Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - How to Harness the POWER of Regret, to Move Forward | Daniel Pink

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

This week’s conversation is with Daniel Pink, the author of New York Times bestsellers A Whole New Mind, Drive, To Sell Is Human, and When. His books have sold millions of copies, been translated into forty-two languages, and have helped readers and organizations around the world rethink how they live and operate.Daniel received a BA from Northwestern University, where he was a Truman Scholar and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a JD from Yale Law School. He has also received honorary doctorates from Georgetown University, the Pratt Institute, the Ringling College of Art and Design, the University of Indianapolis, and Westfield State University.And Daniel has a new book out - The Power of Regret: How Looking Backwards Moves Us - about the transforming power of our least understood yet potentially most valuable emotion: regret. In writing this book, Daniel spent three years examining decades of research and analyzing his own study consisting of over 16,000 individual responses on the science of regret.Dan is the real deal, he BRINGS it during this conversation, and I can’t wait for you to learn from his insights. You won’t “regret” it._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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like anything systematic, we begin to turn it into a habit. We begin to make it less effortful. And when it becomes less effortful, then we're able to take this sting of regret and just naturally turn it into something positive and forward-looking. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I am Dr. Michael Gervais.

And in this podcast, in these conversations, we learn from people who challenge the edges and the reaches of the human experience in business and sport and science in life. We pull back the curtain to explore how they have committed to mastering both their craft and their minds in an effort to express their potential. And in doing so, when we understand how they work, we can begin to scaffold how we might be able to work better. And in some respects, they might challenge our first principles.

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cookie dough. And a few of our teammates here at Finding Mastery have been loving the fudge brownie and peanut butter. I know Stuart, you're still listening here. So getting enough protein matters, and that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus, recovery, for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value, and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Okay. This week's conversation is with Daniel Pink, the author of New York Times bestsellers, A Whole New Mind, Drive, To Sell

as Human, and then the book When. So his books have sold millions of copies and been translated into over 42 languages and literally have helped readers and organizations around the planet rethink how they live and how they operate. And so Daniel has a new book out, The Power of Regret, How Looking Backwards Moves Us. It's about the transforming power of our least understood, yet potentially one of the most valuable emotions, regret. In writing this book, he spent three years examining decades of research and then analyzing his own research,

consisting over 16,000 individuals and their responses to have a better understanding of the science of regret. So Dan is the real deal. You'll get a feel for him. He brings it in this conversation. And I can't wait for you to learn from his insights. And pun intended, this is not one that you'll regret. With that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with all the fire you can imagine with Daniel Pink.

Dan, how are you? I'm pretty good. How are you doing today? Yeah. Okay. So there's some contemplation in how you answered that. What was the pause? The pause? Well, you know what? I've been traveling nonstop for five weeks, and this is literally the second day that I haven't been traveling. So my body is saying, my body wants to actually go into sleep mode. And my mind is saying, not just yet, man, not just yet. Where does that drive come from for you? No pun intended for one of your books, but where does the drive come from for you? No pun intended for one of your books, but where does the drive come from for you?

You know, it's interesting. I think part of it really is just the desire to do good work. I mean, it's the idea like I like to work hard on the projects that I carry out and I work hard enough on them that I believe in them. And then when it's time to spread the word about them, because of that belief, I want to go out and not leave. I mean, forgive the I mean, you know, I know that you can handle a sports metaphor, but my wife only allows me one a day. But I don't want to leave anything on the sidelines. So so I think that's really what it is. And does that come from a place of commitment to the wellness or well-being of others? Or is that coming from an anxiety place? Like, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to miss out. I don't. Where do you orientate more? Is it like generative or more anxiousness?

I'm not sure it's either one, actually. It's a really super interesting, super interesting question. It's it's there's not a lot of anxiousness, but I'm not sure it's either one, actually. It's a really super interesting question. There's not a lot of anxiousness, but I'm not sure there's that much generativity in there either. I think that it's really, if I had to psychoanalyze myself, which is often, which is a dangerous undertaking, I would say that it's more of a commitment to doing the very best that I can. That is, it's a commitment to getting the word out there and creating things that I'm proud of and doing work that I believe in and that is excellent. So, so it's not, so, so it's neither one of those kinds. If you think about those as polls, it's not like, it's not like, oh my God, I'm anxious and I'm going to, that I'm going to fail. And therefore that's what's, that's, that's what makes Sammy run. But it's also, isn't this more exalted? I am a servant of the world and I want to change everything. It's, it's somewhere, it's somewhere maybe even orthogonal

to that yeah very cool yeah and you know what i appreciate about how you answered that is is that i will create um false polls to be able to at least have a conversation sometimes and so what i appreciate yeah what i appreciate that you did is that you pause and you're like wait a minute i don't think it's either and i'm actually sure it's i'm'm not on that, you know, that, that spectrum. So, so that, that is a thin slice of your critical thinking at play. And so let's rewind backwards just a little bit. You've got two main themes that we're talking about here. Right. And one of them, so big motor, big drive, wanting to, you know, express and do your very best. And then the other one is critical thinking.

And so how did your folks and or how did your environment early on shape those two primary movers for you? And I'm sure there's other primary movers. I'm not saying that these are the onlys, but these are two that are present with us today. So your argument is that there are, so I'm going to concede your premise here, I guess, Mike, that the two primary motors are, one of them is critical thinking and the other one is, what was the other one? The desire to do your very best. The desire to do my very best. With a big motor that's attached to it. Yeah. So where did that come from?

I don't know. I'm not sure that I actually wouldn't, I would neither credit nor blame my parents for either one of those. I think it's more, I think if there's anything when I was a kid is that my parents generally left me alone. They let me do my own thing, more or less. And so for me, I think it was, if there was a formative experience at all for me, is that I, you know, there's a lot of fortuitous here, is that I grew up in central Ohio.

Not exactly the most exciting place in the world, but one unknown feature or little known feature of Columbus, Ohio, is that it has arguably the best public library system in America. The state of Ohio has the way that they, and I don't want to empty the room of all of your listeners here by talking about public financing of libraries, but the way that the state of Ohio finances libraries is different from the way that other states do. As a consequence, Ohio libraries have always been extremely well funded. And as a consequence of that, a knockout effect of that, there's always been even a local commitment to libraries that is different from many other places. So I happened to grow up in

a place that has arguably one of the best public library systems in the United States of America. And I also lived walking distance to the library. And so as a kid who was interested in reading and in books and so forth, I had this incredible opportunity to be able just to, whenever I wanted to, to walk over to a very good library. And I think that it might be the sense of wonder that I experienced being in that setting as a kid, saying, wow, I'm in this little suburban town in central Ohio that isn't super exciting. But when I go into this library, holy crap, look at all the things that

the world has open to it. Look at what I can you know, look at what I can learn about this. I can read about sports. I can read about tennis. I can read about baseball. I can go to the World Book Encyclopedia and just randomly take a volume off the shelf and say, whoa, I never even knew that was a country. That's so cool. And I think that that more than, I think it's really that, that sense of wonder more than anything else. What is, what might be the fuel inside that motor? Very cool.

I had, I had laissez-faire parenting as well, like kind of hands off, which is, I think a bit of a dangerous proposition, but it does, it does create, um, space to explore. Yeah. And so instead of like structured learning, it's the guided discovery. And then there's an unfolding that takes place like, oh, look how this works. Look, oh, look how that works. Yeah. I don't think my parents ever once looked at my homework.

I don't think my parents ever once asked me whether I did my homework. I always did my homework, but I don't think my parents ever asked me whether I did my homework. I don't think my parents, you know, and there's a degree of, again, I don't think my parents ever asked me whether I did my homework. I don't think my parents, you know, you know, and there's a there's a degree of again, I don't and I don't want to I don't want to glorify it. I don't want to glorify it or demonize it. It's just like I mean, I just think about even things like just playing like the amount of playing pickup sports, not even organized sports, but playing pickup sports, pickup basketball. I happen to live very close to the school that I went to and they had basketball courts outside. I mean, in the winter, they would open the basketball courts inside. So

pickup basketball. I have a brother who is about my age. I mean, he's a year younger than I am. He's basically almost as close in age as you can be without being a twin. And he and I lived on the street and there were these two other kids who lived on the street who that idea that, hey, you just figure it out and you make it up and you do it. And when there are conflicts, you figure that out. I think that was actually a really, really important. I mean, I haven't really thought deeply about it, Michael, but but I think that was a big part of. How I became the person I am, for better or worse. Yeah, right. Exactly. And you have, you're describing somebody with high agency, right? The ability to, right. And so that actually leads, I think. Yeah. That's a great point. Eloquently to regret because people with high agency, as I'm sure, well, I'm going to ask you because you're much more current on the research here on regret, evidence of your book, but high agency would have the likelihood to feel regret more often.

And because they feel that they have the power to do something in their life, to make an influence in their life where low agency, a bit more of a victim, a bit more of a whipped around by the world circumstances, maybe less regret. But I'm going to leave that to you to explore. And that's going to lead actually right into the second question, which is why do you want to write a book on regret? But maybe we can start with the first one, the premise. Sure. Well, I mean, I think you're right about agency. Regret as an emotion requires agency so um the that regret with agency is a necessary part of regret that regret without agency is in regret regret without agency is disappointment um uh it's it's circumstance now what's interesting and we might be getting slightly ahead of ourselves but

why not is that i was very interested in this question. And so as part of the research for this book, I did my own very large public opinion survey of the U.S. population where we had a very rigorous, large sample, 4,489 Americans. We weighted the sample so that it represented the United States and all of its beautiful diversity. And we asked people a bunch of questions about regret, but embedded in there were two questions. One of them went exactly at the question of agency, although we actually used an even more incendiary phrase. We said free will. And we said, I said, do you believe in general that people have free will? That is that they have some control over their lives. All right. And we found overwhelming majorities of people, Americans say they had free will. Then as a

contrast to that, we also asked the question, do you believe that everything in life happens for a reason? Which is a question that is basically saying, oh, you don't really have agency. There is something bigger going on. And we found overwhelming majorities of people said, yes, everything in life happens for a reason. And so what you had, no joke, I mean, it drove me crazy for a while, but I reconciled it, is that you had overwhelming, this wasn't close. This wasn't close.

You had overwhelming numbers of people, I think it was up to the high 70s who believed both that they had free will and that everything happened for a reason. And that was kind of intriguing. And as I tried to make sense of that, which as a hyper rational person that said, wait a second, these two things are contradictory. I think what people were saying is that if you think about our lives, our lives are a mix of these things. Let's go back to your first question. All right. Suppose that I had been grown up in some other place. All right.

And actually, my parents moved when I was five. All right. My father got a new job and moved across the country. I was born in Wilmington, Delaware. They moved when I was like a little kid. And suppose that I had grown up somewhere else. I might not have become a writer. Why? I might still have had agency, but the circumstances in which I exercise the agency might have been entirely different. And I could have been a world class dentist, you know. Is that what happens in Delaware? have been entirely different and I could have been a world-class dentist, you know? Is that what happens in Delaware?

I don't even know. I guess in Delaware, what do people build in Delaware? They become chemists or something like that, you know? Right, right. And so, but I do think, and forgive this long-winded response, I do think that what these people are saying in response to that is generally right. What we're trying to do in our lives is we're trying to tease out what do we have control over? Where are we agentic? Where do we have some agency?

And what is circumstance? And I think that teasing that out is actually a really important part of figuring out who you are and what kind of life you want to live. Yeah, so you're getting right to the center of something we talk about a lot on this podcast and in my work is about first principles and what you're yeah what you're breaking up are two first principles that seemingly compete with each other and then i double click and to try to unpack that second one you know in the i love the conflict the conflict is great because it gets it's a forcing function to say, well, how is it really for you? Exactly. Right. Yeah. So that's really good. So when I unpack that second one about, how did you put it?

Not free will, but... The question that I asked was, do you believe in general everything in life happens for a reason? Happens for a reason, which to me ladders up for most people. If we had one-on-ones, I would ask this question, right? Do you believe in god and then because most people anchor to uh well that that's where things happen for a reason because there's a plan and then then pull on that thread one more level which is um and i don't know if you asked about god or not but i did i'll go come back to that okay come back to that okay and then pull out one more thread, which is, is God passive or active? Oh, interesting.

That's interesting. Yeah. So that's where it starts to go, oh, so God is active, meaning I have low agency, right? Or God is passive, meaning I have to have high agency. So things happen for a reason, but it's up to me to determine it, or it was already God's will, so be. And so, yeah. So in order to get, so the reason I did such a big sample in this survey was that I wanted to get, I wanted to do the cross

taps to allow me to make claims about different demographics. And so I asked the question for exactly the reason you're talking about. I didn't ask about passive God or active God, but I but I asked in general which something like in general, which best describes your beliefs. I believe in God. I don't believe in God. I'm not sure there's I'm not sure there's a God. And and I was trying to see whether belief in God had any correlation with the propensity to regret or the types of regret that people had. And here's the punchline here. I found out nothing because in America, everybody believes in God. What was the distribution amongst those three options? I'd have to look at, I would have to look it up. I can look it up right now if you want.

Yeah, I'm super interested. Give me a second. I'll look it up right now. But I think that it was somewhere in the high 70s of believing in God. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, while you're looking, it's obviously... Yeah, give me a sec. I'll find it right here. Hold on.

Okay, cool. Yeah. What happened was that it didn't really tell us anything. Okay, I had it slightly off. So which of the following best describes your beliefs? I don't believe in God, 10.7%. I'm not sure if I believe in God, 17.4%. I believe in God, 72%. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous.

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Finding Mastery is brought to you by Felix Gray. I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can create the conditions for high performance. How do we protect our ability to focus, to recover, to be present? And one of the biggest challenges we face today is our sheer amount of screen time. It messes with our sleep, our clarity, even our mood. And that's why I've been using Felix Gray glasses. What I appreciate most about Felix Gray is that they're just not another wellness product. They're rooted in real science. Developed alongside leading researchers and ophthalmologists, they've demonstrated these types of glasses boost melatonin, help you fall asleep faster, and hit deeper stages of rest. When I'm on the road and bouncing around between time zones, slipping on my Felix Grey's in the evening, it's a simple way to

cue my body just to wind down. And when I'm locked into deep work, they also help me stay focused for longer without digital fatigue creeping in. Plus, they look great. Clean, clear, no funky color distortion. Just good design, great science. And if you're ready to feel the difference for yourself, Felix Gray is offering all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to FelixGray.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code findingmastery20 at felixgray.com for 20% off. Okay. So then how did you wrap around that cluster with agency and regret? I didn't. I mean, I think what people are saying, I think what people are saying is, so first of all, I think that the

question of whether people believe in God, based on my analysis, doesn't yield much insight into whether the propensity for regret or the types of regret that people have. I didn't see anything. Just because it's such an overwhelming number of people who believe in God. And also, I mean, we had only, you know, 90% of people, 90% of people, 10% of people did not believe in God.

And so that doesn't really tell you that much. I do think that what people are trying to tease out, I think people are just working that out in their head. I do think there's a sense that being a live human being, I think most people do feel at least some sense of agency, but I don't think they feel a complete sense of agency because there are circumstances, there are all kinds of circumstances. And a rational person can't say, oh, I like everything I've done in my life is because of my own everything that's happened to me in my life is because of my own doing, like I'm 100 percent agentic and circumstances make no difference.

That's a lunatic would say that. Well, but I also don't think we call we call them narcissists. And, you know, one one to two percent of the population actually believe that the whole world revolves around their experience in life. Yeah. And you see this you see this a little bit. I mean, this is something that I think about a lot. And it's actually a project that I've been trying to that I've been brewing for a couple of years is this whole idea of of the especially in America, this whole idea of a birth lottery. The idea that the circumstances

of our birth have a huge effect on who we become and what we're able to achieve and what we're able to contribute and all that. And so, you know, and I look at that for myself, you know, I was born in America. First of all, I was at that for myself, you know, I was born in America. First of all, I was born in the United States of America. I was born in the United States of America in the 20th century. I was born in the United States of America in the 20th century to two college educated parents. All right. I win. Yeah. In Columbus, Ohio, next to one of the greatest libraries in the world. So yeah, right. Exactly. But I'm serious about that. It's like I win.

For sure. And I think about it myself. As you can see, your listeners won't know this, but you know this from talking to me on Zoom, is that I wear glasses and I have really bad vision. My vision is something like 2,500. Like I can't, like I sometimes, if I don't have my glasses on, I sometimes can't find my glasses. That's how bad my vision is. And now imagine if

I were born 400 years ago, I'd be toast. Yeah, no, no, no. I'd be toast. There's no way I would have lived to it. I would have, I would have gotten eaten by a, I would have gotten like run over by a stagecoach or, or, or chariot or something like that. I would have gotten eaten by a, I would have gotten like run over by a stagecoach or chariot or something like that. I would not have probably been able to hold a job because I would have to have worked outdoors seeing things from far away. And so. You would have been labeled with other things as well, like stupid or something like other

things, but it would have been a very dangerous world for you. Extremely dangerous. Yeah. And now like, okay, so you can't become a fighter pilot. Right. Or a pilot, you know, like, I don't know. I don't know what else, you know, requires great eyesight. And it's probably ruled out sport for you in baseball, you know,

but there's some corrective things. Baseball, like it's with my vision, it is very hard to hit a tiny object flying at me a hundred miles an hour. Like that is suboptimal, you know, and you look at some of these, you look at some of these other, you look at like some of these other players, some of these other hitters, like when they, when they, they actually test sometimes better than 2020 in their vision. Yeah. So we did a bunch of testing with pro athletes, both in traditional stick and ball, as well as action sports. And you'd be surprised how many 2010, 2015 eyesight, you know, uncorrected. It's incredible. It's incredible. But it makes sense. also that's also partly birth lottery um you know and and anyway so all of which is to say it's a very intriguing topic and it's one that we don't talk i don't think that in popular parlance we

talk enough about about what is the mix over what do you have control over and what is and what is circumstance and sometimes it gets our view of it is blinded by ideology, where it's a form of political identity to say, you have full control over everything. Or it's like, no, everything is a product of circumstance. And I think that a healthy life is teasing those out. And it turns out that regret offers a way to at least, a tool at least, to help us tease out those things. We introduce in our work when we spend time with enterprise companies or smaller as well, is our framework is inside out and outside in. So here's a set of best practices for inside out, and here's a set of practices to influence outside in to create a high performing environment,

to create an environment where people can do their very best work. And if you miss one of them, I think we've got problems. I think we're not honoring the unique experience of human life, right? There's outside in circumstances as well as environmental conditions and inside out, which is basically shorthand for psychology. So all that being said, why did you want to write a book on regret? I think largely because I had some. And if we think about, I mean, let me just go back to this question of agency and circumstance. Part of that is a proxy for questions about who we are and how we fit in. And I think we answer that question differently at different moments in our life.

And this is a book. There's no way I would have written a book about regret when I was in my 30s. I didn't have enough mileage on me. But in my 50s, it felt sort of inevitable because I had room to look back, but I also, knock wood, had room to look forward. And so I think it was for me the passage of time and having a little distance to look back on.

And when I look back, there were regrets. There were things that I wish I had done differently. They weren't debilitating regrets, but they were thoughts that made me feel bad. All right. Come on, Daniel. Bring it home. Not devastatingly bad, but things that- Like what? Like what?

Oh, well, I mean, so one of the catalysts was my elder daughter graduated from college in 2019. This is really one of the catalysts for it. And, and, you know, I was sort of having this experience that I think many parents have where, where time just seems completely warped, where you have this kid who is like in a cap and gown graduating from college. And it's like, wait a second, she was just born. Like what the hell's going on here? And then you also, then also for me, maybe this is a little bit of my own narcissism. It's like, what the hell's going on here? And then also for me, maybe this is a little bit

of my own narcissism. It's like, how could I possibly be having a kid graduated from college because I'm like 27 right now. And so I started thinking about college. And so I had some regrets about college. I wish I were kinder. I have a lot of kindness regrets about earlier in my life. I wish I had actually taken more risks when I was in. I think I was a little bit too conventional and conformist and rule-abiding. I wish I had taken more risks. And when I came back and mentioned this to some people, it was really brewing. I got a very interesting response, a response that was different from the kind of response

that you would expect to hear for a concept so demonized like regret. And people were like, oh, really? Let me tell you my regret. And so people wanted to lean, you understand in the kind of work that you do, that there's certain topics that make people lean in, certain topics that really engage people. And this struck me as one of them. And that was really the reason it's sort of time of life coupled with working out my own stuff and then also with the response that I got from other people yeah that's really cool and you know it's not that different regret is not that different in when somebody shares oh my gosh I just had a terrible car accident and then almost without

impulse the other person that they're sharing that with goes, oh, you did? Me too. Can I tell you mine? And so this is one of those topics where if I'm going to share a regret I have, and I'm attuned to it, there's an emotional experience involved. But when I share it to people, they don't go, oh, wow, it looks like you're really working through that. They want to share their regret. And so it's like, there's a funny dismissal of the person who is sharing a regret for not a one-upsmanship, but a calibration like, oh, I got them too. And I think, and you hit on this in your book, which is we don't talk about them enough.

Yeah. So I think. Let me offer, let me offer a, maybe a more generous interpretation of that. I think that what you're seeing there is the building of affinity between two people. That it's not so much gamesmanship or one-ups personship. It's, it's kind of affinity. It's like, hey, I'm like you. We're in this together. And one of the things that you see in a lot of the research on disclosure, which ends up being an important

component of regret, is that when we disclose our mistakes and our vulnerabilities, we fear that people will think less of us. But that's often not the case. I mean, we have a lot of research on this. They often think more of us. And the reason I think is that sense of connection and that sense of affinity. And what I've also done by sharing my regret is that I have in some ways destigmatized your regret. I basically said, here's permission to share your regret. You don't have to harbor it.

You don't have to feel, you don't have to hold it close to your chest the whole time. You can actually divulge it and we can have a conversation about it. Are you comfortable talking about, if there was a hierarchy it's interesting question about hierarchy because when because I actually tried to when I when I I'll come back to that I'll come back to the the the micro question let me address the macro question here for a moment when I looked at the kinds of things that people regretted and I did a big analysis of this I initially said it's a hierarchy there's a high and and then I realized there wasn't. That's not what the evidence was telling me. That it wasn't stacked up like this. It wasn't Maslovian pyramid thing. It was just

planets, or I don't know the metaphor, planets orbiting each other, ingredients in a soup, call it what you will. And for me, I'm not sure if there's a, I'm not sure if there's a, a, a hierarchy. I have to say that one of the, for me, I think that one of the, it's a, it's slightly unusual, but not totally unusual for me that I think the ones that really bug me, the one that really bugged me are these regrets about kindness and particularly earlier in my life. And I think part of it is that I can't undo them. You know, I can't, I can't go back and fix it in a way that like, let's say, let's say that I haven't done this fortunately, at least not yet. I haven't swindled anybody in a business deal or anything like that. All right. So if I had done

that, I could actually go back and make restitution or, but, and, and my kindness regrets are different from some of the ones that I collect, slightly different from some of the ones that I collected. In this massive collection of regrets that I accumulated called the World Regret Survey, I had a lot of regrets about moral behavior. And within that category of moral behavior were a lot of regrets about bullying. When I was younger, I bullied somebody and I really feel terrible about it. For me, the kindness regrets are about inaction rather than about action. It was being in many, many circumstances when I was younger.

Not only when I was a kid, when I was in college, when I was a young adult. Being in circumstances where someone was not being treated well, someone was being excluded, someone was being left out. And here's the thing. I knew I wasn't affirmatively excluding that person, but I was in a situation where that was happening. I wasn't, again, it's a great, you're like, and now I'm obsessed with agency all right so i didn't it wasn't my i wasn't affirmatively causing that but i was in a setting where i actually had the agency to do something about it and i didn't that's it yeah so and and that and that really that really even now that really even now bothers me because here's the thing, Michael, I knew at the time it was wrong.

It wasn't like, oh, I didn't have any idea what was going, you know, it was like, I knew at the time and I didn't do anything. Yeah. So this, this lies in, I think your central argument about regret, which is use it, learn from it. Exactly. Before we go into that part of it, I'll share with you like the things that when I look back, so for me, regret is this circular avoidance or this rumination of the pain that I was part of it at one point. So it's, it's an avoidance or a rumination that is either problematic or, um, well, is both are problematic, but the way to work with that obviously is to get in touch with the pain, feel it, get to know in touch with the pain, feel it, get to know it, understand it so that you can move forward through it.

Absolutely. But that's very hard to do. Difficult emotions are difficult. And we're not well-trained, as you point out. We're not well-trained with dealing with difficult, challenging emotions. That's the key right there. No one ever teaches us how to do this.

And it's not that hard, actually. It's not. That's exactly right. It's quite stimulating. There's an aliveness that comes. Your physiology lights up. Absolutely. Yeah, okay.

But the thing is that no one ever teaches us how to do this. And in fact, there are, there are, there are messages implicit and explicit that, forget about that. Don't be negative. Brush it off. Don't look backward. Don't have any regrets. Got to stay positive. Got to stay forward looking. And I love that you bring this up because there's the suck it up, man it up, you know, be tough. There's all of that. Then there's drink it, drug it, you know, whatever. So you don't feel. And then there is this other thing, which is like, hey, just be positive. You know, like, come on. It's nauseating. This be positive all the time, for me at least. And I'm over-indexed in optimism as a fundamental belief. And I believe and I work from that as a first principle that optimism will carry, especially when it's hard. But it doesn't mean all things are positive.

It just means... Yeah, right. That's exactly the thing. Here's the thing. It's like, here's my read of the evidence, all right? Positive emotions. They're really good. I love positive emotions. I want other people to have positive emotions. You should have more positive emotions than negative emotions. There's no question about that. But the idea that you should have only positive emotions is ludicrous. I mean, it's ludicrous because it goes against what the science tells us about

who human beings are. It's also ineffective. And this is the point I'm trying to make in this book is that what you have is you have this emotion of regret. It hurts. It's not a positive emotion. And yet it's ubiquitous. It is arguably one of the most common negative emotion we have. It's one of the most common emotions of any kind that we have. There is a wide swath of evidence showing that nearly everybody experiences it. So what's going on here? This is a riddle. It's ubiquitous and it's unpleasant. Why? Because it's useful. Because it's adaptive. because if we treat it right, it is actually transformative. The problem is, is that what we have, and I think you make a really good point here, is that we have this view of ignore it. So that could either be that sort of like over index on positivity, ignore the regrets. It's meaningless. It's not a meaningful signal. Or we have the other thing where you actually wallow in it. Or in some cases, we end up medicalizing these things that, you know, even though some things obviously deserve to be medicalized, we don't want to medicalize everything.

The idea that everybody somehow needs a counselor because they experience negative emotions in their life is actually not helpful. It's not giving people the adaptive skills. What we want to do is we want to think about our regrets. We want to use negative emotions as signals, as information, as data, receive them, and then have a systematic way to use them as tools to get better. You know, I'm not an addict. And I, well, some might argue in my family that I'm a workaholic. My wife and I were having that conversation the other day, but I'm not an addict. But the reason I bring this up is because the AA structure, 12 steps, I think they got so much right. Exactly.

So step four and 10, as you're familiar with, which is, are you an addict? I am not. I'm not. Yeah. But you're familiar with the steps. Four and 10 are like, listen, take a flippant inventory. Like take an honest inventory of yourself. When you do that, you'll be like, damn, I didn't do right. There's some things that kind of have been haunting me. And then, you know, when you take that inventory, there's a place in the steps to say, I need to go make some amends.

I need to go. I need to go make some amends. I need to go, I need to go do right. And in what were appropriate, like apologize, basically, you know, and so I think that's, yeah. But that's what the 12 steps is a systematic way to deal with this. I would even argue that, you know, and AA has maybe not a full foot, but a few toes in religious belief. But what we also have is we have religious traditions that actually do a better job of helping us deal with negative emotions. Catholicism has confession and repentance. Judaism has, you know, a day set aside in the calendar to atone for your sins. And even other kinds of negative emotions, think about something like grief. Our religious traditions, every religious tradition has a way to help people manage this horrible negative emotion

of grief. But I think that in the broader secular society, it's escaped our attention. We haven't given people ways, systematic ways to deal with negative emotions. And again, it's not that hard, but it has to be systematic. And if you look at religious traditions or AA, they are systematic. It's a series of practices, it's a series of rituals, it's a series of steps. And we just need to create those for negative emotions for those of us who are not addicts and believers. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth.

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it's not about adding more. It's about choosing better. And when your day demands clarity and energy and presence, the way you prepare for it matters. If you're looking for high quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. Daniel, you just hit the entire reason why what I do and the company that we're building

is to give people a set of practices and tools to deal with challenging emotions so that they can work from the inside out. And so i wonder if i could maybe introduce an idea to you later on me um which is negative and positive emotions so what if they're challenging or difficult instead of negative and okay one of the reasons i bring that up is because high joy is actually quite difficult now most people wouldn't call joy a difficult emotion but staying with incredible joy love incredible kindness actually

is so emotionally full that people retract from it they'll'll laugh, they'll giggle, they'll break eye contact, they'll want to drink water because it's so overwhelming. Like there's things that we do to dampen the emotional experience. So I wonder if you, because I know that psychology will do positive and negative, but then that lens is like negative is bad, positive is good. I actually find that the expression and feeling of emotions is quite challenging, all of them. And I put each emotion kind of on a scale. Yeah, yeah. So high joy, low joy, if you will. High grief, low grief, you know, high sadness, low sadness.

And there's lots of different words we use to describe those feelings. But when I say that, do you rotate around that in any particular way? I think it's interesting. I think it's a really interesting way to think those feelings. But when I say that, do you rotate around that in any particular way? I think it's interesting. I think it's a really interesting way to think about it. Well, I think it's an interesting way to look at it. And I do think that it's possible to transmute a negative emotion into a positively challenging emotion. That's my guess. I think that... But what's a low challenge emotion? What's an emotion that's not challenging? Frustration. Boredom?

Boredom. Frustration. That's not challenging. Most people can do it pretty well. Intolerance, they can do it pretty well. Intolerance. They can do it pretty well. Okay. So challenging meaning it's not challenging to contend with. Yeah. I think it's an interesting way to look at it. I think sadness is challenging because it's hard to be in a sad state for an extended period of time long enough to work with it, to know it, to your thoughts relate to it to know how it feels because it can be quickly overwhelming when we're honest and i also think that all of the ranges of fear are quite difficult and so those are challenging to me as well and so um if you think about it like anxiety is one of the big anxiety and depression are the two big ones right from an emotional feeling standpoint and we've got a whole class of drugs to support it and best

practices in psychology to support it but they're difficult because uh one anxiety is that rattle and sadness is that that constriction where we don't have the the vitality that comes with how we would like to live. But I'm taking us in a tangent. I really want to learn about regret. And so, but this is just kind of getting some of the, I guess, first principles in place. Let's keep going on regret. You've got types of regret that you skimmed over, but can you talk through the types of regret?

And then you've also got some practices that would be, I think, meaningful. So let's go to the types of regret. And this is something, so in the academic literature, and then even in my own initial foray into the quantitative research, I was trying to figure out what people regretted. And the way I categorized it, the way I organized it was by the domain of life, meaning that this is a career regret. I should have taken a different job. That's a career regret. A romance regret. This should have married Bob instead of Ed. A finance regret or health regret. And what I found is that that wasn't quite right. And that my own research and some of the other research showed that when you look at the domains of life, our regrets are all over the place.

However, I also, as I mentioned earlier, put together this collection of, we now have over 19,000 regrets from 109 countries, the World Regret Survey. And in reading through those, there's certainly at least the first 15,000 of them, in reading through those, I noticed there was something going on beneath the surface. So let me explain what I mean by that. So I'll give you what I think is the best example of this. So we have people in this database of now 19,000 who say, I had a chance to study abroad when I was in college, but I didn't do it. And now I really regret it. Then we have people, so that's an education regret. Then we have people who say, ugh, a lot of people, a lot,

who say X years ago there was a man or woman who I really liked. I wanted to ask him or her out on a date, but I was too chicken and I didn't do it and I've regretted it ever since. Romance regret. Then we have, again, a lot. I stayed in this crappy lackluster job.

What I really wanted to do was start a business, but I didn't have the guts to do that, and now I regret it. Okay, that's a career regret. But to my mind, those are all the same regret. It's a regret that says, if only I'd taken the chance. You're at a juncture in your life. You can play it safe. You can take the chance.

And I found over and over again, not in every single circumstance, but in many, in most, people regret not taking the chance. That's a boldness regret. Another category are what I call foundation regrets. Foundation regrets are if only I'd done the work. These are people who make small decisions early that accumulate to bad consequences later on. I spent too much and saved too little. I didn't take care of my health. Outside of the United States, huge numbers of regrets about smoking, for instance. A surprising number of regrets, more than I would have expected about people who, if only I'd worked harder in school.

That is, at the time, they didn't realize they should have been working harder and trying to learn more. And they felt like they blew it and it put them on a bad trajectory. So we got foundation, we got boldness, moral regrets, if only I'd done the right thing. We talked about this earlier about bullying. We have a lot of regrets about marital infidelity, a lot of regrets about hurting and cheating other people. Small category, but deeply felt. And then finally, the fourth category is our connection regrets.

If only I'd reached out. These are regrets about relationships, especially non-romantic relationships where you have a relationship, it should have been intact or it was intact, and it comes apart, usually in undramatic ways, just kind of drifts apart. And people want to reach out. They don't because they think it's going to be awkward. They think the other side is not going to care. So drift apart even more. And people feel bad about that. And sometimes it's it's too late. And so these are the four. Those are the four core regrets again are foundation regrets. If only I'd done the work. Boldness regrets. If only I'd taken the chance. Moral regrets. If only I'd done the right thing. and then connection regrets if only I had reached out. Very cool. And then you've got some best practices on how to deal with those regrets. And before we go to that, I want to talk about the nature of regret with one more dimension, which is, so there's a historical context when I look back right and i regret that that thing happened but there's also in psychology we call it counterfactual thinking yeah which okay so

the counterfactual piece of it is that it's it's based on a fallacy it's based on conscripting a possible alternative that you could have taken at that point. But, you know, like it's not you didn't actually have the resource. You didn't you knew you might have known better, but didn't know how to act on it. Or or you completely get it wrong in this counterfactual thinking. And because memory is not great as a human experience. So this looking back thing is tainted with all of the porousness that memory holds. And then if you add a layer of the counterfactual thinking, can you speak to those two elements of psychology that are involved in regret? Sure. I mean, regret is a form of counterfactual

thinking. And you're right. Counterfactual thinking has peril to it, but it also has some power to it. And so counterfactual thinking is, again, it's a tribute to how powerful our minds and our brains are, that we can conjure events that run counter to the actual facts. And so there are multiple kinds of counterfactual that well, there are two big categories of counterfactual thinking. There's downward counterfactual thinking and upward counterfactual thinking, downward counterfactual thinking. I like to call that at least those are at least.

So these are this is how you imagine it. Things could have been worse. And so, again, you go back to the database. We have a lot of people at leasting their certain kinds of regrets. I shouldn't marry that idiot, but at least I have these two great kids. At least are one reason why in some famous research you see in the Olympics, bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists. Because bronze medalists say, oh, at least I got a medal. Unlike that schmo finished fourth. And so they're so they're happy. Another kind of counterfact. And so here's the thing about at least downward counterfactuals. They make us

feel better. No question about it. They make us feel better. Upward counterfactuals, upward counterfactuals. Those are if only this is this is the silver medalist saying, if only I had kicked a little harder in that final 25 meters of that butterfly, I'd have been a gold medalist. If onlys make us feel worse, but done right, they make us do better. At least make us feel better, but they don't improve us. If onlys make us feel worse and can make us do better. In fact, they make us feel better, but they don't improve us. If onlys make us feel worse and can make us do better. In fact, they make us do better in part by making us feel worse. You got to have both the pain, the pain leads to the instruction. Now, to your other point, we are fabulists in that we can conjure things that are preposterous. And that's why it's really

important to interrogate your regrets. And what was interesting to me in looking at these thousands and thousands of regrets is that people were not as outcomeist as I expected. Let me tell you what I mean by that. There's one story in the book about a guy 40 years ago, met a woman on a, he's an American guy, met a woman on a train in Europe. And they hit it off instantly. It's like something out of the movies.

And they basically are falling in love on this several-hour train ride. And she has to get off at her stop in Belgium. And he wants to go with her, and he doesn't go with her. It didn't step off the train. And he says, 40 years later, I always wish I'd stepped off the train. All right. Now, what he's saying there isn't that if I had stepped off the train, he's wondering about the counterfactual. He's not saying if I had stepped off the train, I would be married and living in Brussels and eating French fries with

mayonnaise and having, you know, national health insurance and being part of the EU and having these Belgian-American kids. No. What he's saying is that at that moment, I had a chance to step up and do something and I didn't do it. And that's what bugs me. And so he's not taking, he's taking the counterfactual part of the way, but he's not a pure fabulous in that he's saying, as a consequence of that, everything in my life would be, everything in my life would be happy. And so counterfactual thinking is a powerful skill that we have because it allows us to learn. But it is a skill that has a degree of fabulism to it, just like many other skills that we have. And it can go too far. And when it goes too far, it often leads to rumination. If he had said, if only I'd gotten off that train, my life would be considerably better.

Everything would be great. He's not saying that. What he's saying in this case was, I had a chance to do something. I had a chance to be bold and I blew it. And you can take that and say, okay, what are you going to do about that? You can try to be bold in other aspects of your life. Yeah. And therein lies beautifully said, like that's a very applied explanation of counterfactual thinking, how it works and how it doesn't and or how it's advantageous or facilitative and how it maybe is debilitative towards us. But yeah, what I love is the concreteness of it. And I think that all of us, everybody can find ourselves in that story at some point in our lives. And so I worked for decades in high stakes, extreme back country type

environments with adventure and action athletes, adventure and action based athletes, where there was a pervasive understanding, which was it is there's far more pain to training all of the capabilities, to mustering up the vision to do something, backfilling those capabilities, creating the external resources to go have this incredible thing to potentially take place, then get right to the edge of it. Imagine a 60-foot corn corners that nobody skied down, get right to the edge and pull back because they couldn't go for it. And they pull back because

they have too much adrenaline. It's too dangerous because their internal state is not skilled enough. And they say it's far more pain to get to the edge and pull back than to get to the edge and huck it and go for it. But they're so skilled at calibrating their internal skills, their internal state against the external risks that they do pull back more than I think what people would recognize. And so it's a long story of saying when your legs are shaking and you don't have the ability to go for it and you pull back could save your life but it also could be because you have not invested properly to meet that unique moment and so that pain of not having enough to go for it and it happens in hallways and businesses all the time you talk a big game at the water cooler the

proverbial you know proverbial one now you talk a big game about how things are not right. And when you have the chance to confront, you know, a boss, if you will, or a manager, director that you kind of roll over and you don't, you don't hold the firmness of your beliefs. And that type of submissiveness is very painful for people. And we don't talk about fight, flight, submit systems enough, but that inability to go for it, to play it small, to play it safe is, I think, one of the core regrets that you talk about in your book eloquently and you brought up even now. And so that's a long narrative to say, bring us home, Daniel, on ways that we can work with regret. And you've got a nice little prescription of what you found to be valuable.

Yeah, I think it's actually related to some of the stuff that you do in that I sort of look at it in three stages, inward, outward, forward, inward, outward, forward. So inward is you've got to regret. You have to reframe how you look at yourself and and your own regret and one of the things that you see and it's probably even more true you would know better than i of high performers rather than mediocre performers is that when we talk to ourselves in the face of mistakes and screw-ups we're brutal that our self-talk is cruel that if you were to for many people okay, okay, I won't universalize it, I'll personalize it. Like if you were to somehow broadcast my self-talk in certain circumstances, or if I were to actually

use that self-talk on somebody else in an organization setting, I'd get fired because you don't talk to anybody that way. Yet we talk to ourselves that way. And the solution there is relatively straightforward, which is don't do that. You know, look at the work on self-compassion from Kristen Neff at Texas. And what it tells us is treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Recognize that your mistakes are part of the human condition, that they're a moment in your life and not the full definition of your life. So that's how you reframe it internally. Externally, we talked a little bit about this, but it's more important than I think we realize, which is disclosure. Disclosure is an unburdening. As we mentioned before, disclosure can be a form of building affinity. But the other thing, and I think it's incredibly

just more, I learned from this research, it's more important than I realized is this, that emotions are blobby. They're abstract. That's why positive emotions feel good. It's why positive emotions, as you say, can sometimes feel overwhelming. They can feel overly challenging. Joy is, it's hard to describe joy. We know what it feels like. And when it comes to us in ginormous doses, it's almost unrelenting. We want relief from it in some way. Negative emotions are also, being emotions, are amorphous and blobby. But if we write about those emotions, if we talk about those emotions, we convert that abstraction into concrete words, which are less fearsome. And that allows us to make sense of it. So there's a lot to be said

for disclosure and the sense making that comes from language. And the final step is to extract a lesson from it. And again, these three steps work together. You have to learn something from it. You have to do that systematically. And as you know, we tend to be terrible at solving our own problems, but decent at solving other people's problems. So what you want to do is you want to do some self distancing. And so it's even it's goofy things like talking to yourself in the third person. So what should Dan do? Not what should I do?

It's things like, you know, we've heard of these things before. It's things like Andy Grove's technique where he's trying to make a decision when he was the CEO of Intel and he wasn't sure what to do. He says, what would my successor do? Zoom out. Think about it from another perspective. I'm a big fan of placing a phone call to the you of 10 years from now. I can make a very strong bet, I think, what the me of 2032 is going to care about. And it's not most things. The me of 2032 isn't going to give a shit about most things,

but he's going to care deeply about certain things. And so make decisions so that the me of 2032 doesn't have words with me. The single best decision-making heuristic I know is you're trying to make a decision. What would you tell your best friend to do? And so what you want to do is reframe internally, treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt, go outward, disclose it, make sense of it through language, and then get some self-distancing and extract a lesson from it. And as you were saying before, it's really not that hard. It's really not that hard. But no one ever teaches us. And if we do it systematically, like anything systematic, we begin to turn it into a habit. We begin to make it less effortful. And when it becomes less effortful, then we're able to take this sting of regret and just naturally turn it into something

positive and forward-looking. Nice work. Really nice work. Yeah. Really nice work. Before we wrap up, I've got two things I want to do with you. One is what are you fascinated by next? I think you gave a little hint to that, but I'd love to just know in more fullness, like what are you fascinated for next? Well, I mean, I have been fascinated for several years by this idea of the birth lottery, which I mentioned before. I don't think that we, when I say we, I mean, you know, essentially educated Americans understand how we won the birth lottery. And that there are questions of, it's fascinating, just sort of intellectual questions of how people get to be who they are. But there are also questions of justice and equity uh bundled bundled in

there um the other thing that i'm fascinated by is and i think i'm a little bit late to the party is um the changing i mean this sounds stupid to say it this way but the sort of the changing media landscape i am somebody who is a writer i'm someone who is a text and word person. And so my muscle memory, my instinct is that when there is an idea, when there's something to pursue, you want to pursue it with the written word. And I'm wondering whether that instinct needs to be challenged more aggressively in the next things that I do, that I should be maybe more agnostic about form and not immediately revert to memorializing these ideas in words on a page. And I noticed while we were working in this conversation, or I noticed when we were having this conversation, you were also writing.

Yeah. What was going on for that? Oh, I'm just taking, I'm taking, I'm a chronic note taker. And the reason I do that, so here, I'll show you some of the notes that I've taken. So I have this little thing here about your idea of high challenge and low challenge emotions, which I thought is really interesting. I never, I never, I never, I never thought about it that way. I have inside out and outside in there. I have the point about joy is very interesting, about joy being a challenging emotion. I have that circled. And so it's just the way that I,

that's just, that's, that's, that's just a process. That's just a processing thing. Like I have to process things actively in order to process them so i'm always taking notes and um even when i read i read i always read with a pencil um in my or pen in my hand so do i um yeah because it's that's just but that's just that's just um that's just how i that's just how i process i mean other you know you're my you know all you listeners out there, your mileage may vary. It's not necessarily the best way to do things. It's the way that I do things. And it's on a loose piece of paper.

It's not even in a journal. Like what do you do with the loose pieces of paper? Here we go. Okay. I'll show you. Here we go. So here we go. So what I have here is a pile of paper.

All right. You see this? Yep. All right. And I'll show you something else here. If I don't screw up my canvas. First of all, I use pencils. So you see this is like a real pencil here. Here we go. Take a look over here. I'm going to if I don't screw this up, I'm going to show you something.

OK, we're turning, we're turning, we're turning, we're turning, we're turning, we're turning, we're turning, you see that oh geez yeah yep and so i will periodically i will periodically go through those and periodically go through that and like i harvest stuff and most of it is sort of unrecognizable to because in some ways i'm writing it down to remember it now not necessarily to memorialize it for the future but it actually is really helpful for certain kinds of things. And then I'm actually pretty obsessive about keeping lists of ideas and questions to ask myself. And I do that on a couple of documents and things that I keep in Dropbox. And then we'll reveal everything here. turning this way yeah if you see if you see that those are you see those are um uh wrong way those are uh boxes um and for projects that i'm this is an idea from twyla tharp believe it or not of all people this is um for projects that i'm thinking of, but I'm not working on right now. I will create a box like these. They call them. They used to call them.

They still call them your bankers boxes. You know, in the old days of like law firms and things, these things. And I just have them labeled with certain projects. And then let's say I see I see something. I take a note about something that's relevant to one of these things, I just shove it in there. Or let's say I hear about a book that's relevant to one of these projects, but I'm not going to read the book now because I'm busy doing other things. I'll get the book and I'll pop it in there. And then the great thing about this, and I really want to heartily recommend this technique, is that when I finally get around to actually dealing with this project, I open up the box and it's like, oh my God, this is amazing. Who put all this stuff in here? Oh, that is so good. It's like,

it's like finding $5 in your pocket. It's like, totally, totally. And so, but this is, this is not, this is, this is, this is, I got this from Twyla Tharp, the choreographer. And, and so there are various kinds of projects back there. And I just will kind of shove stuff in there. And it's like, it is. It's like, it's that great feeling when you find like 20 bucks in your pocket. Oh, that is so cool. Okay, so I do something slightly different. I've got journals, like there's bound journals.

And then I write in them. And then I don't know exactly what to do with them it's kind of a mess yeah and then i flip back when i'm looking for an idea i think i wrote that thing down that conversation with daniel and then and then once i do something with it i put a line through the page meaning i've done i've done something with it so then it kind of reduces the um the time to find something that i've written in the past. Totally, totally. Yeah, that makes sense. It's not, it's not great.

Like, listen, listen, you just to me, like one of the things that you want to do is you want to. Systems matter, systems matter, and and, you know, you want to have whatever system works for you, at least this is my view, you want it, you want to have whatever system works for you, at least this is my view. The only way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. I'm convinced of that. So if you're going to have a good idea, you're going to have a lot of bad ideas. But the thing is, you don't know at a moment what's valuable, what's interesting, what's great.

All you know is there's something about it that's making you stop. And so what you need there, to me, is that you need a system to just collect that and then look at it later. So I, so I will, I will, you know, again, as much as that's, that's like, that's like, like Christmas and spring sometimes on those boxes. Other times it's like, what the hell is this? Like, that's totally not interesting. Why did you even put that in there? And you crumple it up and throw it away. Or, you know, you go back through these notes and, you know, I can imagine myself in two months saying, okay, what does, where is it here? What does, what do you mean? What does that even mean? You know, and I'm completely befuddled by that. But you do get, you do get, there are things to do where you've actually captured things and collected things that otherwise would have just flitted past you. And that's actually super valuable. I love it. So let's do, let's bring us home on like a super reductionist.

This will be hard, I think, for you, right? Like, I don't like this, but it's kind of fun. But it's a reductionist in a word, okay? Or three or five. But like, no pros here, okay? These are hard. And you can say, no, lame. In a word or three or five.

So you know I'm going to use five. You're over budget already. And I'm going to appeal for another five. Okay, all right. Let's go for in a word. It all comes down to... Contribution. Hey, look at that.

Okay. Pressure comes from... Uncertainty. I am... Trying. Money is? I'm going to break the rule here. Necessary, but not sufficient.

That's good. Yeah. And then, okay, as a reductionist, one more time. I don't know if you have a boat, but the name of my boat. I don't have a boat. I'm not. The pinks who hail from Eastern Europe were not a nautical lot. Oh, interesting.

Yeah. So that's where you come from, Eastern Europe? Yeah. Which part? Latvia. Okay. So if you had a boat, you would name it? If I had a boat, I would name it...

Hmm. I had a boat. I would name it... The Experiment. Okay, last one. Mastery is... I'm going to break the rule again. A life force. Come on, that's worth breaking rules. Are you a rule breaker or a rule follower? I am someone who has in 50 years, hasn't decided which one he is. Oh, look at that. I think you're, I think that what I've heard in here is that you get up on

the edges and so you challenge things. Yeah yeah but you might do it in like a more conservative way but whatever yeah yeah i think you like to get to the edges i wouldn't i wouldn't i wouldn't say i'm an extreme rule follower but i would not say that i'm an extreme rule breaker either yeah yeah cool do you mitigate risk or take risk uh when it comes well it depends on what kind of risk um um but when it comes to when it comes to risk, I'm actually pretty analytical. Almost like mathematical. I want to make sure that I'm assessing the risk properly because I think that on certain dimensions of life, people believe there's more risk than there really is. And so, you know, I'm like trying stuff,

on trying projects and on conducting experiments and things like that. I think people are skittish about, it's not an accurate risk. So on something like risk, I tend to be pretty, I tend to be pretty mathematical to the point where if, you know, like I was, I was thinking like, like during, during COVID, it's like, okay, why are we wearing a mask outside? This is nuts to wear a mask outside. And yet when I, like, I live in Washington, DC, it's like, when I go on the beltway, I'm like, everybody in my family, we're driving the speed limit. We're all going to wear seatbelts because I know that driving the beltway is a much higher risk than sitting in my backyard without a mask on.

Daniel, you're a legend. Thank you for this hour. It's been awesome. And I'm looking forward to, at some point, you never know how things work, but maybe our paths cross again. Yeah, I hope so. Where are you based? Yeah, I'm in Hermosa Beach in California.

Oh, for some reason I thought you were in Philadelphia. I don't know why I thought that. No, a lot of people think that I live up in Seattle because I spent, not the last year, but the decade before I spent with the Seattle Seahawks. But right. OK, you know what? I was thinking Philadelphia because I associate you with Angela. Oh, Duckworth.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think that could be what it is. I thought that you were might be a pen person, but no, no, no. No, she's she is great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I know that she's enjoyed your work as well. She's a legend. Yeah. She is a legend. Flat out. Yeah. OK. And so are you, Dan. So let's let's let's make it happen at some point.

All right. That's nice. Nicer than the nation's capital. But come on. All right. I really enjoy talking to you. Thanks for making me think so much. I appreciate it. Oh, my joy. So I'm wishing the best. And then we'll line up everyone. Where do you want to send them on social media? What's the best handle for you? Website or social media? A website is best. Dan Pink dot com. You got it. All the best to you,? Website or social media? A website is best. Danpink.com. You got it. All the best to you, Dan. All right. Thank you. Okay. Bye. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you.

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