The Power of Regret

Well, welcome Dan. I’m so glad that you’re able to join us today. 

I’m glad to be with you. Thanks for having me.  

Sure. So for people who may not know you, I’m not sure who they would be, but for someone who does not know who you are, could you please share a little bit about you and your journey as an author?

I’m a writer. I’m based in Washington, DC. I’m talking to you from my home office here in DC, which is the garage behind my office. Let’s see here. I’ve been writing books for about 20 years. The latest book came out last year. It was book number seven, and you know, I just try to write stuff. I, I mean, basically try to write books that I would like to read and that tend to be books about science, particularly social science and what it means for how we work and how we live and how we teach.

That’s a really nice short explanation. That’s great. And congrats on seven books. That’s a big accomplishment. So the first book that I think of yours that I read was almost 20 years ago, A Whole New Mind. And I, it’s, I gotta tell you, I think it came out at about the same time as Ken Robinson’s How Do Schools Kill Creativity? talk on TED, and I remember being in central office with a lot of other educators and everybody rumbling about this book, you know, A Whole New Mind, and how it was gonna change education. And it just seemed to come up with this groundswell where people were talking about creativity finally in education and how it kind of could change the game looking back at that book for a while. Right. How did it change you as a, as an author, as a a writer and do you feel like education evolved maybe the way you thought it might? 

Okay. So a lot of stuff packed in that question. Let me take a step back and just tell some of your listeners and viewers a little bit about that book.

That was a book that came out in 2005. It actually was not written for educators. That, that was, that was kind of a surprise that educators started reading it. It was really more of like a, a business book. And what it argued was that the set of abilities that used to get people into the middle class… It used to be what you needed to get a job and to earn a living were metaphorically left-brain abilities, logical, logical, linear, sequential step by step, algorithmic kinds of abilities. And the argument was that today, those abilities still matter, but they matter relatively less. And another set of abilities, abilities that are metaphorically consistent with the right brain, artistry, empathy, inventiveness, big picture thinking, those things have become the first among equals. Those things have become much more important for very, very pragmatic purposes. I’m making an extremely left brain argument for a right brain conclusion. And so now to your question, Susan, the first one was how it changed me. That’s an interesting one.

You know I was somebody who was not, you know, I was actually pretty good at those left brain kinds of abilities, and so this made me, I think, try to push myself a little bit. So in, you know, in that book, I took a drawing course, and then I also have got a lot better at just thinking through and understanding design.

I recognized some of the importance of empathy and tried to work on that myself. So I think it expanded my own possibilities of who I was. As for what it meant for education, I don’t know. I mean, you know, we got a lot of take up from teachers because teachers want to teach the whole child. Teachers don’t want to train students for standardized tests.

Teachers want students to learn and grow and be creative and do great things, not necessarily you know, ace, whatever the state standardized test is that week? So I think it’s a, it’s a slow, it’s a slow, slow, slow change. But I think the big change is that people who make this case now are not laughed out of the room.

I would agree with that. I think sometimes I wonder if we should be making the case to parents more than anything else because administrators that I know would also agree with this, that this is how we need to teach, and yet we’re still bound by these tests. And so I wonder sometimes what they’re for. 

Yeah. But it’s, it’s interesting. It’s interesting, it’s interesting about parents. I, I think it, I think it varies. Like there’re different kinds of parents. A lot of, a lot of parents are so extremely worried about their kids and whether they’re gonna be able to get a job as adults, that they become very, they become very risk-averse.

And so, they say the only thing you need to study is the only thing you need is to be able to do well on the math SAT and the verbal SAT. And those are the only things that matter when in fact, as we’re seeing even more than 18 years ago, we have to think of it somewhat differently. That is, we have the rise and we see it now even in the last six months of pretty incredible machine intelligence.

And so I think what we have to do is think about in terms of, just forget about just self-actualization and learning for its own sake. But when it comes to the workforce, we have to think about what we can do, what we can do to – with our brains – to augment machine intelligence rather than compete with machine intelligence and, and I’m not sure.

Oh, for sure. 

I’m not sure all parents have completely got that. I think at some level they’re, they’re, they’re fighting the last war. Yeah. 

Yeah. Well, and we always say, you know, you, you work from the experience that you have. And so parents have the experience of being in school and going to the test. And that’s what, that’s what worked. 

And so I, I do think that the rise of artificial intelligence ChatGPT, all of these other things, and I, I think it’s it’s scary to a lot of people because they don’t know what, what exactly that means. And so suddenly we’re now faced with what we do now, right.

And I’m not sure that we have a whole lot of background for what we do now. So no, it’s tough.

It’s a tough, it’s a tough problem. And when, when people are faced with that, that kind of change and that kind of tumult, that kind of upheaval, they, they, they do have a tendency to hunker down and be Teasonably reasonably with risk averse. My view has always been that these, these changes that we’re seeing in the world are ultimately great for everybody. Certainly in the long run, I think there’s gonna be, obviously there’s always some disruption in the, in the short run, but, you know, I’m, I’m old enough to remember when, when people had, you know, there was a, there was some backlash to students having calculators. Like pocket calculators in class. 

Like, oh my God, you can’t have a calculator. You don’t ever learn any math. And now no one makes that, no one makes that argument anymore. Even, even search, even things like Google’s like, oh my God, you just type in something in a box and you get the, you get some results. That’s not research. 

So, you know so I’m, I’m pretty sanguine about how we’ll end up ultimately dealing with it.

Yeah, for sure. Now, I’m curious, just just hearing you talk about the, the book, A Whole New Mind and how you went about, you know, kind of instigating that and researching that. Do you, do you write books based on what you’re wondering about or your curiosity?

Is that how you find topics for your books? 

Totally. Totally. There’s not much of a strategy beyond that. Honestly, because, I mean, part of it is because writing a book is so difficult. Writing a good book is really difficult. It’s extremely time consuming. It’s, it’s there many of the actual day-to-day, much of the actual day-to-day work of doing it is not a lot of fun, it’s a grind. And so you have to pick something that you’re genuinely, genuinely interested in.

I’ve seen too many other writers you know, have an idea or come up with something that at least is initially appealing, but they haven’t really reckoned with what it’s gonna be like to live with that idea for one year, two years, five years or two decades as we’re talking about that other, you know, as we’re talking about this book today.

So, yeah. So for me I just, I write what I’m interested in, what I’m curious about because the truth is that if I’m interested in it, there’d be a lot of other people interested in it too. 

Hmm. True. So I’m curious about your process in terms, you said it was a grind and I have to imagine that you do a ton of research prior to writing a thing. Or I don’t know, you’re kinda looking at me like it could go either way. Do you research while you go or do you research a lot ahead? How does your process work?

That’s an interesting question. So, I mean, I think, thank you. Thank you for calling it a process. So it not, doesn’t always feel, it doesn’t always feel that organized.

The question of, but it’s an interesting question, Susan, the question of, you know, research and writing. I, I think it’s at some level when we teach writing to kids, and it’s okay at the very beginning. It’s like you research, and then you write. And I, and what really happens to me is this:

I research, I write, I realize there’s a whole bunch of stuff missing. I research again, I write some more. I’ve realized, oh crap, there’s still stuff missing or different stuff missing. I research again and write. And so it’s not as, it’s bouncier, it’s not purely sequential. I think one of the, one of the, the disa- one… and it’s very difficult. It’s not, this is not teacher’s fault, it’s just that the, the press of how to do of being required to do so many things in a given school year is that one of the things that we don’t teach kids enough is rewriting. You know, we tend to, we tend to say, okay, here, write this thing and turn it in and that, and then you’re done.

And that’s not how it works in real writing. You write the thing, and then you rewrite it, and then you rewrite it, and then you rewrite it, and then you show it to a couple other people and then you change it again. And that’s how, that’s what real writing is. 

Yeah. For, and I talk to a lot of authors and it’s very different for everybody.

And, but the one piece that comes back over and over again, you’re right, is the rewriting, is the let it sit for a minute, go back and look at it with fresh eyes or give it to somebody else. And, and that whole idea of peer feedback and just, you know, having to go back and really craft it. Right? 

Right. And also part of it some, some of it also, some of it also is, some of it also is beyond simply kind of micro sentence level crafting. Some of it is, you start writing a chapter on whatever and you realize, wait a second, I don’t know what I’m talking about. Or, wait a second, this chapter is not about this topic.

It’s actually more about this topic and I don’t really know much about that topic. So there’s a kind of… I mean, again, I don’t wanna get woowoo on you, but you, you have to listen to the material. The material will tell you when you’re a writer, the material will tell you, give you hints about what it wants to be, and a lot of times the material is telling you you, let me, let me be, let me be specific here for a moment.

Uh, a little bit specific here for a moment. So I it’s not quite it, but it’s, it’s similar. So there was there was one book, and I’m trying to remember what it, what it was. Forgive me, I can’t think of what it was, but there was one book that I was working on and I realized that the chapter that I was writing was ultimately a chapter about belonging. 

It wasn’t about what I had originally intended, and the material was screaming, like, this is about belonging, this is about belonging, this is about belonging. And I’d done no research on belonging, and so I had to stop and do the research on belonging and then, and then do that. Now, what you can do in those circumstances, you can just ignore what the material’s telling you. And then I think you have an inferior, you have an inferior book. So you have to really listen to the material. I’ll give you another example. So this is one that I do remember. It’s from a book that I wrote last published last year called The Power of Regret about this complex peculiar emotion called regret.

I spent about a month reading, I would say probably 60 or 70 academic papers on how regret develops in kids. Right. So what is the developmental psychology of what is the developmental psychology of regrets? So I spent a lot of time researching that, and when I got to writing that section of the book, I realized that it just needed a paragraph.

That was it. Now that’s annoying. So, but I had a choice. I could either, I could either be incredibly annoyed saying, oh my God, I can’t believe I sqaundered this time. OR the worst option is I could take it out on the reader and say, I’m sorry, reader, you only need a paragraph but I did so much work, you’re gonna get five pages. And so, so again, there’s, there’s a, it’s, it’s, it’s much less, it’s bouncier. It’s, it’s much, it’s much, it’s much less linear than than we think. 

Well, and I think this connection to my other question that I, a common thread of yours in, in the books that you’ve written, I think I’ve read almost every single one. 

And I’ve watched your masterclass and the common thread that comes through a lot, Dan, is your ability to use storytelling on things that could possibly be very dry. Or that would be uninteresting to a reader otherwise. Right. And so I’m curious, one, how you go about, how do you go about crafting this as a story?

I want, I wanna get into The Power of Regret in a little bit, but like, if you wanna use that as an example, great. But how do you, how do you go about crafting a story out of research and two, what happens when the, the story you’re crafting suddenly the, the chapter that you’re writing does not fit with the story that you were trying to craft.

Yeah. Yeah. So that, that, that happens, that happens a fair bit. I mean, on the first part, you know, how do you craft this story? I, you know, I just think that you have to think about when you, when you write this stuff, how do you explain something, even if it’s complex to a reasonably intelligent, curious person?

And I think there’s an, there’s a tendency to become, to think that you want to show all the complexities, when in fact you want to make it as simple as, as you possibly can without making it too simple. I’ve always found my, again, this is your mileage may vary. Other writers’ mileage may vary. My view is that most explanations are too long and too complicated.

And the reason for that is that shorter, simpler explanations are really hard. You don’t get it on the first try. You don’t get it on the second try. You get closer on the seventh try, but… so I, I go for just make it as simple as you possibly can without making it, without making it too simple.

And also, when it comes to, and again, people will disagree with me, Susan, but, but when it comes to things like length I, I think that many, many, many, many nonfiction books are too long. And I think that they’re, think that they’re padded, and I don’t think they’re rigorous enough in the explanations.

I, I think they’re, there’s so many books that I read that would’ve been twice as good if they were half as long. And so what I try to do is not fall into that trap by being kind of relentless about cutting, relentless about pairing things down by making each sentence each word, fight for its life and justify to me why it should stay in the book.

Okay. I mean, I think that’s part of the idea between the storytelling, but, and then when you’re working on that with the research how do you find a way to make that research compelling, you know? 

Okay. Yeah. I see what you’re so, so, so, so when you, when you think about research, okay, that’s a, I see what you’re saying.

So, so I think when you think about research, research is in some ways a story. . Okay. I mean, if you think about it, I mean, what is a story? A story has a beginning, middle, and end, and it has some suspense. And so if you, if you, if you take something like go back to… I’d like to give you something that wasn’t in the book drive, but is adjacent to the book drive a, a piece of research that I happened to, like. So you had these, these researchers at Harvard Business School wanting to see if the… They went to a cafeteria in Boston and at the cafeteria in Boston, there, there were these cook, there were these cooks who were back of the house. The customers could not, could never see the cooks, and the cooks couldn’t see the customers like in many, many restaurants. And they said, what if we changed that by putting an iPad that allowed the cooks to see the customers and the customers to see the cooks.

Would that change the quality of the food? Right. Would the, would ratings of the quality of the food go up if the cooks could see the customers. Okay. So that’s a story right there. Once upon a time, there were these cooks, they couldn’t see the customers. One day we allowed the cooks to see the customers, and then you’re like, then what happened? Did it matter?? You know? 

So that’s a story right there. So it’s not that complicated, you know? It’s, it’s, it’s you know, it’s, it’s really, really not that complicated. I, I think that it’s, so much of writing is much more just getting in your seat and doing the work, rather than being brilliant or having some great craft, it just takes it’s, it takes time.

It’s hard. It’s, it’s hard for most people. It’s very, very hard for me, and the only way to tackle it is to just keep working at it and working at it, and working at it, and working at it.

Perfect. So let’s talk about your latest book, The Power of Regret. What made you wanna investigate regret, of all things.

Well, I mean, part of it was that I had regrets myself. And I was at a point in my life where to my surprise, I had a lot of mileage on me. I mean, I had room to look back. It was kind of terrifying. Not, not terrifying. It was kind of alarming. And when I look back, I realize that there were things I wish I had done.

There were things I wish I hadn’t done. There were things I wish I had done differently. And, you know, I knew that nobody wanted to talk about regret. And so when I began very sheepishly mentioning this to other people, I found that everybody wanted to talk about regret. That people were dying to talk about this.

So they just needed the permission to do it. And, and I also felt like we had gotten this emotion wrong, especially in our popular, in our popular thinking about it. So I decided to say, you know, what do we know about regret and how can we actually harness our regrets as a force for good. 

And then you, you created the, the regret survey, right? Is that, is that how it started 

I did two things. One, I did a a very large quantitative survey called the American Regret Project, where we did… It is the largest public opinion survey of American attitudes of regret ever conducted. And then we also did something called the World Regret Survey, where we just gathered regrets from people all over the world.

And right now we have a database of over 24,000 regrets from people in 110 countries. It’s just incredible. 

Wow, that’s amazing. 

I know. It’s crazy. 

Yeah. So now in the book you talk about four core regrets and then how they impact our lives. So for people who haven’t read it yet, can you, can you identify those four?

Sure. I got those four through the world regret survey through this giant collection tool of regrets and as I, and it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s somewhat interesting in terms of what we’re, I mean, modestly interesting what we turned, what we talked about before. So I didn’t read through all 24,000 other regrets, but I did read through the first 15,000.

We’ve gotten some in since we first put it up. Now that’s a pain. All right? That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s very time consuming. So what I also tried to do is I also tried to use, within the program, the, the program it’s called Qualtrics, that, that I, that I use to collect the data and analyze the data.

They have certain features that allow you to deploy a version of AI to analyze this, this text. And I used that and it wasn’t very helpful. Now. So, and, and then I, and then I actually read through it myself and I was like, oh, okay. That’s, that’s a much better form of analysis, so I don’t want us to go too far in thinking how quickly AI can replace our human brain, at least in, in this case, it couldn’t, it was a, it was a, sorry, substitute for simply reading and thinking.

But once I read and, and thought about all that stuff, I realized that exactly as you say that the regrets seem to fall into four main categories. One is what I call foundation regrets. Foundation regrets are regrets about small decisions early in our life. Small actions, inactions early in our life that accumulates a terrible consequences later on. So I never ate right and never exercised, and now I’m profoundly out of shape. I never… I spent too much and saved too little, and now I’m broke. 

Second one is boldness regrets, which are, if only I’d taken the chance. These are about people who were at a juncture in their life. They could have tried something, taken a risk. And they didn’t. And instead they played it safe. And what I found is that most people, most of the time, not all the time, tend to regret not taking that shot. And this is everything. It’s from asking people out on a date to speaking up at work, to starting a business, to traveling to all kinds of things that bear a little bit of risk. When people don’t do that, they end up, most people end up regretting it. 

Third category, moral regrets. Moral regrets are, if only I’d done the right thing. These are our regrets that people have where they were at a point in their life, they could do the right thing, they could do the wrong thing. They do the wrong thing. Again, most of us regret it. You know, not everybody, but most of us regret it. These are, we had a lot of bull- an incredible amount of bullying. An incredible amount of bullying blew me away. A huge amount of marital partner infidelity too. So that was in moral regrets. 

And then finally is, is connection regrets, which are relationships, not only romantic relationships, but about all the relationships in our life. And many times those relationships, you know should have been intact but weren’t, or were intact and then drifted apart. And people wanna do something about it. They wanna reach out, they wanna call that old friend.

They wanna talk to their estranged sibling and they don’t, and they tend, they tend to regret that. And so when we look at these regrets: foundation regrets – if only I’d done the work; boldness regrets – if only I’d taken the chance; moral regrets – if only I’d done the right thing; and connection regrets – if only I’d reached out… they tell us something. I mean, they tell us essentially what we value. They’re kind of a reverse image of what we value. 

What do we value? Foundation regrets tell us we value some stability. Like Good Life has, is, is, is is stable. It, it’s not wobbly. Boldness regrets tell us that we value learning and growth. That we don’t wanna stagnate, that we wanna do something during the vanishingly short time we’re on this planet. Moral regrets are most of us are good and want to do good and feel pretty bad when we’re not good. And so a good life is good. And then finally, there’s connection regrets, which are ultimately about love. And not only romantic love, which is obviously quite important, but just all the love we have in our lives for all the people in our lives. 

And so what’s peculiar to me, I didn’t expect this when I, when I dove into this, is that these, this emotion regret, which is an unpleasant emotion, is actually giving us clues about how to lead a decent, meaningful life.

And I love how you put this, that you talk about this as a photographic negative, like you were talking about that it gives you that backwards perspective exactly of viewing it. Right, right. So I’m curious about two things. One I’m thinking about the book Atomic Habit. Yeah. And James Clear’s idea on stacking habits. Right. Do you think that, that people stack regrets or stack the foundational regrets with maybe connection regrets, or in some other mechanism? 

I don’t know. I haven’t thought about that. I just, I actually don’t know. That’s a great question. 

Okay. I was just, I was just curious because I mean, I can definitely see regrets in all four categories, right?

But then I also think that some, I was thinking about, oh, well, maybe foundational regrets led to some of my other regrets in another category, and maybe those two things worked in tandem together. I don’t know. 

I don’t know. That’s a great question. Yeah, I just, I really, I really don’t know. 

Yeah no, I was just curious if going through the research you had seen some of those things as well.

Maybe just kind of thinking about that. And then the other part was thinking about Brene Brown’s work on the things that we don’t like to look at inside of us are the things that actually drive us. So do you think regret pairs with other emotions like fear or shame, as a way to kind of build upon one another?

I think that, that there, again, it’s an interesting point. I think that there are nuances in those kinds of, in, in those kinds of emotions. So let me take those and then answer the question more broadly. Cause I think there’s a difference between fear and shame. What, what we have is we have, and I’ll take a big step back.

So, so we have emo obviously human beings have emotions. We have a whole portfolio of emotions. Some emotions make us feel good, some emotions make us feel bad. And one of the things that I think we haven’t done a very good job on, in terms of how we lead our lives is our, is, we’ve fallen for the the scam essentially, that we should be positive all the time and never negative, that we should always look forward and never look back.

That negative emotions are bad for us and they’re always to be avoided. When in fact, negative emotions in the right doses are functional. They help us, they help us survive. They help us lead leave live. And, and what we haven’t been taught, and this is certainly the case with regret, is what to do with those negative emotions.

Because so, so, so I, I, I feel like we’ve really been sold a bill of goods about positivity. We should have more positive emotions than negative emotions. We should have , you know, way more positive emotions than negative emotions, but we shouldn’t banish all of our negative emotions. That is not healthy.

That is not good. Fear is a great example of that. I wouldn’t want, you know, I don’t like experiencing fear and chronic fear is debilitating, but I would not want to extinguish my ability to experience fear. Why? Because if I’m in a burning building and I don’t, and I can’t feel fear, I’m gonna die.

Right? So I think that’s a So, so, and, and reg, and when we look at our negative emotions and we have a lot of research on this, especially in social psychology, but also in some other, also in some other fields. Our most common negative emotion is regret. When you stack up all these negative emotions, the one that seems to come up most often in our lived experience is regret.

And so the question then isn’t, you know, you shouldn’t ignore your regrets and you shouldn’t wallow in your regrets. What you should do is you should use them, you should confront them, you should enlist them to live better. And when we do that, we have lots of evidence that it can help make us better on a whole range of things.

And so I think that what, what Brene was talking about is, is, is spot on that we have to look inside of ourselves and recognize we have positive emotions and negative emotions. Again, we should have more positive than negative emotions, but all these emotions are functional in some way, with an exception, some exceptions, so.

And this is actually really important with, with, with with, with one of the emotions that you mentioned before. Fear, perfectly healthy. You, everybody should be able to, everybody should be able to experience fear. Everybody should have the fear emotion in their brain and body and soul. No question about it.

Shame, maybe not because shame is a different kind of emotion. Shame is,  shame is essentially look at the difference between shame and guilt. Guilt is that I did a bad thing. Shame is I’m a bad person. And one of the things that we know through cognitive behavior therapy, one of the things we know even in the study of regret is that when we make universal attributions about who we are that are negative, that can be debilitating. So there’s a huge difference between, there’s a huge difference between I was walking late at night and I was scared versus I’m an intensely fearful person all the time. One is about a particular act and moment.

The other is about, is a universal attribution about who you are. Same thing is true with, same thing is true with guilt and shame. I bullied some, I bullied somebody 10 years ago and I feel bad about it. . Okay. Right. I did a bad thing, but shame is I’m a horrible person because I did that and, and we know a lot that making those kinds of big attributions about who you are as a person, it can, can really be debilitating.

And so, yeah, I think that the big point here is that we haven’t really had yet an honest conversation about negative emotions. That, that what we, we are, especially Americans are skittish about negative emotions. We think we should be positive all the time. And as a consequence, that approach is leaving capacity on the table.

We are not being as fully realized and as developed and as on a, as deeply on a path to a life well lived as we could be. 

Yeah. And Brooke Castillo talks about this all the time, about a 50/50, that you’re gonna experience positive emotions. 50% of the time you’re gonna experience negative emotions 50% of the time, and is if you acknowledge that you’re gonna experience both, then when you hit them, you can go through them.

So my question to you is, how are there strategies or techniques in ways that we can go through regret and not dwell or ruminate on it.

it. Absolutely. So one of the most important things you can do at the outset is, is what’s called self-compassion, which is the work of Kristen Neff at the University of Texas.

And so, you know what, what she’s, what what she suggests is that, you know, here’s, here’s an, here’s an example. When we screw up, when we make mistakes, we often will talk to ourselves silently and the way we talk to ourselves, that self-talk is often brutal. It’s vicious. We talk to ourselves in ways that are lacerating and cruel compared to how we talk to other people.

And what Kristin Neff’s research tells us pretty clearly is, don’t do that. What you should be doing… There’s no, there’s no evidence that that kind of lacerating self-criticism improves your performance. It, it is just not there. Instead, what seems to improve our performance is treating yourself with kindness rather than contempt.

Treat yourself not better than anybody else, but treat yourself with the same kindness you would treat somebody else. That turns out to be incredibly important on a whole range of things. The, the research on self-compassion is mind boggling and it, and its effect on our performance at work, and its per and its effect on our performance, on things like, like problem solving, and it’s even in its physiological effect.

So treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Recognize that you’re, that mistakes are part of the human condition. You’re not that special. And also, and this goes a little bit to our universal attribution point, that recognize that any screw up, any mistake, any blunder you have is a moment in your life, not the full measure of your life.

And when you do that it, it opens a way for other kinds of sense making. So one of the things that’s helpful in making sense of your regret is to, is to take a step back and is to, is talk about your regret, to write about your regret, to make it, to turn it into words rather than into these… convert these amorphous negative feelings into words.

And then just taking a step back and drawing a lesson from it is important. So treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Talk about it or write about it, and then take a step back and draw a lesson from it to apply next time. And when we do that, it’s not that hard. We can use regret as a powerful force.

We have piles of evidence showing that it helps us on a whole bunch of different things. It helps us find, if we do that, it helps us find more meaning in life. It helps us become better negotiators, better strategists, better problem solvers. There’s a whole set of benefits that come from reckoning with of our regret.

Not wallowing, not ignoring, but just dealing with it head-on. 

And you said at the beginning when we were talking about why you started to write this book, that it was because you were looking back on, on your own tenure so far. And has what you’ve learned been, have you been able to apply it and have you seen the benefit of it?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the, one of the areas is it is gonna sound, I mean… So, you know, I ha So I like everybody, I have regrets and I, and I felt kind of bad about them for a, a long time. And then I have this database of 24,000 regrets, and, and I’m like, okay, I’m so not special. I mean, basically any regret that I have, you can find somewhere else.

Any regret that any of your listeners have, I can probably take 90 seconds and find it in the database. That is, we’re a lot alike in these kinds of things. We have a similar kinds of regrets and so, so for me, understanding that regrets are part of who we are. And that you can’t extinguish that at all.

You can’t say I’m going to banish regret cuz everybody has regret. Everybody with a functioning brain has regrets. They’re people who have brain damage. Sociopaths. Little kids whose brains haven’t developed, don’t experience a regret, but the rest of us have regret. The question is, what do you do with it?

And so for me, when I look back and wish I had done something different or wish I had done something in a different way I try to go through systematically and try to understand. You know, treat myself with, with kindness rather than contempt. Really acknowledge it and then very explicitly draw a lesson from it that I can apply to my next action.

Yeah, and I, I think that’s the best way we can all move forward. Now there’s a question that I ask everybody before we close and that is because everybody has a different take on it, I find it’s almost like a fingerprint. So if there’s one thing you’d like teachers to know about creativity, what would it be?

Well, I mean, I think teachers already know this, but I, I think it’s the idea that every, every kid is creative. That is, creativity is not something that a few people are magically touched by. It is a capacity of every single human being. And our job, I don’t mean only teachers, but I mean parents and citizens, is to try to awaken that in, in everybody, especially our, especially our young people.

I think a lot of times we, we look at, we look at creativity as some kind of magic blessing bestowed by the universe on a certain, like, group of people, and I don’t think that’s true.

Well, I couldn’t agree more. So, Dan, will you tell people where they can find you online and so that they can continue to follow your work?

Sure. You can go to my website, which is dan pink, d a n p i n k.com. I’ve got a newsletter. All kinds of good free resources there too. 

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate 

it. Total pleasure, Susan. Thanks for having me.