The Power of Regret by Daniel H. Pink

Dan Pink is one of my all-time favorite authors. Period. Full stop. To date, I’ve read The Power of Regret, When, Drive, and To Sell is Human, and with each one of these titles he somehow manages to produce and encapsulate meaningful, relevant, science-based information to help us (humans) improve our day-to-day lives. With this latest book, he conducted a massive “regret survey” of tens of thousands of people, analyzed the data to figure out how looking back at regret — or regrets, for a lot of folks — can be beneficial, and how, as awful as regret can be sometimes, it can make us stronger if we figure out how to turn those emotions into more positive outcomes. This is a short, quick, breezy, blast of a read, but Pink has a way of writing that makes it seem like he is actually speaking the words to you at the same time — and that is perhaps why he is such a successful author, easily one of the best-known social psychology writers in the world. His bi-monthly e-mail/newsletter is also excellent, as he gives little bits and tips to readers such as why you need a “failure resume”, how to talk to yourself, how to ask for a favor, and how to make meetings less awful, to name a few of his subject headings. Reading this particular book certainly made me look back on some of the decisions I’ve made in my own life, and I’m glad I l took a fair amount of notes because I know I will certainly make a decision at some point in the future that I will most likely come to regret. As long as I have the tools to turn that negative into a positive — and learn from it — I think that’s all I can ask for. Pink’s book can help me get there, and I’m grateful for it.

• Regret is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human
• valuable, clarifies, can lift us up
• tattoo removal business is $100M year industry
• 1950's, U of Chicago economics student named Harry Markowitz - "modern portfolio theory", i.e., don't put all your eggs in one basket
• investors could reduce their risk by diversifying
• too much positivity brings its own dangers - imbalance can inhibit learning, stymie growth, limit our potential
• negative emotions are essential, too
• regret makes us human, regret makes us better
• nearly all regrets fall into four core categories: foundation regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets, connection regrets
• regret is better understood less as a thing and more as a process
• most children don't begin to understand regret until age six
• regret is a market of a healthy, maturing mind
• inability to feel regret can be a sign of brain damage
• people without regrets are often people who can be seriously ill
• comparison lives at regret's core
• people's cognitive machinery is preprogrammed for regret
• Americans far more likely to experience regret than they are to floss their teeth
• emotion we experience the most is regret, value the most is regret
• essential component of the human experience
• "To live, it seems, is to accumulate at least some regrets."
• travel through time and to conjure incidents and outcomes that never happened - counterfactual thinking
• imagine what might have been
• athletes who finished third appeared significantly happier than those who finished second
• "downward counterfactuals" - could have been worse, at leasts
• "upward counterfactuals" - how things could have gone better, if only
• at leasts make us feel better
• if only's, by contrast, make us feel worse
• 80 percent of the counterfactuals people generate are if only's
• if only counterfactuals can improve our lives later
• regret is the quintessential counterfactual - ultimate If Only
• by making us feel worse today, regret helps us do better tomorrow
• think about a previous escalation of commitment, and then to regret it, decreased likelihood of making error again
• regret can improve decisions
• more they regretted decisions, more time they spent preparing for subsequent negotiation
• better decisions in later negotiations
• leaning into regret improves our decision making process because the stab of negativity slows us down
• we collect more information
• wider range of options, take more time to reach a conclusion
• children's decision making capabilities improve tremendously when they cross the developmental threshold, around age 7, that allows then to experience regret
• regret can boost performance
• this is one of the central findings: can deepen persistence, which almost always elevates performance
• thinking about other people's regrets may confer a performance boost
• replaying failure over and over in your head can have the opposite effect
• setback can provide fuel
• regret can deepen meaning
• counterfactually thinking about pivotal moments in life experienced greater meaning
• thinking is for doing
• we act in order to survive, we think in order to act
• feeling is for ignoring - one view
• burying negative emotions doesn't dissipate them - intensifies them
• another view - feeling is for feeling; luxuriate in them
• excessive regret is linked to depression and anxiety, PTSD
• when it comes to regret, feeling is for thinking
• occasional, acute stress is helpful, even essential
• framing regret as an opportunity rather than a threat
• when feeling is for thinking, and thinking is for doing, regret is for making us better
• American regrets span a wide range of domains rather than cluster into any simple category
• Chomsky - language built atop a deep structure, universal framework of rules lodges in the human brain
• language wasn't an acquired skill, Chomsky said; it was an innate capacity
• Foundation Regrets - failure to be responsible, conscientious, prudent
• Boldness Regrets - regret the chances we didn't take over time
• Moral Regrets - over time, morally dubious decisions can gnaw at us
• Connection Regrets - fractured or unrealized relationships
• Foundation Regrets arise from failures of foresight and conscientiousness
• choices require short-term sacrifice, but in the service of a long term payoff
• spend too much and save too little
• if only I'd done the work ...
• gradually and then suddenly the regret comes
• people discover their foundation regrets
• difficult to undo
• best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago; second best time is today
• fundamental attribution error: we too often attribute the behavior to the person's personality and disposition rather than to the person's situation and context
• fix for foundation regrets: change the person, but to reconfigure that person's setting, situation, environment
• Boldness Regrets
• arise from a failure to take full advantage of that platform - to use it as a springboard into a richer life
• play it safe or take a chance?
• with boldness regrets, we choose to play it safe
• If only I'd taken the risk ...
• introversion and extroversion are not binary personality types
• two thirds of the population lands in the middle
• people regret inactions more than actions
• when we don't act, we can only speculate how events would have unfolded
• consequences of inaction are general, abstract, unbounded
• thwarted possibility of growth
• authenticity requires boldness, when authenticity is thwarted, so is growth
• Moral Regrets = smallest of the four categories
• these regrets ache the most and last the longest
• Haidt: when we consider what's moral, we have an instantaneous, visceral, emotional response about right or wrong - and then we use reason to justify that intuition
• moral foundations theory: beliefs about morality stand on five pillars - care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/disloyalty, authority/subversion, purity/desecration
• Five regretted sins:
• harm
• cheating (cheating others out of physical items, academic dishonesty, marital infidelity)
• disloyalty (moral foundation of loyalty helps groups cement bonds and form coalitions)
• subversion (dishonoring my parents, disrespectful to my teachers)
• desecration - violating sanctity
• moral regrets may also be the most collectively uplifting
• stamped somewhere in our DNA and buried deep in our souls is the desire to be good
• when it doubt, do the right thing
• connection regrets are the largest category
• relationships that have come undone or that remain incomplete
• relationship that was once intact, or that ought to have been intact, no longer is
• if only I'd reached out ...
• closed door regrets distress us because we can't do anything about them; open door regrets bother us because we can, though it requires effort
• regrets about social relationships are felt more deeply than other types of regrets because they threaten our sense of belonging
• rifts and drifts
• rifts usually begin with a catalyzing incident - insult, disclosure, betrayal
• resentful and antagonistic
• drifts happen almost imperceptibly - one day, connection exists, another day we look up, it's gone
• we generally stink at divining what other people think and anticipating how they will behave
• we don't realize how inept we are at these skills
• pluralistic ignorance: we mistakenly assume that our beliefs differ vastly from everyone else's
• happiness is love, full stop - Grant Study
• close relationships more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives
• loneliness and disconnection, in some cases, are fatal
• what give our lives significance and satisfaction are meaningful relationships
• when those relationships come apart, stands in the way of bringing them back together are feelings of awkwardness
• "you're almost always better off to err on the side of showing up"
• lesson of closed doors is to do better next time
• lesson of open doors is to do something now
• stability = material, physical, mental, well being
• explore and grow - novelty of being bold
• aspire to do the right thing - be seen as good people who honor moral commitments
• yearn to connect with others, to forge relationships and friendships bonded by love
• solid foundation, some boldness, basic morality, meaningful connections
• actual self is a bundle of attributed that we currently possess
• ideal self is self we believe we could be
• ought self is self we believe we should be
• people regret their failures to live up to their ideal selves more than their failures to live up to their ought selves
• discrepancies between our actual self and our ought self make us agitated
• coulda’s bug us longer than shoulda’s because we end up fixing many of the shoulda’s
• pursue opportunities, fulfill obligations
• regrets of inaction last longer than regrets of action in part because they reflect greater perceived opportunity
• college graduates have more career regrets - larger universe of foregone opportunities
• people who were not white had more regrets about education than white people
• ages thirty to 65 had regrets about finances and career, but older had regrets about family
• men were more likely than women to have career regrets
• women more likely than men to have family regrets
• men's sexual regrets involve inaction, women's involve action (people they did sleep with)
• action regrets are less prevalent
• make amends, reverse our choices, erase the consequences
• people are much more likely to undo regrets of action than regrets of inaction
• we're more apt to repair what we did than what we didn't do
• If Only to At least: going to law school was a mistake, but at least I met my wife
• at least's can turn regret into relief
• self-disclosure is intrinsically rewarding
• disclosing our thoughts, feelings, actions - by telling others or simply writing about them - brings an array of physical, mental, professional benefits
• relive and relieve
• reverse was true for positive experiences: writing and talking about triumphs and good times drained some of their positivity
• language, whether written or spoken, forces us to organize and integrate our thoughts
• merely writing about emotional difficulties, even solely for your own consumption, can be powerful
• write/talk/tell
• self esteem measures how much you value yourself
• brings downsides though - can foster narcissism, diminish empathy, stoke aggression
• self compassion
• we're better off extending ourselves the same warmth and understanding we'd offer another person
• replacing searing judgement with basic kindness
• normalizing negative experiences, we neutralize them
• something that people can learn
• benefits of self esteem is not without it's drawbacks, so self compassion might be better
• people who addressed their regret with self compassion were more likely to change their behavior than those who approached their regret with self-esteem
• confront difficulties head on and take responsibility for them
• illeism: fancy word for talking about oneself in the third person
• talking about ourselves in the third person is one variety of what social psychologists call self distancing
• zoom out and gaze upon our situation as a detached observer
• self distancing helps you analyze and strategize
• fly on the wall technique
• mentally visiting the future, then examining the regret retrospectively, activates a similar type of detached, big picture perspective
• can make the problem seem smaller, more temporary, easier to surmount
• using third person pronouns can increase intellectual humility and sharpens way we reason through difficulties
• addressing yourself by your name
• looking backward can move us forward
• start a regret circle
• create a failure resume - detailed and thorough inventory of our flops
• self compassion: curb excessive self criticism
• pair new year's resolutions with old year's regrets
• mentally subtract positive events
• world regret survey
• adapt a journey mindset
• don't just relish the goal you've achieved, review the steps that got you there
• instead of leaving fortune to family, Nobel created the Nobel Prizes
• premature obituary - he glimpsed a preview of his future and he regretted what he saw
• regret lottery - if the organizers draw my name, and I haven't completed the survey, I know I'll kick myself
• loss aversion: in general, we find the pain of losing something greater than the pleasure of gaining the equivalent thing
• inaction regret of not getting vaccinated, and thus endangering ourselves and others
• anticipating regret can prompt us to sign up for a flu shot, condoms, quit smoking
• pre-mortems: look to the future for the nightmare scenario where everything went wrong
• Regret Minimization Framework
• anticipating our regrets
• we're pretty bad at predicting the intensity and duration of our emotions
• particularly inept at predicting regret
• overestimating regret can cloud our decisions
• if we don't anticipate properly, we end up making the regret minimizing choice rather than the risk minimizing choice
• regret aversion can often lead to decision aversion
• students who change their answers usually improve their scores
• first instinct fallacy
• warning: anticipating regret may cause decision paralysis, risk aversion, first instinct fallacies, and could lower test scores
• constantly trying to anticipate and minimize our regrets can become a form of unhealthy maximizing
• optimize it instead
• Regret Optimization Framework
• anticipate foundation regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets, connection regrets
• make a choice and move on when buying a microwave - you'll be fine
• if the decision does involve one of the big four, spend more time deliberating
• project yourself into the future
• we are both the authors and the actors, we can shape the plot but not fully
• contamination sequences: events go from good to bad
• redemption sequences - events go from bad to good
• looking backward to move forward, seizing what we can control and putting aside what we cannot, crafting our own redemption stories