Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #248 How To Make Your Mistakes Your Superpower with Daniel Pink

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

What do you regret in your life? When I asked this question on social media a few weeks back, I was surprised by how many of you were quick to share the things you wish you’d done – or not done. There were others who take a ‘no regrets’ approach to life. It’s clearly a topic that resonates. And my guest on today’s podcast has an interesting and useful take on why that is. Daniel Pink is a bestselling author and researcher specialising in human behaviour, creativity, work and business. His books have won multiple awards, have been translated into 42 different languages and he has sold millions of copies around the globe. In his latest book, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backwards Moves Us Forwards, Dan asserts that regret is a misunderstood and useful emotion that when used correctly, can help us lead happier, more fulfilled lives. The key, he says, is to recognise it as a signal, telling us what we should do next. Through Dan’s extensive research, he’s identified four core categories of regret. He found that no matter what the context, be it romance, career, travel or family, people’s feelings fell into one of these four camps: Boldness Regrets (‘if only I’d taken the chance’); Foundation Regrets (‘if only I’d done the work’); Moral Regrets (‘if only I’d done the right thing’) and Connection Regrets (‘if only I’d reached out’). Society tells us not to look back and instead to focus on the positive. But Dan’s view is that regrets aren’t there to be ignored. Sitting with the discomfort of a regret allows us to unpick it and understand what our values are. No regrets, says Dan, means no growth. We cover so many different themes throughout the conversation and Dan shares plenty of practical advice on how we can use regret to improve our now and our future. I really enjoyed chatting with Dan and I think this is a powerful conversation that will cause you to reflect on your own life and your own relationship with regret. I hope you enjoy listening! Thanks to our sponsors:   https://www.calm.com/livemore   https://www.blublox.com/livemore   https://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Order Dr Chatterjee's new book Happy Mind, Happy Life: UK version: https://amzn.to/304opgJ US & Canada version: https://amzn.to/3DRxjgp   Show notes available at https://drchatterjee.com/244 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3oAKmxi. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified health care provider with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

Why do human beings experience regret? Regret helps us learn. When we lean into our regrets, we become better problem solvers. We become better parents. We become better strategists. We have more meaning in our life. Regret clarifies what's important to us and instructs us on how to do better. That's the power of regret right there. Hi, my name is Rangan Chastji. Welcome to Feel Better Live More. What comes up for you when you hear the word regret? Do you consider yourself someone who has many regrets in life? Or are you someone who prefers to leave the past in the past? Well, when I asked this question on social media a few weeks ago, I was surprised by how many of you were quick, and I mean really quick, to share with me the things that you wish you'd done differently in life or not done at all. My guest on today's

podcast has a really interesting and fascinating take on why this topic seems to resonate with so many of us. Daniel Pink is an author and a researcher specializing in human behavior, creativity, work, and business. He's the author of five New York Times bestsellers, and his books have won multiple awards, have been translated into 42 different languages, and have sold millions of copies around the world. Now in his latest book, The Power of Regret, How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, Dan asserts that regret is a misunderstood and useful emotion that when used correctly can help us lead more fulfilled and happier lives. The key, he says, is to recognize regret as a signal telling us what we should do next. Through the extensive

research he conducted whilst writing this book, he's identified four core categories of regret. He found that no matter what the context, be it romance, career, travel, or family, people's feelings fell into one of these four camps. Bonoreless regrets, if only I'd taken the chance. Foundation regrets, if only I'd done the work. Moral regrets, if only I'd done the right thing. And connection regrets, if only I'd reached out. Now much of society's messaging these days tells us not to look back and instead

to just focus on the positive. But Dan's view is that regrets are not there to be ignored. Sitting with the discomfort of a regret allows us to unpick it and understand what our values are. No regrets, says Dan, means no growth. Now I think this is a topic that is really, really interesting and relevant to each and every single one of us. We cover so many different themes and throughout the conversation, Dan shares plenty of practical advice on how we can use regret to improve our now and our future. Now, I must say, I really enjoyed chatting face-to-face with Dan. I think this is a powerful conversation that I'm sure

will have you reflecting on your own life and your own relationship with regrets. I hope you enjoy listening. And now, my conversation with Mr. Daniel Pink. I'm so excited to talk to you about regret. My initial reaction when I think I got sent an email by your publicist saying, hey, look, this book's coming out, here it is. And it said in the press release, you know, this whole idea of no regrets is nonsense. And my initial thought was well if you ask me i'd probably say i have no regrets so let's get into it yeah right let's get into regrets why they're so important why you think it's such a misunderstood emotion and i wanted to start off with this quote by bob dylan

i don't believe in regrets you don't agree with bob do you? Far be it for me to disagree with a Nobel Prize winner, but I profoundly disagree with that. I don't know how you, like, the idea that one can't believe in regret is absurd. And that's not a philosophical point of view. That's a scientific point of view. Scientists have been studying this emotion for 60 years and over 60 years. And what they have determined is something that is very important to note at the top here, which is that everybody has regrets. Everybody has regrets.

They're part of the human condition. Truly, the only people who don't have regrets are five-year-olds because their brains haven't developed because regret requires this incredible cognitive dexterity. People with certain kinds of brain lesions, people with Huntington's, certain kinds of Huntington's disease, and sociopaths. Everybody else has regrets. Not having regrets is a sign that you're a tiny child or you have a grave disorder. And so, the thing is, is that regret feels bad. And so, there's a puzzle here, which is that you have this emotion that everybody has. It's arguably the most common negative emotion that

we experience. One of the most common emotions of any kind that we experience. It's ubiquitous, and yet it's painful. So what's the point? What's going on here? And the point is obvious. If you think about evolution, if you think about survival, It's that it's useful. It helps us if we treat it right. The problem is, is that we don't treat it right, is that we have this absurd philosophy that we should never have regrets, we should never look backward, we should always be positive, and that's just profoundly wrong. It's unscientific, and it's not an effective blueprint for living. So sorry, Bob, but you missed this one. What do you think we, as a society, get wrong the most about regrets?

I guess it's probably worth, right at this point, defining regrets. Like, what do you mean when you say regrets? So that's a great question. First of all, let's start. Regret is an emotion. It's an emotion. It's a negative emotion. It's an emotion that makes us feel bad because what we do is we look backward and we feel bad because of a decision we made or a decision we didn't make because of an action we took because of an action we didn't take in the past. And we imagine that had we chosen differently, the present would be a little bit better. And it's different from disappointment because it's our fault. Disappointment is not our fault. Regret

is our fault. So we have agency and we've made a choice or not made a choice that actually has, we think that has produced consequences in the present that are suboptimal and it's our fault and it makes us feel bad. So two days ago, I was taking my son to the school bus stop in the car and we were in a bit of a rush. And for whatever reason, I didn't check that his belt was on, his seatbelt. And I had to suddenly brake because a car was coming out in front of a parked car. And he went forwards. But thankfully nothing happened. It was just a little minor sort of.

Nothing happened. He just, you know, his arm went forward. And I think his chin. But I was like, oh man, that could have been much worse. Thankfully it wasn't. Since then, you know, we have never moved in the car without me checking everyone's seatbelt is on. This literally happened two, maybe three days ago. I think it was two days ago. And I've been reading your book over the last few days. So I've really been thinking about

mistakes, disappointment, regrets, how these three things interplay together. So what was going on there? Because I don't feel I regretted that. I feel that I made a mistake by not checking. Thankfully, we got away with it. And I don't think I will ever make that mistake again. Had he been hurt, there would have been a regret there, I guess. So help me understand that incident through the lens with which you look at regret. I think there are two factors here. One of them is more important. One factor is outcome.

So there wasn't a cataclysmic outcome here. So your son got bounced around a little bit, but there is no major long-term outcome. So, what that does is that reduces the overall psychic pain that you experience from that. So, that's one thing. But I think the more important thing is this, is endurance. Chances are you're not going to remember that incident in five years or 10 years. That's my guess. So, the difference between a mistake and a regret is that not every mistake triggers a regret. You could make a mistake, you correct it, and then you never think about it again. And so, with a regret, it remains unresolved. It lingers. It sticks with us. I think that's the big difference. So, it's a combination of endurance

and outcome. But the thing is, here's the thing about regret. It's because it sticks with us. Not every mistake triggers regret, right? Mistakes are actions. The other big distinction is mistakes are an action. Regret is a feeling, right? And so, I've made plenty of mistakes that I don't think about ever again. Maybe because I've corrected it. Maybe because I immediately learned something from it. But when something sticks with us, we have that stomach-churning feeling that sticks with us over time when it endures, that is a signal. And it's a very important signal. It's a signal about what we value, and it's a signal about what we should do. What got you interested in studying and writing about regrets? I was dealing with regrets of my own. And what I found is that when I was sort of, it's interesting because you've written different books,

you've written several books, but a different person wrote each of those books. Yeah, 100%. Okay, all right. So I've been writing books for 20 years to my astonishment. And the me of 20 years ago would not have written this book because the me of 20 years ago didn't have written this book because the me of 20 years ago didn't have enough mileage on him. He didn't have enough mileage, didn't have enough life experience, didn't have enough room to look back. The me of my 50s, this felt kind of

inevitable because I was at a juncture in my life where I could look backward and there was mileage there, but I could also look for, hopefully look forward and have mileage there. And so what I found is that when I started reflecting on my regrets and talking about them, because I'm a big believer in when you have ideas, the importance of socializing ideas, like this idea that this notion that, oh, I have an idea, but I'm not going to talk about it because someone's going to steal it. That's nonsense. Okay.

And so what you want to do is you want to get feedback on your ideas. You want, and I said, God, and I wasn't even thinking about it as a book. My elder daughter graduated from university and I was at her graduation. I just started thinking about my own regrets about university. And so I came back and here's the thing. I started talking to people about it, saying, oh man, I was like, I was thinking about my sophia's graduation i came back and i was thinking about like what i regretted in college and i found that people leaned in okay into this conversation and what's interesting about that is that that's a for your writer that's a very good sign because here you have this this this word that i'm pointing to this

word here on the track regret ah okay we don't want to deal with it we want to we want to hide under the couch and when i started bringing it, people engaged in a profound way. And that's an interesting signal. And then I realized that I didn't know anything about it and I wanted to work it out myself. And actually, I put aside a totally different book and- And wrote this one. And wrote this one instead, yeah. Yeah. No, I love it. Now, when I was researching you online yesterday yes and you can believe everything you find online of course but this was your ted talk in 2009 okay and what's interesting you just told me that actually maybe early on in your life

yeah this wasn't as relevant but of course at this point at this juncture yeah you know you can look back you can look forwards it has real i guess poignancy and meaning at this point in your life what was interesting to me is that you opened your 2009 ted talk with something to this effect i have a confession to make okay 20 years ago yeah i did something i regret oh did i say the word regret you said regret in the first line of your title. Wow, very good. Very good, doctor. Very good psychoanalysis there.

I didn't mean to, but I just thought, isn't that interesting that that was, what, maybe 13 years ago? Yeah, that's fascinating. I had no idea about that. You can go watch it tonight. I believe you. I believe you.

So, yeah. So, maybe at some other level, I've been reckoning with regret ever since. I also think the other reason it might have been in the back of my head is that, you know, I wrote a book about timing, more broadly, as a physician, you know, we have biological clocks, basically, in every cell in our body, and we're moving through time. But if you think about this, you and I began this conversation in the past. That's gone. Okay, yeah, that's kind of freaky, right? And then and then you and I are going to continue to have this conversation in the future, but it hasn't happened yet. That's crazy when you think about it, right? Okay. It's kind of whack.

And so, and our lives are that way too. And so, our lives are about, I think in some ways, how do we integrate the past, present and future? And regret obviously is an incredibly important part of that. This world regret survey that you conducted. Yes. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that. Sure. How you came up with the idea? What questions did you ask? What did you find out? Because,

of course, that underpins a lot of what you've written about in the book. Sure. Well, I mean, I looked at what the academic science had said about regret. I also did something called the American Regret Project, which was a public opinion survey of American attitudes about regret to try to get demographic differences, to see if there are demographic differences in regret. And it turned out to be far fewer than I expected, which itself is kind of interesting. So we did a pretty rigorous public opinion survey. And then I also did this other thing, which proved revelatory, which is called the World Regret Survey, which is actually really simple. I put up a website, put something in my newsletter, made a few tweets and said, hey, you want to tell me your one big life regret?

And I put it up and within a blink, we had 15,000 of them from over 100 countries. We're now up to, and I stopped publicizing it because I didn't want to break the database. And I also didn't want to, you know, 15,000 is enough to read. And we're up to over 19,000 now from 109 countries. So that itself tells you something, the fact that people were so eager to share their regret and reveal their regret and disclose their regret. And so that proved to be a very rich source for figuring out what people regret, which ended up being, I think, a central part of my understanding of regret.

Yeah, I love the way you came up with these four core categories of regrets, because on the surface, a lot of these regrets can seem quite different. Yes. But I thought it was brilliant the way you actually went back to first principles and thought, well, what is the structure and foundation of these particular regrets? So, I wonder if you could share what those categories are and, you know, some of your learnings. Sure. So, that was, but this is, again, I went into this book and actually most of my books without a very strong theory of the case. It wasn't like I had sort of a mission,

a philosophy that I was trying. I went in saying, regret, it's super important. I have them. I don't understand it. What's it about? All right. That was basically my business plan for the book. And so, I initially started wondering what people regret. And the academic research showed that people regret a lot of different things. We have career regrets and education regrets and romance regrets. Then in my own quantitative survey, I asked that same question and found the same thing. People's regrets were all over the place. So, it's kind of stymied. It's like, what's going on here? But what I realized in reading through thousands upon thousands upon thousands of these regrets is that, just exactly as you say, that the domain of life mattered less

than what was going on one layer down. What do say, that the domain of life mattered less than what was going on one layer down. What do you mean by the domain of life? Domain of life meaning this is a regret about my career. This is a regret about my education. This is a regret about finances. This is a regret about health. This is a regret about romance, family, okay? And you started hearing the same language, hearing sometimes identical language, language like taking the chance, speaking up, not confident, believe it or not, introverted, those kinds of things as examples. And it didn't matter what aspect of people's lives they were discussing those things. And that language kept coming up over and over again. This is the value of qualitative research.

If you go into the words and the words convey the emotions of what people are talking about, they tell you something really important. So what I found, and let me make this a little bit more concrete. Could you just explain that term, qualitative research, to people who may not understand it? So quantitative research is, I asked people, I did a poll. I asked people a bunch of questions. So things like, do you believe in God do you believe there's a god yeah yes no not sure okay and then people click whichever one then this is like a multiple choice type thing yeah yeah yeah and but what we know from what we know from that quantitative piece of research is because

we we put together a sample of 4489 americans we We weighted W-E-I-G-H-T, the sample, meaning it's a statistical procedure to make sure that every aspect of American population is represented there. And so, that allowed us to see, oh, do women, are women more likely to believe in God than men? Are men more likely to believe in God than, just one example. I mean, I choose that example because in America, overwhelming numbers of people believe in God. Like, belief in God doesn't tell you anything. Right. Because everybody believes in God.

So, that ended up being, because I wanted to see whether people's belief in God affected their regrets. Okay. But I learned nothing because everybody believes in God. All right. So, that's a quantitative thing. But the qualitative is just people, think of it as as qualitative is a fancy word, story-based research. What I'm getting is people simply submitting their regrets. Their own words.

Their own words. In their own words, they submit their regrets and that's it. And I just read through them. So I have these little mini sagas, these little stories of people's regrets. I regret that I married too young and ended up getting divorced when I was young, and that put me on a bad trajectory. I regret that I never traveled when I was younger. I regret that I didn't reach out to my friend, and then he suddenly passed away.

So, it's all these kinds of stories and things like that. And that gives you some, that ended up being very revealing. Because what I found to your earlier point is that deep down, there were four core regrets that people had. And let me make this a little bit more concrete by giving you an example of that. So here's the thing. So I have plenty of regrets from people who, it's quite amazing to me, a lot of regrets of people who didn't travel at some point in their lives.

They went to university and had a chance to study abroad, but they didn't do that. That's a surprising number of people. Or I had a chance early in my life to travel, but I was too scared to go do a gap year. I was too scared to get on a train. I was too scared to fly, and I didn't do that, and now I regret it. So think about it as an education regret. Then I have lots of regrets in the career realm about not starting a business. This is a very big regret that people have. Really? Huge. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur,

but I didn't have the guts to do it. I always wanted to go out on my own, but I didn't do it. If I had gone out on my own, I might not be stuck in this terrible job. That's a career regret. Then I have lots of regrets about romance that are essentially people wanted to ask out somebody on a date and they never did. And it bothers them 10, 20, 30 years later. Okay. So that's a romance regret, but all those regrets are the same. All three of those regrets are the same, even though they're in different domains of life. It's a regret that says, if only I'd taken the chance, you're at a juncture in your life. And a lot of these regrets, as you know, from the book

begin at a juncture, you're at a juncture in your life. You can play it safe or you can take the chance. And when people don't take the chance, not every time, but way more often than I would have expected, they regret it. And it bothers them for years and years and years and years. So that's one category of boldness regrets. What I hear there is this idea that we regret more what we didn't do than what we did do. Is that what the research shows as well? That is an overwhelming conclusion of the research. Both the academic research, they were not in the quantitative part, the numbers part, the polling part of my research. There weren't a lot of amazingly clear, stark, important conclusions there. It

was a little bit murkier. But one that stood out was exactly that, and it has to do with age. When we're young, we have roughly equal numbers of regrets of action and inaction. Action regrets, I regret what I did. I hurt somebody. I stole. I, you know, whatever. Inaction regrets. I didn't travel. I didn't ask out that crush. As we get older, action regrets diminish. Inaction regrets increase. And by the time we're in our 40s and 50s, inaction regrets are probably double, are

double the action regrets. What sticks with us are things we didn't do big time. I'd be surprised if there's anyone listening or watching this now at this very moment. Can't think back to some aspects of their life where they wonder what would have happened had I made that different decision. Yeah. And what's interesting about that is that it's not only about the outcomes it's also just about actually doing something like like like what i found which is sort of interesting is that when people who did take the chance and it failed a few of them reported that as a regret i started a business

and it totally went it totally went under and i lost money and i wish i just stuck with my regular job but there weren't that many people like that. They were outnumbered probably 40 to 1 by the opposite of it. And what's interesting is that even many of the people who, think about the romance regrets. The romance regrets, the boldness regrets in the realm of romance. So, I met a woman and I really liked her and I wanted to ask her out and I never got around to it and I lost my chance. The people who are saying that are not saying, oh, had I only taken, had I done that, I would be living this blissful life today. They're not saying that. What they're saying is that I had a chance in my life to step up and do something and I blew it. It wasn't so much about the outcome. It was about the act itself. It was about having a chance in my life to step up and do something and i blew it it wasn't so much about the outcome

it was about the act itself it was about having a moment in your life when you could do something and you didn't that's what really sticks with people it's and they're less they're they're less outcome is than i would have expected tell us about the other three categories so we get that overarching kind of so so what we've got we've got what i call foundation regrets foundation regrets are if only i'd done the work. These are regrets, some of which you write about. So they deal with health. So things like I didn't take care of myself and now I'm 60 years old and I am woefully

out of shape and have chronic health problems because of decisions I made in nutrition and exercise earlier in my life. Other regrets, a lot of regrets about spending too much and saving too little. There was nobody truly who had a regret. Oh, I spent too little money. Not a single person had that, all right, as a regret. But spending too much, lots of people. Saving too little, lots of people.

I thought it was pretty interesting. A lot of regrets about people not working hard enough in school or in university. More than I would have expected. Wow. Because they, you know, it's like, I should have listened to my parents and worked a little bit harder. Because what it did is that these foundation regrets, I use the word foundation, is that you make small decisions in your life that each one of, no single one of which is cataclysmic but the accumulated force of them is massive so and you put you find yourself in a position later in life or like oh my god i totally messed up and i have a lot to undo here so that's foundation

regrets if only i'd done the work moral regrets small category intensely felt um if only I'd done the work. Moral regrets, small category, intensely felt, if only I'd done the right thing. Once again, you're at a juncture, you can do the right thing, you can do the wrong thing, you do the wrong thing. Most people regret it because most people, when we talk about this, I think most people want to be good. I think most people are good, actually. I think most people are moral and want to be moral. I think they want to be and I think most of us probably think we are, you know, or we'd like to think we are. And I remember in that section of the book, you write a bit about Jonathan Haidt's research, which I found super fascinating, that we do not make moral decisions based upon reason.

Oh, my, oh, my. Can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah, yeah. So, I brought in that book. Haidt has a book called The Righteous Mind. I encourage everybody to read it. That makes two very important points. One of them has to do with what is morality? And one of the things that you see around the world, if I go to this World Regret Survey, 109 countries, people in, somebody in the

UK and somebody in Japan and somebody in Amarillo, Texas in the United States will agree that asking somebody out on a date is bolder than not asking somebody out on a date, all right? Starting a business is bolder than staying in a lackluster job, okay? Consensus about that. We have consensus about connection, what, you know, should you, you know, reaching out to someone you care about, all right? We have consensus about that. We have consensus about foundation, take care of your body. Morality, we don't have full consensus on we have consensus on some things according to research i think he's spot on there's certain kinds of morality that uh like basically harming other people yeah i bullied somebody around the world everybody thinks that's wrong political

ideology everybody almost everybody thinks that's wrong harming and cheating people you almost not quite universal but very widespread people think it's wrong. It's pretty black and white for most people. Other things are not. Okay. Okay. So, things about like duty and sanctity and purity. So, if you have, so I'll give you one example.

It's a little bit of an American example, but it is perplexing to some people. I have people who say, I regret not serving in the US military. Several people like that. And it wasn't, oh, I missed, it wasn't a boldness regret because I missed the adventure. They say, I feel like I let down my country. I had a duty to serve. I had it because we don't have conscription in the United States. You don't have it here either. I had a duty to serve. It was an act of patriotism to do that. And I betrayed my duty. Now, there's some people in America and elsewhere who say, what the hell are you talking about? You don't have any moral duty. And they say, yes, I do. And the people who disagree with them are wrong. It's like these are people who believe in the morality of duty.

And not all of us have, as Haidt puts it, that moral taste bud. But it doesn't mean that it's a wrong taste bud at all. It means that it's just another taste bud. So, it's things like that. So, moral regrets are highly individual, I guess. They're idiosyncratic. Some of them are more idiosyncratic than others. So, you're going to get a little bit more disagreement. And basically, what it is,

is that you have a traditionally conservative political philosophy has more moral taste buds than traditionally liberal philosophy. Liberals care about care and harm, and conservatives care about duty and sanctity and purity. So morality is a little bit more complicated. Now, that said, most of the regrets were in the things about care and harm. They were regrets about bullying people, hurting people, cheating people, marital infidelity, those kinds of things. You know, when I hear that, I think of the term alignment in the sense that I've been working on a model of happiness over the last year or two for my upcoming book. And I got this concept called core happiness, which is what I think we are all wanting in our lives. And it has three components, alignment, contentment, and control.

Alignment is when your actions match up with your values. Okay. And I very much hear that as you talk about moral regrets. I hear very much that this is when potentially we've done something that isn't really who we really are. And actually there's this kind of disconnect and this kind of fault line. And we, you know, it just eats away and erodes us from the inside because we regret it. We're thinking about it because you can't really hide from yourself, can you? It's still there. You know, you lie in bed at night by yourself.

If you have done the wrong thing, according to your own morals, then yeah, I could see why so many people would regret that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. would regret that oh yeah yeah yeah and it's also it's but this is but this is it's it's directly related because one of the things that regret does when we experience regret remember it's a signal it's a signal okay the way we get regret wrong is that we think of we think of regret as something that's meaningless something that we should ignore because feelings don't really matter and because you should always be positive and never look backward. That's a bad idea. What's also a bad idea, perhaps even a worse idea, is ruminating on these regrets, bathing in these regrets, wallowing these regrets, letting them capture you. What we want to do is we want to think about them. And when we think about them, regrets do two things. One, they

clear, to your point, they clarify what we value and they instruct us on what to do. And I think that's clear in all four categories, but it's especially clear in the moral category. I'll give you an example from my own experience. So I have regrets about kindness, especially when I was younger. I was never a bully, ever. I was never a bully, ever. But as a younger person, both in school and university, as a young professional, I was often in situations where people were being excluded. People were not being treated right.

People were being left out. I saw it happening. I was right there. I didn't say a word. I didn't step in. That bothers me. All right? And it's bothered me for years. Still to this day? Both this year? Well, I've tried to repair it. And I'll tell you,. That bothers me. All right. And it's bothered me for years. Still to this day, it bothers you?

Well, I've tried to repair it. And I'll tell you, it still bothers me. It doesn't bother me as much. It still bothers me. It bothers me a little bit talking to you about it right now. I mean, I feel like a little prick of negativity in talking about this. But here's the thing, Rangan. That's a signal, okay?

That's telling me something. The fact that this bugs me for 10 years or 20 years, that's a signal. What's a signal of it's a signal of what I value. It's a signal of what I value. It's telling me you value kindness. You value kindness, perhaps more than you realize you value kindness more than perhaps you're consciously aware of. All right. And so if you think about that, you don't say, oh, it doesn't matter. That was in the past. I let people be excluded in the past and didn't do anything. Oh, it doesn't matter. No regrets. Or you can say, oh my God, I am the worst human being there ever was. I am just so inherently flawed. I don't deserve the sanctity of life. There's

something profoundly wrong with me. That's a bad idea too. What you should be doing is thinking about them and saying, you value kindness. What it's also doing, along with the clarification, it's instructing me. It's like, you, it's giving me, it's like, don't do that anymore. Do better. And so, one of the things truly that I've done, I mean, it's modest. I'm not trying to paint myself as some kind of saint here, but if you see me in social gatherings, what you'll find is that there might be clumps of people around. And if there's somebody who is left out, somebody who is kind of this unmoored from the other islands of connection there, I will literally walk over and bring that person in, always invite them into the scrum. Now, again, does that qualify me for sainthood? No. Is that better than I was before? Yes. Is the reason I was better than before regret? Absolutely.

But this is one of the main cases I think you're making in the book that we can utilize regrets. We can utilize the past to help us inform and change our future behavior. Not only can we, we must. That is an essential component of healthy living. Again, go back to the brain. Why do human beings experience regret? Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health,

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live more. If it wasn't useful, it would have likely evolved out of our bodies and brains. It's useful. Regret helps us learn. And there's also, so that's sort of the evolutionary theory behind it. But we also have evidence from social psychology showing that when we lean into our regrets, we become better negotiators. We become better problem solvers. We become better parents. We become better strategists. We have more meaning in our life.

That regret, again, clarifies what's important to us and instructs us on how to do better. And so this is why I don't like the no regrets view. The no regrets view, which you know from the book, I got all these people with tattoos that say no regrets. All right. All right. It's nutty, right? So, but if you have a tattoo that says no regrets, it's like, you might as well say a tattoo that says no growth, no learning, no doing better. And I think the big problem here, I'm realizing even more now that the book is out, is that especially in secular society, we don't do a very good job of helping people deal with negative emotions. Yeah. I think that point about secular society

is really key. And I want to just discuss for a moment this idea of no regrets that does permeate through society because I kind of feel if I'm honest that prior to reading the book and I love what's in the book I think it's I think it's absolutely brilliant but I think there's two different ways to interpret no regrets right so I think yes a lot of people are interpreting that as you know I'm not looking back, just moving forward, staying positive. I have no regrets. When I think about myself and I feel that I have no regrets, I feel that what I'm saying is, actually, I know my past mistakes. I spent time with them. They've changed how I look at the world. I'm not going to beat

myself up about them. I was making the best decision that I could at that time based upon what I knew. And there's a real acceptance. Like for me, I know I want to talk about self-compassion because I know it's part of the book. And, you know, I'm a huge fan of Kristin Neff and her work, as you are. But I feel, I guess, more in this sort of spiritual, non-secular space, let's say, that a lot of my growth since my dad died, coming up to nine years ago, has been about looking at the past, going into the past, has been about looking at the past, going into the past, looking at why I get triggered at certain points, why I have certain behaviors, whether that be, you know, on my own or through some sort of therapy or whatever. And I've got to say these days, I feel so really quite calm and content with my life in a way that I didn't for much of my life. And so when I say no regrets,

I'm not saying it with this kind of thing that I'm only looking forward. No, I feel that it's because mostly, unless I'm kidding myself, that I have processed those regrets. So then my question to you is, because I've been really pondering this over the last few days, I've been really excited about talking to you. And I think, well, I totally buy the case that Dan is making, but regret seems to be a time-related phenomena, because let's say it's when you've not processed it. So it's stuck in your body. It's causing negativity. You're still thinking about it. It's making you tearful. You're stuck in your life because of it. And you're not looking at it, I think that's a huge problem.

But if you go into it, you make peace with it, you understand why you did what you did, and you then change going forwards, I feel that you no longer have that regret. What you're describing is the power of regret. I mean, you're describing how to use regret as a force for progress and for good and for an evolved, well-lived life. You're not ignoring the regret, you're actually taking it and using its power to instruct and to clarify. Now, the question, there's a metaphysical question of does by doing that, does that somehow extinguish the regret? I don't know. I actually don't think so, but that's not anything I want to litigate. What I want to do is have people do what you did, which is actually not say, oh, I never look backward.

I only look forward. I'm only positive because that's a sign of courage. What I want is then to follow the path of courage that you're laying out here and saying, you know what I'm going to do? What I want is then to follow the path of courage that you're laying out here and saying, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to look my regrets in the eye and I'm going to do something about them because I know if I treat them right, it's going to clarify what I value and it's going to instruct me how to do better in the future. That's the power of regret right there, what you're talking about.

No, I totally get that. And I guess it's also this view that all of our past, every single component of our past has made us who we are today. That's true. So, therefore. But you can still regret that. Here's the thing. To me, I can keep both these ideas in my head.

Let me give you a personal example of it. So, you mentioned the fact that I, years ago, said that I regret going to law school. All right. And I do. But I also met my wife in law school. So, if you gave me, if you, if the devil, if Satan came here today and said, I'm going to make you a pact, all right, you can go back in time and avoid going to law school. But the price you will pay for that is not meeting your wife.

I'm like, I'm good. I stick to what's happened. I'm stick to it because I'm actually, so at some level, I'm glad, but I still regret the choice because it's the choice itself that was a mistake. It's a choice itself where I made a decision without doing enough due diligence. I made the decision because I was conforming. Made a decision because everybody else was doing it. Made a decision because I was uncertain.

Made a decision because I wanted to do something nominally prestigious to fill the void of not knowing what I wanted to do. All right? That I regret. And so you can, you can say, you know what, I'm, I, I would never under any circumstances want to turn back the clock and not meet my wife. Yeah. But I can still regret the underlying decision because it was a bad decision. And by looking that decision in the eye, I can learn what matters to me. And in that case, what mattered to me is that I was over-indexing on conformity, I was over-indexing on security, and I was woefully,

woefully, woefully overconfident in what I knew about the world. Well, this is a really important point that I think about a lot. And you particularly, certainly you might see this in the educated middle classes. I've heard before in an interview that you've given that you were a middle class kid from middle America and you're not sure why you went to law school. And I kind of feel that there's many people of that kind of, let's say, upbringing in the UK, all over the world, who end up in these kind of jobs. I know this in medicine, the amount of doctors who are deeply unhappy with their jobs and their compensation for that is too much wine on a Friday and Saturday night to kind of numb the frustration because so many

people sleepwalk into their career choice bingo right it sounds like that potentially was you and then if we go back to autonomy mastery and purpose I feel, yeah, sleepwalking into your career choice. Well, there's no autonomy there. You're certainly probably not finding your purpose. No way. The purpose is in some ways is conformity. The purpose is not disturbing. And you're never going to get mastery. It's harder to get mastery. It's harder to get mastery because if you're not engaged with that. Right.

Yeah. I think this ability to hold these two conflicting things side by side is really important rather than saying all good or bad it's like no you know what yes it wasn't the right choice for my career but i met my wife there right right so there's so much in what you said there so one of the things is that our brains again our brains are amazing or you know that is our brains are amazing we can do counterfactual thinking that's requires a lot of dexterity can you explain counterfactual so we can envision things that run counter to the fact so we can conjure a world that didn't really happen okay okay so we're basically it's it's a form of storytelling so there are different kinds of counterfactuals that we can do we can do a downward counterfactuals that we can do. We can do a downward counterfactual. Imagine how things could have turned out worse, all right? That makes us feel better. That's an at least.

I made a mistake in my higher education, my graduate education path, not cataclysmic, but I made a mistake and I regret a higher education choice, but at least I met my wife, all right? That makes me feel better about the choice. It doesn't extinguish the regret, and it doesn't say, therefore, I have nothing to learn from that choice at all. It just balms that feeling a little bit. The thing about downward counterfactuals, at least, is that they make us feel better. But they don't, on their own, make us do any better. Upward counterfactuals, if only, make us feel worse, but they help us do better.

And that's the king. And the thing is, and what makes this complicated, not complicated, what makes this uncomfortable for people is that we want the instruction, we want the clarity, but we don't want the pain and discomfort. And I'm sorry, that's not the deal you're being offered. The deal you're being offered is you're going to have to take some of that discomfort because that discomfort is going to lead you into clarity and instruction. But you can't just have, you can't have one. It comes as part, it comes as part of the package. And there's a reason.

The thing is that if onlys make us do better, and regret is the ultimate if only, if only upward counterfactuals make us do better because they make us feel worse the feeling worse momentarily is central to it it acts as a spur to clarifying what we care about and doing things better in the future one other thing that i gotta get in here because you were talking about sleepwalking because it's so it's so important so let's go back to william j the father of modern psychology. I quote him in this book, his well-worn comment that what is thinking for? What is thinking for? Thinking is for doing, he says. Thinking is what do human beings think? We think because we have to do, right? So, the question then is what is feeling for? And I don't think we fully answered that

question. Some of us think feeling is for ignoring. Some of us think feeling is for feeling. My view is feeling is for thinking. Feeling is for thinking because thinking is for doing. And so if we channel our William James, feeling is for thinking. Feelings are signals. Feelings are data. Feelings are information. If we personify feelings, particularly negative feelings, a negative feeling is not some stranger that walking down the street that you never have to think about again. That's a bad idea. But it's also not a hanging judge passing final judgment on your worth as a human being. It's someone who's delivering a newspaper to your house saying, hey, there's some information here. You might want to take a look at it. That's what that is.

And so, William, feeling is for thinking because thinking is for doing as william james told us now one the reason i mentioned william james is your sleepwalking point william james said something that has haunted me my whole life and he said most of us go through life only half awake that has bugged me rung in, ever since I, when I read that, and I'm trying to remember what the, I can't remember what the specific essay was. When I read that, most of us go through life only half awake, it was like being jolted with electricity. It was like sticking my finger in a socket. I'm like, is that me? Am I going through life only half awake? And I think that living in fear of going through life only half awake is not necessarily living in fear.

Living with a consciousness that too many of us go through life only half awake is important. And I think that going through life only half awake can be the consequence of not reckoning with our negative emotions, particularly our most common negative emotion regret, not having enough autonomy and self-direction in our life, not making progress and achieving mastery and not having a purpose. One of the most important things I do on a daily basis to help me with mental well-being, with contentment, frankly, for my levels of happiness, is a daily practice of solitude. And I actually think solitude is very, very much underrated. I think it very much plays into what you've just said, because what you're saying is you've got to sit with that discomfort. You've got to listen to the signal that your emotion, that

your feeling, that potentially your regret is giving you, right? But it's so easy now. It's always been easy to distract ourselves. It's probably easier now than ever before, whether it's our phone or social media or whatever, you know, emails, we can always go outward and sort of basically not have to turn inwards. So therefore, we don't know what we're feeling. We've never spent time sitting with that feeling. So therefore, we can't process it. And, you know, I remember as a junior doctor, I remember being at the, I think it was in the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. as a junior doctor i remember being at the i think it was in the royal infirmary in edinburgh we got taught about early warning signs and i remember being really mesmerized as a kind of straight out of medical school that this idea that actually if we do certain observations

heart rate respiratory rate oxygen saturations at regular intervals and you can put them into different zones and you can predict with reasonable certainty who is going to end up in high dependency units or intensive care in four hours or five hours and by doing that we can take aversive action so they don't end up needing that high dependency or intensive care beds and I, and I've written about this in my new book, that I find daily practice of solitude for me allows me to tap into my own early warning signs, right? So, oh, is something bothering me? Did I do something that actually is gnawing away at me? Am I feeling a tension in my body in some way that actually, if I just keep distracting myself, I'm not aware of it? So, sometimes it can be simple like, oh, I've got tightness in my right

back. That generally happens when my stress load is mounting. By being aware of that, I can go, okay, maybe I need to ease off my work the next few days. Maybe I need to go to bed earlier for a few nights. Or maybe it's a thought, like in that time, if I journal, I'm like, oh man, that thing's really bothering me. For me, me I think and I've seen that with patients it's so helpful and I kind of feel regrets plays in here because if you're always so busy that you can never sit with your thoughts and your feelings and your emotions how on earth are you going to start processing it and we don't like to do that because it's slightly uncomfortable. Yeah. And this is the problem. That is, comfort is never, and I understand that, comfort is never the path to growth.

Comfort is never the path to progress. Now, extreme discomfort is not that either. Yeah. It's this kind of mild discomfort, this mild perturbation. We know this from physical exercise. Imagine if you did physical exercise in which there's no strain is not helpful. All right. The physical exercise is about bringing on some kind of desirable difficulty, bringing on some kind of exertion that actually wears you out a little bit. That's how you grow. That's how you get better.

The thing is, we don't do that with our emotions because no one ever tells us how. That's the problem. We almost need like a gymnasium for emotions, you know, to help us deal with that. And to some extent, you know, I never thought about it this way, is that to some extent therapists are like personal trainers. Yeah. For emotions. Now, the thing about it is, is that I think in some ways with negative emotions, we go these two different paths. We ignore them, which is dangerous.

But I think sometimes we get so captured by them that we inevitably medicalize them. And they don't necessarily need to be medicalized. In the same way that if we can avert diabetes in advance we don't have to treat diabetes medically we can actually avert it in the first place by treating it through behavior yeah 100% 110% agree with that and there's loads of science gabon matthews written a lot about this in one of his Matej wrote a lot about this. In one of his books, he wrote a lot about the research between holding onto negative emotions and not processing them. So, when we feel, you know, resentment and hostility and anger, and we don't do anything with them, we hold onto it,

and it is associated with higher risks of cancer, heart disease, autoimmune disease, risks of cancer, heart disease, autoimmune disease, you know, strokes, you know, it's really, really profound. So, actually, on the surface, I'll regret, you know, whatever. No, actually, this actually not dealing, not owning up to our negative emotions, not being honest with ourselves and not taking steps to actually move through them, yes, it affects you mentally, but it also affects you physically as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. And as I said, nobody teaches us how to do that. It might even be more true in America than here is that we are so obsessed and over-indexed on positivity. But that hurts people. It hurts people in the sense that if you have people who feel negative

emotions and they look around and think everybody else is feeling positive, that can be debilitating. But what you're seeing there is performative positivity. What you're seeing there are people essentially acting as their own PR agents and showing how wonderful their lives are when in fact they're as vulnerable and flawed and struggling as all of us. I think that's one of the real gifts of your new book to the world is that you're talking about it, you're sharing all of these stories that people have shared with you on that survey and you're making people feel less alone and go, oh, wow. Absolutely.

And for me, what I did as an experiment yesterday, I thought, oh, okay, I'm talking to Dan tomorrow about regrets and he's done this survey. So yeah, I'm just going to put it out on my own channels, you know, for people to share their regrets. And what was really interesting, I did it on Instagram stories and I did it on Twitter.

Okay. Now, of course, they're different audiences. Yeah. I did it on Instagram stories and I did it on Twitter. Now, of course, they're different audiences. On Instagram, I probably had over 200 replies in just a few hours, right? I printed off some of them here, which I want to go through with you. On Twitter, I didn't get a single reply.

Now, I've been thinking about this all morning. And on Instagram, the way I set it up on the poll, you are replying privately to me. So not everybody sees what your regret is. And on Twitter, it's all there in the public. Now, this is not a scientific experiment. There are different audiences. I have more people who follow me on Instagram than Twitter. So there's all kinds of reasons, but it made me think, is there something about that they can share it with me or with you on your survey anonymously, but people still feel slightly reticent about sharing it in public? Do you think there's something there? I think there is something there, although sharing it privately is sometimes the first step to sharing it publicly. My survey was completely anonymous.

Yeah. It was totally anonymous. But here's the thing that's surprising is that I gave people the option of, I said, your survey is anonymous. All I wanted was the location, the gender identity, and the age. But otherwise, I had no idea who they were. However, I said, if you would like to be contacted for a follow-up interview you please you leave your email address and we had more people than i would have expected willing to to offer up their email address now it wasn't the majority

anywhere close but two out of three people remained anonymous but one out of three is a decent number of people who were willing to to that. And what's interesting about this is that the willingness of people to share their regret with a complete stranger is itself telling. The volume that you are getting, the volume that I were getting is telling. What it says is that there's this pent up demand for people who want to talk about it. Why? Because it's an unburdening and very important. It's a way to make sense of it. It is a part of the essential process of dealing with these negative emotions, of sitting with it, whether it's, you know, of having that moment of discomfort. And instead of fleeing from it by scrolling down your phone as like a digital narcotic to relieve a little bit of that psychic discomfort. You actually sit with it and recognize that discomfort is part of life

and discomfort is a desirable part of life. It's the same thing wrong. Think about something like stress, chronic stress, terrible for you. Acute stress, occasionally, not that bad. Gets you moving, gets you to do things, motivates you. Imagine if we never felt any kind of stress. We would never get anything done. Imagine if we never felt any kind of fear. Imagine if we just eliminated other negative emotions. We eliminate the negative emotion of fear. All right. BG, I wonder if I should cross the street in front of Rangan's house when all this traffic is going. Well, I'm not scared of anything. All right. Imagine if we didn't experience grief. Imagine if you didn't experience grief at the loss of your father. That would be horrible because your experience of grief is an expression of love. The reason you grieve is because you love. And so, again, negative emotions, listen, you know this. I just want to make sure it's clear. We want positive emotions. We want a lot of positive emotions. Positive emotions are great. You should have more positive emotions than negative emotions, but negative emotions are part of our lives and they are useful if they don't terrify us and mortify us and make us dive under the couch. If we look at them like grownups, look them in the eye and say, wow, I'm scared right now.

What is this telling me? I feel grief right now. What is this telling me? Or the granddaddy of all these negative emotions, regret. Wow, I'm experiencing regret right now? What is this telling me? Or the granddaddy of all these negative emotions, regret. Wow, I'm experiencing regret right now. What is this telling me about what I value? What is this telling me about what I should do next? Yes, about paying attention to the signals. And then I guess, like with stress, it's trying to find that sweet spot. Exactly.

You're looking for the sweet spot. You don't want the negative emotions to weigh you down. So, you're stuck in your bed all day. You can't move. You're paralyzed. You don't know what to do, but you don't also want to pretend that actually they're not there. And, you know, for me, when I hear that people shared with you anonymously, at least initially, like it makes me think of something that's become really, really clear to me in my clinical practice is that awareness is the first step in any significant change. I know that sounds really obvious, but actually I just don't feel like sometimes people say, okay, I'm aware now, what do I do? It's okay. Well, A, I want to get to you. I want to talk to you about what we do with that regret. And there's loads of practical exercises in the book that I think will help people. But I think we sometimes undervalue even just that first step of awareness, right? So, I think many people who reply to you, now that I'm thinking about it,

the hundreds who've replied to me on Instagram, I would imagine since sending that little message, I imagine they're thinking about it today. Absolutely right. Right? There's no question about it. Exactly. So, maybe they were getting on with their life and then they suddenly saw this question in my Insta stories and they're like, oh man, and let me read you some of these. Yeah, I'd love to hear this. I'd love to hear this. Okay, so, regrets that I found.

Okay, so this is not part of your regret survey. No, no, no. This is just a non-scientific experiment. Thinking that I always need a plan for life. Interesting. Leaving my first husband. Oh. Not taking opportunities that were in front of me because I felt afraid.

Boldness, regret? Moving school in the middle of my A-levels. Oh, that's interesting. I wonder whether that's a regret or whether that's a disappointment. Because, well, go ahead, yeah. Not sending my toxic toxic emotionally abusive ex on his way earlier what a waste of three years yeah where would you put that one oh i think that's a version of a connection regret it's a bad it's a bad connection it's not about reaching

out but it's about actually recognizing that connection belonging and love is essential and that you were being betrayed on that i find the language used in that quite telling as well actually you know not sending my toxic emotionally abusive ex on his way earlier what a waste of three years and of course it's just you know you'd love to speak to someone and understand it a bit more but on first impression that would indicate to me that that person hasn't or maybe potentially hasn't moved on from the regrets it's still locked in that what a waste of three years that kind of that's certainly what it says to me i could be wrong of course i don't think that that person has processed it a way to do that is to look back on who you were at that moment do a post-mortem on

the decision itself yeah what was wrong did i not know myself well enough was i too rash um this is self-compassion isn't it well in some ways it's it's like potentially forgiving yourself for what you perceive yourself to have done let's say wrong that's important you've got to forgive yourself okay so let's let's talk about self-compassion. I like this. Can I look at this one again? Yeah, please. So she was saying, not sending my toxic, emotionally abusive ex on his way earlier, what a waste of three years. Okay, so this is a really interesting one for self-compassion. Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my

very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health.

And together, we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life. And I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour. I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits

and improve our relationships. There are, of course, many different ways to journal and as with most things, it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three-question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel.

Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. What she said to you is probably a somewhat sanitized version of what she's saying to herself. If you think about her self-talk, she's probably saying, I'm an idiot. I've wasted three years. What a fool.

I'm such a moron. What is wrong with me? All right. She's probably, when it went through the public translation of it or the the the conveyance to somebody else it probably was de-harshified all right okay so what we see is that when we talk to ourselves we are cruel that if we if we if you were to somehow get into my brain the language center of my brain and put like an amplifier to amplify it out into the world so that people could hear myself talk you would think i was an abusive nut the way i treat myself all right that's a bad that's really bad though yeah so what self

compassion says is don't do that instead treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt so what she's saying here if that's what she's if that's actually a milder version of what she's saying to herself, she's treating herself with contempt rather than with kindness. Don't do that. Treat yourself with kindness. That's what self-compassion teaches us. Recognize that your mistakes are part of the human condition. And there are so many regrets like this. Yeah. So many regrets. Like, I mean, I'm sorry, whatever this person is. You're not that special. Like, a lot of people have this regret. It's not like you're the only person who's made this

mistake. And then also recognize that it's just a moment in your life. So, I don't know how old this person is, but it's a moment in your life, doesn't fully define your life. And when you do that, you can begin the sense-making process. You can treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt, recognize that it's part of the human condition and then recognize that it's a moment in your life rather than the full definition of your life. Some of the regrets are things that people potentially can't do anything about because that situation has now changed, right?

And so the last one I wrote down, and this one definitely connected with me deeply. changed right and so the last one i wrote down and this one definitely connected with me deeply this one is not expressing my gratitude to my father before he passed away first of all i'd love you to explain which of the four core regrets might that fall into and it connects with me not because i feel the same myself. I don't actually. One of the things I do not regret in life is that pretty much all my adult life until I was in my early mid-30s was spent caring for dad. That's why I moved back here. You know, I didn't do a lot of the things that all my buddies were doing because I actually was a carer. And now that dad's not here, I'm glad I spent so much time with him.

not here. I'm glad I spent so much time with him. But what it has done, and again, I'm probably not looking at it through a lens of regret, more as a teacher to me, is there's things that I wish I could have asked dad about his life story. You know, as I get, you know, I'm sure you're a little bit older than me, but as a parent, you know, as your kids go through certain milestones, you think, oh man, you think back to what your parents might have been thinking when you were going through them. And I think, wow, I'd love to have spoken to dad about this. So, what I am doing is I'm talking to my mum about all of this stuff. Perfect. That's it. Do you know what I mean? So, I've learned from it and I'm changing it. But what can people do? What kind of regret is that?

So, that is a classic. It's not expressing my gratitude to my father before he passed away. That is a classic connection regret because it expressing my gratitude to my father before he passed away. That is a classic connection regret. Because it's basically a regret about not reaching out. Did we cover connection regrets? Oh, we didn't do that one yet. Yeah, let's see. That's the fourth one. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

No, no. So, this is a perfect segue in here. Very artfully done. It's a connection regret. Connection regrets are about relationships. Yeah. And they're about relationships that have come apart, usually through some kind of drift. And this is a classic example of that.

What typically happens if relationships drift apart, and what's interesting, these relationships are usually not romantic relationships. The relationships like this one here, the relationships, parents and children, children and parents, siblings, other relatives, friends, colleagues. What happens is that the relationships drift apart. This person is not suggesting any kind of massive rift between her and her father. It's more of a drift, which is the classic thing that happens in a lot of these relationships. The way that these relationships sometimes come apart is not very dramatic. And so, what happens is people get to the juncture, okay? Regrets begin at a juncture. Should I reach out? Should I not reach out? Should I express my gratitude in the form of

reaching out? Should I not? And she's going to say, or he is going to say, you know what? It's going to be kind of awkward. If I just like say, just one day walk up to my father and say, oh, dad, I love you and I'm so grateful for everything you've done. That's going to be so awkward for me. It's going to be so awkward for me to say something like that. And you know what? He's not going to really care one way or another. He's going to find it a little creepy. And so, we don't do it. And so, more time goes on. And then in this case, so much time goes on that you don't have a chance. And here's where we're wrong. It's not awkward. It's way less awkward than we think we so over predict our feelings of awkwardness the second is that there is a form of pluralistic ignorance here in that

there's no question that her father would have said well very little question if her father would have loved to hear that i can't imagine a father who wouldn't want to hear that and so we think it's going to be awkward and we think the other side is not going to care. And the answer is that it's very rarely awkward and the other side always cares. So, for me, as a personal lesson from this material, as someone who hasn't been in his life that great about reaching out, is that if you're at a juncture in your life and you're wondering, should I reach out or should I not reach out? Should I express my gratitude or should I not express my gratitude? Should I say something or should I not say something?

If you've reached that juncture, you've answered the question. Always reach out. Always reach out. What a powerful, powerful message. We can even rhyme it to make it even stickier. When in doubt, reach out. Love it. Love it.

Definitely from America. Coming in with this punchy. I love it. I love it. But you know, I'm really hoping, Dan, that there's a world, right, with a lot of negativity going on at the moment. And I'm hoping that this podcast, this conversation is going to spread a bit of love. I hope so. Around the world. And I'm hoping everyone who listens or watches, literally now take a break or at the end of the conversation, do you know what? Reach out to someone, maybe tell your mom or your dad how much you value them. Wouldn't that be amazing? That would be, that would be, honestly, I'm not joking. That would be extraordinary. Like that would, that would keep, if people actually did that, that might keep me in the writing business

for a couple more weeks. But I think that that's the lesson. And that's the lesson for me. And we were talking before about how if you do certain professions for long enough, you know, you've written a few books, and I've written a few books, but the person who's writing them is different. The person who started writing this book about regret is different from the person you're talking to now, because this person you're talking to now has been affected by the work that i've done and this is one area where it's absolutely true you always reach out you always reach out and give you another always go to the funeral always go to a funeral this has a personal relevance for you doesn't it oh it does yeah yeah but but i but it's also it's also what these people told me if i just go into the database and

search the word funeral what you will see is you'll see a lot of people who regret missing funerals of people they cared about. And I did that. A few years ago, I had a friend who I worked with, older than I. He died. It was sad. I wasn't super close with him, but I was friendly with him. And he had a funeral, and I was going to go. And I was just really busy that and, and I was going to go and I was just really busy

that day and I didn't go. It's, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of, I'm almost to the point on this one where I'm risk tipping from regret to shame. Um, because, um, I feel kind of ashamed of myself for that. And, uh, this, this, and cause I'm one reason, a reason I'm ashamed is that a, I didn't do it. And B like the funeral was like walking distance from my house and i was like you know too quote unquote busy i can't undo that i can't make amends but you can change going forward absolutely absolutely and that's again a key theme right it's like you can't do that but you can't change always yeah so always reach out always go to the funeral. The other thing, okay, so we can just keep dispensing. We can be a vending machine for quick life advice here. I love it.

Like, here's the thing. Honestly, I really believe this. If there is somebody who you're interested in romantically, just ask the person out. Seriously. The worst thing that can happen is the person's going to say no. They might say no. They might say no, but at least you extinguish the what if. There are too many people here who haven't stepped up. I heard your talk from a couple of nights ago, and I think you mentioned, was it a Brian who got on a train once and did it? Can you tell that story? Oh my gosh. Okay. So, that's an interesting bonus. There's this guy, it's an American guy, his name is Bruce. One of the very few people who I wrote about in this book who didn't want me to use their full name. So, which suggests that not only do people want to talk about it, but not everybody needs to do things anonymously. That once they get past that initial discomfort, they're willing to be more public with it. But Bruce was an American guy. He's in his

early 60s now. He graduated from university in the States in the early 1980s. He goes to Europe to work on a farm in Sweden. And final week there, he's traveling around Europe and he's on this train. There's a seat open next to him on the train. And this woman sits down next to him about his age. She's Belgian. She speaks English. So they're talking, riding the train, just chit-chatting. But then they start having this kind of connection where they're laughing, and then they're playing word games on paper, and then they're, like, leaning into each other,

and then they're holding hands. You know, and Bruce is like, oh my god, this is like a movie. It's like this instant sort of like, almost feelings of, I don't want to overstate it, but feelings of being in love, almost, that happen instantly. And they're rumbling along, she's an au pair working in France.

And she's going back to visit her parents in Belgium for the weekend. And the train finally gets to Belgium and somewhere in Belgium, wherever she is. And she says, this is my stop. I have to get off. And he's like, I'll come with you. And she says, my father would kill me. I can't bring you home. And so he doesn't know what to do.

He's completely stymied. And he, again, this is before cell phones, you know. And so, he doesn't, he can't say, okay, here's my text. Just text me. He takes a piece of paper and he writes his mother's postal address on a piece of paper. His mother lives in Texas. Postal address on a piece of paper. Rips this piece of paper. Hands it to texas postal address on a piece of paper rips this piece of paper hands it to her they kiss she exits and then 40 years later bruce fills out the world

regret survey and says i'd always wish i stepped off the train and so i think there are a lot of lessons in bruce's story yeah but there is a meta lesson which is step off the train what people what what people regret we were talking about this. What people regret, we were talking about this earlier, what people regret, what they didn't do, particularly when it comes to boldness. And let's go back to this point

about outcomes with Bruce. Bruce, who I talked to, he's a lovely guy. And I talked to him, interviewed him several times just to get the full texture of his story. And what Bruce, Bruce never once said in all these conversations, if I had stepped off the train, I would have this blissful life. He never said that. He didn't conjure some alternative life that he could have led had he stepped off the train. It was at that moment, the 22 or 23 year old Bruce had a chance to do

something that was bold, that would have led to growth, that was an expression of who he was, and he didn't do it. And 40 years later, 62 year old Bruce is still bugged by that. And that tells us something. Step off the train. Yeah. I mean, I don't know the state of Bruce's life today, if he's married, if he's in a relationship. He is married. Yeah, he's married. Yeah.

But what's interesting for me is that that stayed with him for 40 years. For me, that is like you're holding that in your body. Emotionally, physically, you're holding on to that. And actually, that is having an impact in some way, unless you are open with it. And this speaks to the wider point that sometimes we try and shut out and we pretend this stuff isn't happening. And, you know, another big theme I get from your book is honesty. Be honest with yourself. Like if you're feeling it, okay, even if you don't know what to do with it yet,

be honest, write it down, do something. Well, absolutely. But writing it down is actually powerful for other reasons. Writing it down or even talking about it is one of the most important things that we can do with our regrets for a whole host of reasons. One of them is this honesty. It's a form of self-confrontation. But the other thing about it, which I found the research quite fascinating is this, is that when we experience, so emotions almost by their nature are abstract, right? So, something like love or joy, it's an abstraction, right? You could give me the chemical properties for the caffeine in here, right? We can make sense of what caffeine is in this coffee, right? We can draw the molecular structure of caffeine and identify it perfectly,

right? But there's no molecular structure of joy or bliss or love or anything like that, okay? It's abstract. Same thing with fear and regret and so forth. So, emotions are abstract. That's what makes positive emotions so great is that they're abstract. They're vaporous. It's like you're in a fog of joy. But it's also what makes negative emotions so great is that they're abstract, they're vaporous. It's like you're in a fog of joy. But it's also what makes negative emotions so menacing because they're amorphous. And so, writing it down, talking about it, writing about it converts that abstraction into words. Words are concrete. Things that are concrete are less fearsome. And that's an essential part of the sense-making process.

I mean, going back to the start of our conversation, your daily progress report, right? That's the same thing. You're writing. Yeah. You're writing it down. Instead of it just being out there, did I have a good day?

Did I have a bad day? How's life going? Actually, no. These are three things where I made progress. Right, exactly. It makes it real. Exactly. The other thing, Dan, that comes to me

as I look through these responses people have given. Over certain topics, you have regrets on both sides, right? So, there's a lot of people who've said, not leaving a toxic relationship early and not leaving my husband, not breaking up early, staying too long. But there's one here at the top of the page, which is, I regret leaving my first husband, right? So, some people regret staying too long. Some people leave, they think there's something better out on the other side of like, man, I wish I'd never done that. So I find that fascinating.

But then I also, I thought, I want to talk to you about sexual regrets. And the reason is that, well, the reason is, is it comes up a lot. It's a reader's favorite footnote in this book. Really? Yeah. Well, that a lot of people are, that I've read from your survey that whether it's you putting on Twitter or, or here in the book is I regret cheating on my partner. Oh, okay. That, that sexual regret. Oh yeah. I mean, you can talk about the other one in a minute if you want, because I don't know what that is. Because I'm not sure whether the, I'm not sure

whether the, the infidelity is a sexual regret. I actually think it's a betrayal of trust. Yeah. Well, actually, this is where I was going. So, most of the ones I've read are saying, I wish I hadn't cheated. What was I thinking? It wasn't worth, as you say, the betrayal of trust that came. I was weak in that moment. I've read loads of those. But there's one here on, I think, page 188 of your book, year old female from michigan oh i regret not being more sexually active right and i thought god that's fascinating yeah right the majority of the regrets i'm reading is saying i wish i hadn't cheated yeah and of course i don't know if she's single right exactly exactly being sexually active and cheating on your spouse are two different things. Yeah, so, I mean, on the face of it, where do those two regrets fit in?

You mentioned that cheating one is a... It's a moral regret. It's a moral regret. Yeah. Okay. You're betraying a trust, yeah. And I guess not being more sexually active, is that a boldness? It might be boldness.

It might be boldness. Not every single regret. I mean, I got, you know, 19,000 of these things. Not every single one fits perfectly in each of the in each of the in each of the categories but that strikes me as a that's a very interesting one that's why i put it in there because it's a 71 year old woman who regrets not being more sexually active so it sounds like a boldness regret but also you got to figure a 71 year old woman was born in 1951. All right. And so we don't know what her family background was, but it could have been the kind of thing where she was raised in a

extremely religious household. And so she's 18 years old and it's 1969. And she's in a community that is missing out on the whole sexual revolution. And, you know, and the reason I raise that is that a lot of times with certain kinds of regrets, we ascribe too much agency to ourselves. That is, the context matters also. Let me give you an example. You often see this with foundation regrets, but this is an example where it might just be that the regret that she wasn't sexually active could have been a reflection of her time or her circumstance and her environment rather than the choices that she made. I don't know. I don't know enough about her to do that. But you see this, but you have to factor that in with things like, let's say that someone is 40 years old and says, I regret that I haven't saved any money. And we find out that that person was

the first person in their family to go to university. And that person was maybe supporting their parents or supporting siblings or something like that. That's not totally on them that they haven't saved money. Like that's, you know, that's context and situation and environment. So, I probably would have contacted her. My guess is that she didn't leave her email address. Because that's a super interesting one. Yeah, for sure.

There was another woman. She didn't leave it either, but i wanted to use this one she said she i think about the same age she says her regret was not marrying joe schmidt like she named the guy what if joe's listening to this right now joe yeah well what happened with okay so so just to follow up this not to not to spoil the plot in any of this, but what happened with Bruce, and one of the things that's so interesting and I think very revelatory is that, so I interviewed all these people about their regrets. And what was both revelatory and annoying was that in response to our conversations, they started changing their behavior. Yeah, there you go. So with Bruce, it's like, okay, I got this incredible story about this guy who didn't get off the train. And he's a very compelling character because he's such a nice guy.

And he's married, but he's unhappily married. And there's something about this that's been sticking with him for 40 years. And he hasn't done anything about it. And then, after a conversation, he decides to do something about it. So he starts. Did he find her? To my knowledge, he hasn't found her yet, but he started posting on like Craigslist misconnections. Yeah. Like he started taking and said that, you know, there's another woman in the book who had this friendship that had

drifted apart and she didn't want to reach out to her friend. And the reason she didn't want to reach out to her friend was that she thought it was going to be, her words, that her friend would find it creepy if she reached out after her friend was that she thought it was going to be her words that her friend would find it creepy if she reached out after 25 years and she thought it was going to be really kind of awkward and i didn't reach out and then so i write this i write this part of the book and then you know maybe a month later i get an email guess what i did and i'm like no you didn't please i have to rewrite it now um so uh so that happened with bruce it happened with some of the other characters, which suggests that when people start actually confronting these things, they change their behavior.

But to my knowledge, Bruce has not found this woman. Do we know her name? We do know her name. Let's put it out there. Let's find her. Yeah. Actually, that's a great point. I assume she's still in Europe, and this is a popular podcast in Europe.

So if your name is Sandra and you're Belgian and you worked as an au pair in France in the early 1980s, and one evening we're on a train with an American guy named Bruce holding hands and playing word puzzles, he's looking for you. He lives in Spokane, Washington. He's been thinking about you for 40 years. He's looking for you. in Spokane, Washington. He's been thinking about you for 40 years.

He's looking for you. Go to my website, danpink.com and go to the contact form and email me and we can make this. Oh, man. This would make my year,

my decade if this happens. Can you imagine? But if there is a reunion, we're going to bring all these cameras we have here. Yeah, we're doing it. We're going to. You and I.

It's our new show. We're going to pitch this as a show. Reunions. Reunions with rongan and dan oh man i think that's got a punch to it yeah it's got some punch to it yeah when i when i mentioned sexual regrets before your mind went to a different kind of regret yeah apparently a lot of your readers are super interested yeah unsurprisingly so what did you well i didn't write i didn't write much about it but there's a footnote in here that people are like why'd you put that in a footnote? Because it's so interesting. It had to do with, I had to do with sexual, it had to do with. Sorry, I have all the scribbles. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a book well read. I can't make any claims about gender differences based on the qualitative portion, the story portion of the research. But on the quantitative portion, the public opinion poll, I was able to crunch the numbers and see some mild gender differences. Men tend to have more regrets about careers, women more regrets about family, but not by a wide margin. That's actually not even that interesting, I think. But there's other research, not mine, that shows a gender difference in regret in that men tend to regret the people they didn't sleep with and women tend to regret the people they did sleep with. I'm oversimplifying, but not by much. That is so interesting, isn't it? Yeah, I should have. Yeah. So, that's what everybody said. And I didn't make a big deal of it. And I put it in a footnote um i put it

in a footnote that's your next book deal surely you think i think that's a global bestseller i have to say you know like the marketer in me sort of blew it by by um there it is i think i see it right here yeah here it is uh for those of you those of you reading along at home it's on page it's on page 155 uh footnote on page 155 yeah doing that difference but the marketer in me sort of blew it because i should have had a chapter called sexual regrets actually i should have called the book that sexual regrets how looking backward moves you forward um to start bringing this to a close you've very powerfully made the case for regrets.

Obviously, we've spoken about disclosure, awareness being the first step in a change. But for people who this is really connected with and they're like, man, you know what? I've got some regrets in my life. Maybe even hearing these other regrets from other people has brought up for them. up for them, what kind of advice would you give them as to how they can, you know, start that process of dealing with it, processing it, and then ultimately moving on from it? Sure. So, as we were talking about, start with self-compassion, treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Very important.

Treat yourself with the same kindness you treat somebody else. Recognize that your missteps are just like anybody else's. Disclosure, that sense-making process, that writing about it, talking about it is extremely important. I think the first step, doing it privately as people did on your Instagram feed, but don't discount disclosing it publicly because we make another error here in that we think that when we disclose our vulnerabilities, people think less of us. They think more of us. Not in every time, but often. Then the final step here, and this is the key, you have to extract a lesson from it. So, if you treat yourself with kindness and you do the sense-making, you got to find a lesson. And the thing is, is that we're terrible problem solvers

when it comes to our own problems. So, what you want to do is you want to do self-distancing. And there are all kinds of techniques for self-distancing to extract the lesson from. You can talk to yourself in the third person. So, instead of saying, what should I do? Say, what should Dan do? You can do things like a great decision-making tool, which is ask yourself, what do I tell my best friend to do? So, let's take one of these over here. Not traveling when I had more time before kids. Let's say that's a regret. Okay. So, if your best friend came to you with that regret, what would you tell him or her to do? What I would tell them, so this person probably doesn't know what to do. He or she is stymied. But if I were to ask him or her, what would you tell your best friend to do?

They would probably say, oh, well, I would tell my best friend to look for a three-day weekend where you can go on a trip in the next couple of months okay yeah you know and it's like oh okay but you don't think about that for yourself so ask yourself what would you tell your best friend to do and then I think my final the final thing I think it's a really powerful technique, is to use our incredible abilities of time travel to reach out and talk to the you of 10 years from now. The you of 10 years from now knows what's best. And we can make, based on this research, we can make reasonable predictions about what the you of 10 years from now is going to care about. So let's think about it. The you of 10 years from now is not going to care about whether you wore a black t-shirt today or a green t-shirt today. Absolutely not. The you of 10 years from now is not going to care what you had for lunch today.

But what the you of 10 years from now is going to care about is did you reach out when you had a chance? You had a relationship and it drifted apart. Did you reach out? Because in 10 years, it might be too late. The you of 10 years from now is going to care, did you do the right thing? The you of 10 years from now is going to say, did I act boldly when I had the chance? And so, this is the way that actually these four regrets give us some clarity about the future. And so, that's another way to make sense of our regrets is that if we're unsure what to do make a phone call to the view of 2032 because he or she knows

what to do they we we can we can make a very strong prediction what that you have 2032 is going to care about and it's not very much yeah it's stability and love and boldness and morality i love that part of the end of the book where you talk about these anticipation regrets and i thought it was just a beautiful way of using regrets from the past as a way to inform what you do in the present right but it's also about using that mental time travel of going to the future and going actually i'm not going to care about this. And I think a lot about Bronnie Kerr's five regrets of the dying. You know, palliative care nurse spends lots of time caring for people at the end of their life. Five common regrets, you know,

things like, I wish I'd worked less. I wish I spent more time with my friends and family. I wish I'd led my life, not someone else's life. That makes me think of your boldness. Absolutely. You know, I have this, if I might try it on you now, if you're open to it, there's a, I've tried it on a few guests recently and so far it's gone pretty well, but there's an exercise. Well, that's going to come to a halt right now. There's an exercise in my next book. I guess it's a little bit related to this. And I do want to finish off talking about regret and happiness and what it can teach us about happiness because I think there's a real there's quite a bit of crossover in certain areas which which I find absolutely fascinating but

you know I think sometimes we confuse success and happiness in life yeah and it's a common thing particularly in the west and that's a good point and it's a very simple exercise. It's basically, the first part of it is, what are three things that you could do this week that you think would truly make you happy? Such an interesting, three things that I could do this week to really make myself happy. Or even say last week when you were at home, because obviously I appreciate you on a book tour at the moment in a foreign country.

Oh yeah, because if it was this week i would say the first thing that would make me happy would be coming on your podcast that would obviously be number one um let's say next week that's that's a that's a brilliant question i would say um yeah i think i know i mean one of them would be um talk to my kids because my kids are out of the house now and so i don't see them every day so talk to my kids because my kids are out of the house now and so I don't see them every day. So talk to my kids, no question about that. Second one would be, maybe I'm nuts, but exercise because exercise always makes me happy. And the third would be to create something. I don't even know what it is. Just to create something that the world didn't know it was missing this week,

but that is my unique contribution to the world didn't know it was missing this week, but that is my unique contribution to the world. Now, I love that. The second part of the exercise is imagine now you're on your deathbed, looking back, and this really fits in with what we've just been talking about, anticipation and regret, which is why I'm bringing it up here. You're on your deathbed, looking back on your life, what are three things you will want to have done? are three things you will want to have done? I mean, I think it would be knowing that I left the world and there were people who I loved and who loved me. I think that's the most important thing. And I think that's a small group of people, a very, very small group of people. And I think that's the most important thing. To me, it's horrifying to think about breathing my final breath and thinking there's no one here who loves me and there's no one I love.

That is a chilling concept to me. So that would be the first thing. Second thing would be, did I make some kind of contribution to the world? And I'm not saying solving the climate crisis or anything like that. I'm just like, is the world slightly better for my being here even on the margins even a peppercorn better because of my being here and i might not even need a third yeah if i have those two but i mean if it was a third i would say you know what i actually learned something like at each stage of my life, I became smarter and better and more informed and more creative because I recognized that that was a central part of healthy living.

But that's totally the bronze medalist. The top two are did I have people who love me and who i loved and did i make even a tiny modest contribution to the world and then the next part really which and this really doesn't surprise me at all is to look at those two answers and go are they aligned oh right and immediately as you were saying your first three i'm like this guy of course having read having sold millions of books all over the world, talking about human behavior. Of course, you understand human behavior. You understand what's important. And, you know, that whole thing, you know, spending time talking to your kids.

Well, that, if you could do that next week and you do that week after week, then yeah, at the end of your life on your deathbed, you will have met that first most important one about spending time with loved ones, having people who care about you, right? One of the ones that you want to do each week is, can I create something? Something that the world maybe doesn't know it needs and will some way make a difference. That is what you also want to have done at the end of your life, made a contribution, right? And I don't think anyone can argue that you haven't already done that in bucket loads with all the books, all the impact you've had. So for some people though, they do that and they go, oh, there's a pretty big mismatch here. There's a mismatch here for what I know I'm going to want on my deathbeds

to what I'm doing. And often that comes to work or things like, you know, oh my dad, I will want to have spent a lot of time with my family and friends. And then they realize they're working way too hard. They've never had time for their friends. They have a connection regret as it, as you know, through your lens, do you know? And I, and I find, I put this out on Instagram a few days ago and I've had such wonderful responses. Are people aligned or misaligned or all over the place? Some people are saying, I'm delighted that I'm aligned. Other people are saying, oh wow, I need to take a cold hard look at my life. These things are completely different. And again, it's not about beating ourselves up. It's about exercising a bit of

self-compassion and going, oh man, at least I know now. At least I brought some intention to it that I can now start to make small changes. I'd have to have a life over, but maybe it's a couple more dinners with my wife and kids this week and not working through. Do you know what I mean? But let me, let me, let's, we're playing poker. I'm going to see you and raise you. All right. Okay. I'm going to see you and raise you the notion of courage. All right. And I think that in some ways, a lot of what we're doing externally is performative courage. And I think what really is courage is doing that exercise. It takes courage to do that exercise because you have to stare your imperfections and your reality in the eye.

And you can't sanitize it on social media. You can't balm it with a few glasses of wine you have to actually confront it and and confrontation is inherently uncomfortable but we can push past the we can push past the discomfort and i and i really think that so much of our lives and it's interesting because I might feel this, I think I believe this more deeply because of our conversation, is that so much of our lives are spent avoiding discomfort when maybe what we should be doing is actually welcoming discomfort more affirmatively. That's what I'm trying to do with regret. But I think in general, too much of our lives are spent trying to bypass discomfort rather than just simply recognizing that in a more like almost like Zen-like state, hey, discomfort

is part of the human condition. Let me welcome it into my life because the more I do that, the less likely I'm going to be to have that discomfort metastasize into something that's destructive. Super, super powerful, Dan. I think, you know, huge fan of your books. Thank you. Another classic, people are going to love it. This podcast is called Feel Better Live More. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of life. more. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of life. You have studied human behavior. You've written so many books on different aspects of human behavior. Putting it all together now for people who are listening, people who are watching,

how can they feel better and get more out of their lives? Oh my gosh. It's a big question. Yeah. So I can speak for my own life, which is I care way less about what other people think than you do. Because the dirty little secret, because I know what other people think of me. And you know what? They're not thinking of me.

They're thinking about themselves. They couldn't give two wits about me. All right. So get out of that narcissism and stop caring what other people think of you because they're not thinking about you. Once you do that, you have a sense of liberation. For me, there was. So stop thinking about what other people care about you.

I'm a firm believer that showing up is much more important than having talent. Just show up and do your, if you want to get stuff done, if you want to make a contribution to the world, show up and do your work, do it the next day, do it the next day, do it the next day, do it the next day. Persistence trumps talent. I believe that very firmly. I also believe that you are better off in every dimension of your life if you begin from a position of generosity, not from a position of sort of personal scarcity, but of a position of personal generosity. That generousness is healthy, you feel better, but it's actually a surprisingly effective professional tool as well. That's not why you do it, but it has that knock-on

effect. So begin with generosity. I'll give you one more. I'll give you two more. One more, it would be maybe have a bias for action. And the reason for that is that sometimes we have, one way I look at things is that is almost like an economist, which is like, what do we value? What's the proper price on things? Okay. I think we value planning too much and action too little. And one of the things that I've learned is that action is a form of learning. That sometimes instead of planning and then deciding to act, just try stuff and learn from that. And then finally is your mileage may vary.

Be generously skeptical with advice from people like me. Dan, it's been such a joy talking to you. I've really enjoyed it. And I appreciate the coffee too. My pleasure. We can make another one now if you want. But I really appreciate all the work that you've done. Thank you.

I appreciate the new book. I appreciate the old books and i honestly appreciate on a very short trip to the uk you've taken time to come up north to the studio i think the conversation was better because of it totally and i look forward to the next time we get together thank you thanks for having me thank you really hope you enjoyed that conversation as always do think about one thing that you can take away and start applying into your own life thank you so much for listening have a wonderful week and always remember you are the architect of your own health making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.