Daniel H. Pink is a Washington rarity. After spending some time working in the Bill Clinton administration, including writing speeches for former Vice President Al Gore, Pink stayed in DC but left politics behind. Instead, starting with the 2001 best-selling book Free Agent Nation, he explored the social sciences for lessons about how people can build more productive and meaningful careers. In his books and “The Pinkcast”—a video series filmed at his Cleveland Park home—Pink explores topics such as the science of motivation, why we work best in the morning and the secret to making the ultimate pandemic sandwich (peanut butter, pickles, sriracha).
His latest book, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, analyzes the regrets of more than 16,000 people from 105 countries, many of whom bared their souls to him about lost loves and unfulfilled paths. Over coffee in the converted garage that serves as his home office, Pink discussed his biggest regrets, the reasons so many Americans quit their jobs, and why we shouldn’t take career advice from Jeff Bezos.
You write that regret is the most misunderstood human emotion. What do we get wrong?
We think of regret as this negative emotion that has no use—something to be avoided, something to be withheld. But I think if we embrace it the right way, regret can actually be a useful emotion.
When did you start to embrace your own regrets?
What brought me to this topic was going to my older daughter’s graduation. It was very long and her last name starts with “P” so you have to wait. I just started thinking, “Gosh, this is almost fantastic – I feel like I graduated from college last year.” I started thinking about my time in college and regrets about it. That got me thinking about this.
As I read your book, I kept thinking about Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”: “Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention.” Do people not like to talk about their regrets because it’s sort of unseemly to say, “Woe is me, I went to the wrong law school”?
I don’t think resistance is about rudeness. I think people don’t like to talk about regret because it’s, therapeutically speaking, a kind of narcissistic injury. We want to project this image of flawlessness into the world, where everything is great. And regret says, “It isn’t.” However, the dirty little secret is that regrets actually help you move forward.
How so?
Because regret is a tool that helps us learn. It is adaptable. Our culture has gone too far with positivity, when actually negative emotions are more valuable. There is a reason why our species feels regret. If it was not useful to us, it would be eradicated from our psyche. Its prevalence in our lives and its usefulness are two sides of the same coin.
Washington is one of the most affluent, highly educated areas in the US. You uncovered some revealing data suggesting it might also be particularly rife with people harboring professional regrets. Can you explain why?
I found that the more education and income you had, the more you regretted your career. So what is the explanation? I think it’s twofold. One is that opportunity encourages regret. If you graduated from Georgetown Law and live in Washington, you probably had a lot of career options – and therefore had a lot of [untapped] options, which could lead to regret. I would also speculate that for the well-educated—you know, serious people with elite formal education who work professional jobs and live in Washington, DC—career is a bigger part of their identity than it is for other people.
People seem to be channeling those professional regrets in interesting ways. More workers than ever are quitting their day jobs and striking out on their own, as your first book predicted 20 years ago.
Freelancer Nation, baby! In that book, I may have been, as they say in Washington, in front of the voters.
So what lessons should employers and policymakers draw from these trends?
The lesson is that people want to be able to do something interesting, big and psychologically rich. That’s us. We all have an innate sense of our mortality and we don’t want to waste it. We don’t want to drop our shot. So it doesn’t make sense for companies to tell people, “Okay, you know how to do X, so keep doing X,” instead of putting them in roles and tasks where they can do something bigger, more interesting, and have more growth.
One woman I interviewed via Zoom wept over her deepest moral remorse: she molested a child on a school bus when she was eight or nine years old. It shows that most people in most places want to do the right thing. And there can be a growing unease among workers in some organizations that they are not doing the right thing. If your job won’t keep you safe and you’re worried about doing the wrong thing, what’s the point?
What is also clear is that we want close relationships. This is extremely important for building a coherent organizational culture. One of the worst regrets in the book was a colleague who told me he had worked at the same place for 30 years and realized he wasn’t real friends with any of his colleagues. That’s sad.
So we want people to accept and embrace regret as part of the human condition. But do institutions and companies also have a responsibility to help people avoid regret?
They should anticipate the kinds of regrets people will have and mitigate them. There is something to be said for individual leaders who reveal their regrets to their teams and say, “Let me tell you about this regret I’m feeling, this decision I made that is bothering me. And here’s what I did about it.” There is overwhelming evidence that this is a winning leadership strategy.
Isn’t that softening the edges too much for people?
No, the opposite. What we tell people now is don’t even worry about regrets: look forward, never look back. Think positive, be positive. It softened the edges. I want to add some right angles to this and say, “Wait a second. That regret that stings you? He should poke you, and you have to listen to it.” You have to use that as a signal.
How might the power of regret be applied to social policy—like, say, the criminal-justice system? Can society do more to help people turn regrets about their mistakes into something positive?
The restorative justice movement is something along these lines. It’s not about denying that I’ve done anything wrong, nor about being defined by what I’ve done wrong. That’s a third way, in the same way that I propose a third way to deal with regret – one that deals with it, confronts it, and then learns from it.
In the book, I say that making sense out of regret requires people to show “self-compassion.” There is also a strong argument that regret helps us show compassion and kindness to others. When I think about my own life, I have many regrets about kindness. I think about school and the times when there was a child left out, or a child who was maybe a little different, and I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t cruel. But that’s a regret of inaction – I didn’t take an affirmative step to consciously be kind to people.
It’s amazing how much those memories stick with all of us.
When I think about my life, before the age of 25, I just wasn’t kind enough. And I definitely feel regret about it. I can’t do anything. I can’t go back and find someone who was bullied by others and say, “I’m sorry that in Mrs. McMullan’s class in sixth grade I didn’t jump in when people made fun of you.” But I can go ahead and say, “I’ll try to treat everyone with more kindness than I did then.”
What’s so interesting about moral regrets is that many of us have them. It is quite universal. I think it’s a good sign that these things that happened in sixth grade are bothering us. It makes me feel better about humanity.
Toward the end of the book, you quote from a 2001 interview with Jeff Bezos in which he talks about basically organizing his life around being able to look back at age 80, having “minimized the number of regrets I have.” He’s done pretty well for himself. Why isn’t that a model for the rest of us?
Because you can’t minimize every regret. The surprising lesson for me—and one I wasn’t looking for when I started this research—is that regret reveals what makes life worth living. There are some things in life that we care about very, very much. Everything else is a kind of comment. So we shouldn’t waste time trying to minimize our regrets about this, that, or the other thing. We should focus on minimizing regrets for the things that really matter. If you think about how many decisions we make in a day, if we tried to minimize the regret of each of those decisions, we would be miserable. But if we don’t think about regret at all, then we end up making all kinds of bad choices because we don’t optimize the things that make life worth living.
People will be reading this in the new year. You recommend that people write down three regrets from the last year and use those as the basis for their New Year’s resolutions. Have you started making your list?
One thing I regret: I have some friends, people with whom I was quite close a few years ago, who I haven’t spoken to in years. You know how there are people you’ve been seeing all the time at certain times in your life? And nothing happened – there was no breakup or anything, and you still kind of care about them. This is the case when I wanted to reach out, but I didn’t. I regret that. So I guess I’ll have a New Year’s resolution to help out.
And I don’t feel like I took enough career risks and was brave enough. So that old year’s regret will become a new year’s resolution to do something bolder and bigger and cook something super cool and interesting. Which could be a total failure.
I don’t get the sense that you regret having done this interview, which I’m glad about.
That. But let’s see how it turns out.
This article appears in the February 2022 issue of The Washingtonian.
Associate editor Romesh Ratnesar is a member of Bloomberg View’s editorial board.
How do you get over regrets?
7 Changes You Can Make to Get Over Regret
- You’re sorry. …
- Embrace the Present Moment. …
- Build self-efficacy by focusing on what you can control. …
- Open your eyes and your mind to new possibilities. …
- Look for positive experiences, things and people. …
- Practice gratitude. …
- Make value-based decisions.
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How many pages is the power of regret?
| ISBN-13: | 9780593541647 |
|---|---|
| Release description: | Signed edition |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 38,788 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10 (W) x 8.80 (H) x 1.10 (D) |
What is the book The Power of Regret about? What is it about? The Power of Regret (2022) is a refutation of the “no regrets” worldview. Drawing from human psychology, he shares actionable steps for turning emotion into action and using past disappointments to shape a purposeful future.
Who wrote the book regret?
Daniel H. Pink is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of seven books — including his latest, THE POWER OF REGRET: How Looking Backward Pushes Us Forward. His books have sold millions of copies worldwide, have been translated into forty-two languages, and have won multiple awards.
What are the 4 core regrets?
You write about four basic categories of regret – core regret, gutsy regret, moral regret, and relationship regret.
How old is Daniel Pink?
What are the 4 core regrets?
You write about four basic categories of regret – core regret, gutsy regret, moral regret, and relationship regret.
What are the four core regrets?
Dan talks about the Four Core Regrets that often lie beneath the surface of the regrets we often experience – Core Regrets (I wish I had done the work to lay the foundation when I was younger), Courageous Regrets (If only I had taken the opportunity), Moral Regrets (I wish that I did the right thing), Link …
What are Foundation regrets?
Category 1 â Core Regrets: These regrets represent a failure to be responsible, conscientious, or prudent and leave you thinking, âIf only I had done the work.â Many financial and health related regrets fall into this category.
When did the power of regret come out?
What are Foundation regrets?
Category 1 â Core Regrets: These regrets represent a failure to be responsible, conscientious, or prudent and leave you thinking, âIf only I had done the work.â Many financial and health related regrets fall into this category.
How old is Daniel Pink?
What is core regret? Category 1 â Core Regrets: These regrets represent a failure to be responsible, conscientious, or prudent and leave you thinking, âIf only I had done the work.â Many financial and health related regrets fall into this category.
What is Pinkcast?
Pinkcast A short video with science-based tools and tips for smarter work and a better life.
What are the 4 core regrets?
You write about four basic categories of regret – core regret, gutsy regret, moral regret, and relationship regret.
What is Daniel Pink known for?
Daniel H. Pink is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including his latest, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Pushes Us Forward. His other books include the New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind â as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human.
Where is Daniel Pink from?
Pink grew up in Columbus, Ohio and graduated from Bexley High School in 1982. He also graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Northwestern University in 1986, where he was a Truman Scholar. He received his Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law & Policy Review.
What is Daniel Pink known for?
Daniel H. Pink is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including his latest, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Pushes Us Forward. His other books include the New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind â as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human.
What is Flow Daniel Pink?
“In progress, the relationship between what a person had to do and what he could do was perfect. The challenge was not too easy. Nor was it too difficult. It was a step or two beyond his current capabilities, stretching body and mind in a way that the effort itself did. the most delicious prize.
What is foundation regret?
Category 1 – Core Regrets: These regrets represent failures to be responsible, conscientious, or prudent and leave you thinking, “If only I had done the job.” Many regrets related to finances and health are in this category.
How common is regret? A whopping 82 percent of Americans say they feel regret at least occasionally, as you can see from the chart below, which appears in Chapter 2.
What are the four core regrets?
Dan talks about the Four Core Regrets that often lie beneath the surface of the regrets we often experience – Core Regrets (I wish I had done the work to lay the foundation when I was younger), Courageous Regrets (If only I had taken the opportunity), Moral Regrets (I wish that I did the right thing), Link …
What are connection regrets?
Relationship regret is the largest of the four categories in the deep structure of human regret. They arise from relationships that have been annulled or left unfinished. The types of relationships that produce them differ.
What is a boldness regret?
Bold regret: Bold regret refers to an opportunity that was not taken. Things like study abroad opportunities or leaving a dead end job, but for whatever reason you decided to play it safe.
What is a boldness regret?
Bold regret: Bold regret refers to an opportunity that was not taken. Things like study abroad opportunities or leaving a dead end job, but for whatever reason you decided to play it safe.
What happens at the end of the novel drive?
Bernie goes after Driver, killing Shannon in the process, almost succeeding in killing Driver, but ends up disembowelling him instead, and Driver races off into the sunset battered but probably alive.