from them?
Daniel Pink:
Yeah. Thanks. I really appreciate that question, Don, because I decided to do things a little bit differently here. So, one of the amazing things about the time that we live in is that it's possible to do pretty sophisticated survey research, even if you're just a single individual because of the tools that are available. So working with a data analytics company, I put together a survey. This is a public opinion survey to try to gauge American attitudes about regret. It is, to my knowledge, the largest sample of American opinion about attitudes about regrets ever conducted. And there have been several in the past. So I wanted to get a sense of what did people regret and how did they think about regret?
One of the main takeaways from that research, which ended up being a very, very large sample of 4,489 people, and it was representative, so we were able to look at different demographic groups. The biggest thing was this. We have this notion that, oh, we shouldn't have any regrets, no regrets. I don't have any regrets. I never look backward. So I asked people a question where I didn't use the word regret. I said, how often in your life, how often do you look back on your life and wish you had done something differently? What we found is that the number of people who said never was 1%. 1%, and then basically 83% of people said they did it at least occasionally. We had about 42% who said they did it a lot.
So the point is what I wanted to verify was what come up on some of the academic researchers was that regret is incredibly common. Everybody has regrets. They're part of our humanity. That is as some social scientists and even neuroscientists put it, our cognitive machinery pre-programmed for regret. So that survey was designed to sort of verify some of that and also just to try to get a sense of what people regret and whether there are many differences between demographic groups on regret.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah. So, that's the American Regret Project, and that was quantitative data, correct?
Daniel Pink:
Exactly.
Don MacPherson:
Or was there quantitative as well?
Daniel Pink:
No, that was quantitative. Well, I asked people for their regrets there because I wanted them to think about their regrets, and then I had them place it in categories, but that was a very, very good quantitative survey. Now the survey was very good. I was most interested in seeing if people's attitudes toward regret were different based on race or income or education. There were not actually massive differences based on those kinds of attributes. Now, I also did a qualitative piece of research that made me understand the limits of my own quantitative research and actually some of its predecessor quantitative research. That was something, as you say, called the World Regret Survey.
All I did there was collect regrets and ended up collecting a lot of them. Pretty amazing how much people were willing to share. It's kind of amazing. Ended up with ... we're over 17,000 now, but I ended up, to write the book, I think we had something like 15,000 regrets from people in 105 countries. We also put the survey out in Chinese. We also put it out in Spanish. So 16,000 regrets from 105 countries. What I discovered there when I actually just began a laborious task of reading through them, one after another, after another, was that there was something bigger going on that I had no idea of in the quantitative survey. That was this, that when we're trying to figure out what people regret, we end up going too much to the domains of their life.
This is a work regret. This is a career regret. This is a health regret, education regret, romance regret. What I found is that when I looked at this giant trove of regrets, this almost ridiculous compilation of human longing and aspiration, that underneath, there was something bigger going on and that, around the world, over and over again, people had the same four regrets, irrespective of domain, the domain of their life. There was something bigger going on. I found that was like a big, big breakthrough for me. It took actually reading through the regrets and actually sort of widening my vision a little bit and saying, wait a second. I can ask people to categorize them as work regrets or personal regrets or anything like that. But those categories are confining, because there's something bigger going on.
Don MacPherson:
Let's talk about those four core regrets. What are they?
Daniel Pink:
Number one, foundation regrets. So foundation regrets are people who make decisions in their life. Basically all these regrets begin at a juncture. You're at a juncture. You can go this way or that way. So in this case you can do the work, you can put in the time, you can take care of yourself, you can act responsibly or you can abandon those kinds of things. When people abandon those kinds of things, invariably they regret it. Not right away, but the effects build. So these are things like around the world, people regret smoking. People regret not exercising, not taking care of their health. A lot of regrets, a huge number of regrets about spending too much and saving too little, all over the place. So all these things, these are foundation regrets because they begin eroding kind of the stability of your life.
So the catch phrase of regret is “if only” and so foundation regrets are, “if only I'd done the work.” That ends up being a pretty big category. Second category are – this is really interesting, I think...I think it's super interesting – are boldness regrets. This is where I started having an instinct that there was something bigger going on here. I think that your business audience will appreciate this. I have huge numbers of people all over the world who regret not starting a business, who regret not being entrepreneurial, who regret sort of sticking with a lackluster situation and not going out and taking a risk in professionally because they were scared about that. There are huge numbers of people all over the world. But I also have people all over the world who regret forgoing chances to travel.
I say this in the book, as you know, Don, because you thankfully read it, but you could start a travel agency with college graduates of all ages who regretted not studying abroad. I can't even believe how much that was a regret of people. So, you think about that. So one of them is like a career regret. The other one is, I don't know, call it an education regret. Then you have, again, legions of people all over the world have a regret that basically it's like, there was someone who they were really interested in romantically. They wanted to ask that person out. They didn't because they were too chicken and they regret it. So, that's like a romance regret. So all these things are in different domains, but it's the same regret.
It's basically you're at a juncture. You can play it safe or take the chance. You play it safe, you regret it. You take the chance, sometimes you regret it. But much, much, much, much, much, much less than we think. So, that's a boldness regret. That to me is like, okay, wait a second. Foundation regrets. It's not about health or finance or anything like that. It's about stability. It's about the platform of your life. The boldness stuff is about our desire to take a chance. Give you the two other categories. The third one is moral regrets. Again, the juncture, you can do the right thing or you can do the wrong thing. We do the wrong thing, many of us, not all of us, but a heck of a lot of us regret it. So I'm doing interviews on Zoom with fifty-year-old people who are in tears because they feel so bad and regretful about bullying somebody in school.
I can't even believe some of the ... it's fascinating these conversations I'm having with ... multiple conversations with people who regret cheating on their spouse and are telling me about that and how they're reckoning with that. So more regrets are of only I've done the right thing.
And finally our connection regrets, and those are regrets about relationships, but relationships of all kinds. What typically happens there is you have a relationship that should be intact or whole, or was intact or whole, and it just starts drifting apart a little bit. To me, one of the insights for me, and again, hearing all these stories was that the way a lot of these relationships come apart is just profoundly undramatic. There aren't many instances of people throwing dishes at each other and cursing each other and slamming doors and doing all those kinds of things.
It's just a kind of a drift. What happens is that people want to reach out, but they say, ah, it's going to be awkward to reach out and the other side's not going to care. Of course they're wrong. So connection regrets are if only I'd reached out. Just one more beat on this is that these four regrets, what I realized ... this took me a while to get there, that these four regrets are a photographic negative of the good life. That if we understand what people regret the most, we understand what they value the most. So, in this weird way, and I ended up in a place I didn't expect, that this negative emotion of regret tells us what people want most out of life.
Don MacPherson:
You're talking about a photographic negative of what they value, right? So understanding their regret helps you understand what they value. Is it what they value currently, or is it what they have always valued? Because I can think of almost every one of these core regrets and put myself in a category in and say, yep, here's an instance where I have a foundation regret. Here's an instance where I have a boldness regret. Here's an instance where I have a moral regret. Here's an instance where I have a connection regret. Now that's 53-year-old Don. That's not the person who made the mistake or who created the regret.
Daniel Pink:
It's a great question. It's a fascinating question. I have to say my answer is, I'm not sure. I'm not sure.
Don MacPherson:
That's what I would expect. That's what I would expect. Yeah.
Daniel Pink:
I feel fairly certain that these are things that we value throughout our lives, but we might value them in different degrees at different points in our life. One of the relatively few demographic differences that came out in the quantitative side of the research was on age. So it sort of goes to your 53-year-old Don's question, which is that around age 20, people had sort of equal numbers of regrets of inaction and regrets of action. So inaction regret is I didn't do this. Action regret is I did this. But as people age inaction, regrets completely take over. I think that there are some differences there, but my instinct is that these are things that we always value. We just don't know how much we value it. Maybe knowing how much we value these things early in life can actually steer people to make better prospective decisions about the rest of their life.
Don MacPherson:
One of the things that surprised me about the research is just how honest and candid people were. I couldn't believe some of the things that I was reading and you probably only listed 50 instances in the book of some of these. I was just blown away by this.
Daniel Pink:
I am so with you on that. I'll tell you a little backstory of this. So two things. Number one is that, in the World Regret Survey, I wanted it to be anonymous, but what I also said is ... I said at the end of it, if you're interested in being interviewed, please include your email address. I expected I'd get maybe five or 6% of people opting to be interviewed. I got something like 32% of people opted in. So it's crazy. Then the other thing that happened is that, again, I want to be respectful because people are telling me these very vulnerable stories. So there were certain circumstances where people are telling me things and I'm like, okay. So three people requested it. That was it. Wanted a slight ... don't use my real name. One person was, don't use my real name, so I have a pseudonym, but that's the only one in the entire book. Somebody else didn't let me use his last name.
Don MacPherson:
That'd be Bruce.
Daniel Pink:
Yes. But everybody else was willing to go on the record. Especially some of the people with marital infidelity, I interview them and, we can just use your first name. We can say a different name, whatever. We just have to disclose that to readers. "Oh, no, that's okay. You can use my name." I'm like, okay. Then I write it up and, "Hey, I'm going to put you in the book and just want to make sure. I'm using your name right now, but we can always use a pseudonym." "No, no, no, that's cool." I'm like, "Okay, are you understanding this?" I did something that I never do. It was like, "Let me send you what I've written."
"That's cool." It's just incredible.
Don MacPherson:
Unbelievable.
Daniel Pink:
Yeah. But actually what I learned there is that it's not a bad thing. What I learned in the research, in the academic research, is how important disclosure is in dealing with our regrets, that disclosing our regrets relieves the burden and helps us make sense of them. So my surprise evaporated once I learned the research. It's like, well, no, this makes sense why people are disclosing, because they're removing a little bit of a burden and, by simply describing it and talking about it, they are on the path to making sense of the regret.
Don MacPherson:
How do we use our regrets to improve ourselves and improve our performance, whatever it might be.
Daniel Pink:
Yeah. The one thing, and again, I don't want to sound too touchy feely here, but one important step is to actually neither beat yourself up over them, nor sort of pat yourself on the back for it. You have to sort of treat yourself with some kindness when you have regrets. There is some interesting research on self-esteem. So let's say I have a regret. I regret that I didn't travel more when I was young. I can say, that's okay, Dan. You're awesome anyway, and just boost my self-esteem. You're just incredible anyway. It was probably better off for you to be in the United States because everyone loves being around ... whatever. So boost self esteem.
The other one is what we more often do, is we just, you idiot, what is wrong with you? You're such a ... our self-talk is just so horrible. So there's a principle pioneered by Kristin Neff at the University of Texas called self-compassion…very powerful research, showing that if we treat ourselves with kindness, rather than contempt, if we treat ourselves the way that we would treat a friend, if we recognize that our mistakes are part of our shared humanity, that's actually the beginning of the reckoning process. So, that's one thing we can do. The second thing we can do is disclosure. Disclosure is incredibly important. As we talked about before, it relieves the burden, it begins a sense making process. It is powerful because we convert some of these blobby negative feelings into concrete words, and that makes them less fearsome. So we also fear that, when we disclose that people will like us less, but they actually like us more.
So disclosure is important. Then the most important thing is draw a lesson from it. You can't just like disclose it. You say, okay, what did I learn? You have to stop, take a step back and say, what did I learn from this? What is the lesson I derive from this and apply going forward. So if you treat yourself with kindness, rather than contempt, if you disclose it to make sense of it and then take a step back and draw a lesson from it, the research is overwhelming that it's helpful. On a business level, it's unbelievable. There's research showing that regret can help make you a better negotiator. It can help you with your problem solving skills. It makes senior business leaders better strategists. It deepens your sense of meaning. There's some really profound benefits from properly, properly dealing with our regrets.
Don MacPherson:
That self-disclosure one, I think is really, really important from a leadership perspective too. When a leader, self discloses, these were my mistakes, these were my regrets. They are vulnerable, but that vulnerability draws people to them, right? As long as it's not oversharing in an inappropriate way. I think that there are a lot of leaders who feel like they need to be perfect., feel like they cannot have mistakes, but that's not true. That's absolutely not.
Daniel Pink:
It's a colossal mistake on all fronts. First of all, it's a misreading of what the evidence tells us. I don't know if it's a reading of the evidence, but it's a miscalculation of what the evidence tells us. Again, there's ample research on this, that disclosing our vulnerabilities, our failures, our screw ups builds affinity much more than it makes people recoil in horror. When we disclose these things, people admire our courage and they empathize with us. For leaders to do it is absolutely powerful, and not doing it ... here's the thing. It's like we don't do, especially in the United States, a very good job of dealing with negative emotions. We've sort of over indexed on insane positivity all the time, because we've never been taught what to do with negative emotions.
So part of us are taught, okay, there's a negative emotion coming in. I'm going to ignore it. Emotions aren't real. Never look backward, blah, blah, blah. It's not going on. So that's a bad idea. But sometimes we actually get debilitated by these negative emotions. We wallow in them. We ruminate over them and that's bad too. What we want to do is we want to use these negative emotions as signals. If leaders use their own regrets as signals, “Hmm, I have a regret. I feel bad. I feel bad.” But what we know is that regret makes us feel bad, but do better. So what's this telling me? There's a signal coming in and, if I listen to that signal, I'm going to be better off.
Don MacPherson:
As I was reading the book, I was thinking about different ways in which leaders can use this research and this book to help their teams and their people. One of the ideas I had is asking about regrets during an interview. What do you think about that idea?
Daniel Pink:
It's a very interesting idea. I'm wondering whether ... I would love to see it tried. I can go two ways on this. One is that I can see people giving a very performative answer in the way that they, what's your biggest weakness. Oh, I have two. I work too hard and I care too much. But I can also see it being a revealing answer too. So I'd like to see it. I'd like to see a tried. It reminds me of one of my favorite interview questions, which is, tell me something that you've changed your mind on recently.
Don MacPherson:
Now that's a good one. With questions like that, it's not necessarily the words that I look for. It's the body language. Is this person giving me a robotic answer that they think I want to hear? Or are they being sincere? Maybe the way to prime it is to disclose a regret yourself.
Daniel Pink:
I think that's smart. I think that's the way to do it. I agree with you.
Don MacPherson:
Because what I was picking up on is what you wrote about what we regret reveals our values, and what we want to know in interviews oftentimes is what does this individual value?
Daniel Pink:
Great point.
Don MacPherson:
The other thing that I was thinking about is a sports reference. You might appreciate this one. Herb Brooks, who was the legendary coach for the 1980 US Olympic hockey team, not the motivation speech before the Soviet game, but before the Finland game says, if you guys lose this game, you will take it to your graves. He used very colorful language on that. But the players talked about that. They're like, oh yeah, that's kind of the pre-mortem that you talked about.
Daniel Pink:
Yeah. Yeah. It also shows you how it's important to anticipate our regrets and to do it properly. Did the US play Finland in the finals, is that what it was?
Don MacPherson:
Yeah, it was their last game and they had to win that.
Daniel Pink:
They had to win that to do that. So they had to knock out the Soviet, do you believe in miracles? Then they played Finland to win that thing. So again, if you got to use that for the right things. When we anticipate our regrets, you have to use that for the right things. It can't be like, oh man, if I buy a blue car, rather than a gray car, I'm going to take that to my grave. It's really, when we anticipate our regrets, we focus on the right things.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah. So, so let's talk for a minute about the regret optimization principle, because I think that's really fascinating and I think it's a play on the Jeff Bezos-
Daniel Pink:
It is, explicitly. Yeah.
Don MacPherson:
Okay. So what is that and why does it matter?
Daniel Pink:
Well, we have a tendency to ... it's like, okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually minimize all my regrets. I'm going to minimize all my regrets. That's unhealthy, actually. One of the things we know from piles and piles of social psychology is two broad approaches to decision making. This is fairly well known. Some people are maximizers, so I'm going to make the best decision in every realm. What are we going to have for dinner tonight? I'm going to maximize. What kind of car am I going to buy? I'm going to maximize. What the research tells us is that maximizes are generally miserable. They're overwhelmed. There's always something better. They make themselves crazy. And that the alternative satisfies. There's good enough or sometimes perfectly happy.
I think that what we want to do is we don't want to minimize all of our regrets. We want to optimize them. And by that, what I mean is that when we anticipate our regrets, go back to Herb Brooks. If you don't build a solid foundation, you will take that to your grave. If you don't act boldly, you will take that to your grave. If you do the wrong thing, you'll take that to your grave. If you don't build connections to people who care about you and you care about, you will take that to your grave. But the other stuff doesn't matter. So maximize on those regrets, minimize those regrets rather, and then just satisfice on everything else, man. It doesn't matter, again, whether you have a blue car. Ultimately a blue car or a gray car, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, and certainly when you're in your final years on this planet, you're not going to be thinking about that, but you are going to be thinking about, I never told my brother that I loved him.
You are going to say, wow, I had this really close friend growing up and we just drifted apart, and I wanted to reach out. I have a story like that in the book. I knew this friend was sick, but I wanted to reach out and I never got around to it. Then when I decided to reach out, it turned out that she had died that morning. That's going to bug you. So the “regret optimization principle” is make decisions to minimize those four core regrets and then just satisfice on everything else. I really think that is a good recipe for satisfaction, psychological wellbeing. And to your point, Don, leadership success.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah. I think about the maximizers I know. Oftentimes they perseverate on a particular decision and they never make the decision or they spend so much time. By the time that they do decide, maybe the opportunity is passed.
Daniel Pink:
Exactly, exactly. So anticipating regret. I love writing about that because it's interesting research. There are certain things in there that are sort of how decision-making wiring is a little bit faulty. So things like when I was in school, everybody always said, you're taking a multiple choice test, put down your first instinct. Do I want to change? Oh, I think the answer is C but no, I come back and I think it's B. Do you change? No, don't change. Always go with your first instinct. That's completely wrong. There's evidence showing that you actually should switch. But the reason we don't switch is that we feel more pain from switching from a right answer to a wrong answer, than not switching from a wrong answer. So that sort of heightened pain that we feel from that anticipated regret leads us to some bad decisions.
So we really want to optimize on the main things. I really think that regret tells us what do we want out of life? As human beings, we want some stability. We want a chance to do something. We want to do the right thing. I found the moral regrets kind of heartening. There's something kind of inspiring that people in their fifties and sixties are bothered by moral breaches earlier in their life. It suggests that we want to be good. Then certainly connection regrets too. We want stability and a chance to do great things and be moral, but ultimately what we want ... again, not to be too touchy feely about this, is we want love, and love not only in the romantic sense, but love that we have for other relatives besides our spouses and love that we have for our friends. Even to some extent, the love that we have for our colleagues and teammates.
Don MacPherson:
Do you have any advice for leaders who are working to coach a member of their team through a particular regret or a particular failure? You talked about the self, the disclosure, the compassion.
Daniel Pink:
Yeah. I think what's important. I think what's important is first of all, self-compassion, it's a gooey term. I think you could also call it kind of get-over-yourself compassion in the sense that we sometimes think we're more special than we really are. I've used this to technique myself. So if I have a regret about ... I have some regrets about, God, twice in my life, I took such a stupid idea to take these two jobs, these two jobs that I had. Just a colossal mistake. It made me miserable. I really regret those things and I felt bad about it for a very long time. But at a certain point, I needed to get over myself and say, wait Dan, do you think you're the only person who's made a bad choice about where to go work?
That's a pretty common experience. You're not that special. If someone else came to you saying, oh, I took these two jobs and they were total waste of time. What would you say to them? “You freaking idiot, what's wrong with you? You should've known.” You would treat them with compassion. So part of it is that self-compassion. The other thing is actually talking about it freely, as I mentioned before, but one of the most important things is you don't stop there. You extract a lesson from it. So you extract a lesson and you apply it. The technique that I'm started using myself is sort of next time. So you look for the next time you're at that kind of juncture and you remember it then.
So let me a little bit more concrete. Tina Seelig at Stanford has this great idea. I did it myself, called a failure resume, where you have your regular resume. The thing that sort of talks about how you're the greatest thing ever. When you pull up your LinkedIn profile, stirring music plays in the background because you're so incredible. But a failure resume is a list of your screw ups and your setbacks and your mistakes and your blunders and so forth. You literally list it, like you would in a resume, but then that's only the first step. The next step is to say, what lesson did you learn from it? What are you going to do about it? For me, when I did this, I find this a really revealing task, Don, because one of the things is, there was some mistakes that's like, what's the lesson?
It's like, I don't know if there's a lesson. Just sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes things just don't go right and that's the way it works. But for me, what I found is that when I started looking at this list, it was like, wait a second. I've been making two mistakes over and over and over and over again. I probably should stop making those two mistakes because I'd be a lot better off. The forcing function for uncovering some of those mistakes was the failure resume.
Don MacPherson:
In the book summary, you talk about regret teaches us two broader lessons. Could you talk about what those lessons are and what you take away?
Daniel Pink:
Yeah. So, as I tried to unpack some of these core regrets, I realize that they're ultimately always about like about two things, opportunity and obligation. So if you think about boldness regrets, it's like, oh my gosh, I had an opportunity. I didn't pursue the opportunity. More regrets are about, I had an obligation and I blew that obligation. Then connection regrets are sometimes a mix of both. Then foundation regrets are more about, oh man, I had the opportunity for a great education, but I was too lazy and so forth. I felt those kinds of things kept swirling around there. I realized that's actually really important as we fashion a good life, that our lives are about opportunity and obligation. The key thing here is the “and”…is the conjunction there.
In my mind, a life of opportunity and no obligation is kind of a hollow life. A life of obligation, but no opportunity is kind of crimped, shackled, not vivid. But I think that a life that fuses opportunity and obligation is true. That's what we want out of life. We want a life where we are able to meet our obligations, because that is ennobling, but also pursue opportunities because that is uplifting. To me, again, to my surprise, this emotion that, oh, I don't want to talk about regret. This emotion is basically telling us what makes life worth living, and what makes life worth living is fusing opportunity and obligation.
Don MacPherson:
You started the book with a story and you end the book with a story. I think it's a beautiful thread throughout. I was so excited to read that story. I want to do the same thing with this interview, and I won't do it as beautifully as you did, but you started talking about why you wrote this book and you talked about your daughter's graduation. I'm wondering, we'll bring it back to the family role. One of the most important leaderships that we play, you and I, is parenting. I think I can speak for you on that. I've known you for a long time and talked very fondly about your children. I'm wondering how has what you've learned influenced you as a father. I mean what you've learned about regret.
Daniel Pink:
About regret. I think that, for my kids, I think it's like, in your life, you are going to have to deal with negative emotions. Things are not going to be positive all the time, and you're going to feel crappy at certain times. You need to pay attention to that and not ignore that. Not say, ah, it doesn't matter, but not wallow in it, but say negative emotions are telling you something. If my kids are like everybody else, and statistically, the odds are very, very good that they are, the most common negative emotion that they are going to feel is a regret. So I want them to be prepared for that, not to ignore it, not to be debilitated by it, but to use it as a force for learning.
So I think that's what it is. I also think, not surprisingly, parents, they're like bosses in a way. They don't like talking about all their screw ups and mistakes. I think that because we're kind of embarrassed and we feel like, oh my God, my kids are going to think I'm an idiot. With me, it's like, my kids already think I'm an idiot. So I might as well disclose my regrets anyway, and maybe they can learn something from my regrets. That's one other thing. Forgive the long-winded answer here, Don, but one of the things that I heard from people, especially later in life, people say in their eighties is that, when they have regrets and they're harder to undo and they're inaction regrets, and they're harder to sort of plot an entirely new course, because there's less ahead of them. One of the things that gives them a sense of meaning is actually transmitting the lessons to the next generation. So that's a big thing that we can do for our own kids and for all kids.
Don MacPherson:
Anybody who tells you they have no regrets, what do you say to them?
Daniel Pink:
I say to them, are you five years old? Okay, I check to see that because we know that five-year-olds don't have regrets, because they're brain haven't developed. I said, have you had an MRI or a thorough neurological exam? Because we also know that people with certain kinds of brain damage and certain neurodegenerative diseases can't feel regret, or are you a sociopath? So, if you're none of those, then you're not telling me the truth. We all have regrets and they don't make you less. They make you human. If you use them properly, they can be an incredible force for good. They can point you in the direction of a life well lived.
Don MacPherson:
Well, congratulations again. I really, really enjoyed the book.
Daniel Pink:
Thanks a lot again.
Don MacPherson:
I think it will open up conversations for people. It already has in our home.
Daniel Pink:
Oh good.
Don MacPherson:
Only half of us have read the book. So, again, Dan, thank you for taking your time and sharing your wisdom and knowledge with us. Congratulations on the book and thank you again for being a genius.
Daniel Pink:
Thanks a lot for having me, Don, and thanks ... Actually, I really appreciate your reading the book so thoroughly and asking such thoughtful questions. It was a really super interesting interview and the mark to me of a good interview, if I'm the interviewee, is whether I learned something. I've taken notes on this interview. So, I appreciate that.
Don MacPherson:
Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses. In our next episode, we will explore the power of purpose with Richard Leider. Richard is the author or co-author of 11 books about purpose, including Work Reimagined, Who Do You Want to be When You Grow Old, and The Power of Purpose. My conversation with Richard is a must for anyone struggling to find their purpose at work or in life and for leaders who want to better understand how to rally a team around a common purpose. That episode will be released March 15th, 2022. Thank you to Jonathan, Jay, Tony, and the rest of our production team at GL Pro in London. If you love this podcast, please let us know by subscribing and leaving us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. To subscribe to 12 Geniuses, please go to www.12geniuses.com. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a genius.
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