Motivation Daily by Motiversity - IT'S NEVER TOO LATE

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

Mistakes make us human and regret makes us stronger. It's never too late to start again. An Exclusive Motiversity Interview with Daniel Pink.Music by Secession Studios (https://bit.ly/SecessionStudiosYouTube). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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There are four core regrets over and over again, and they tend to transcend the domains of life. We often think of our regrets as like, oh, I have a career regret. Oh, no, but I have a health regret, or I have a romance regret. But what I found is the four regrets are these, foundation regrets.

Foundation regrets are if only I'd done the work. These are regrets people have about not studying hard enough in university or not taking care of their health or smoking or not eating right or not saving money. Small decisions that accumulate to bad consequences. The second one, huge category, boldness regrets. These are regrets that people have that say, if only I take in the chance, they didn't start a business. They didn't ask that crush out for a date. They didn't travel. They had an opportunity at one point in their life to do something beyond play it safe, they chose not to do that, and now they regret it.

Third category are moral regrets. If only I'd done the right thing. These are people who at a certain point in their life could do the right thing or the wrong thing. They do the wrong thing, and it still bugs them, which is in its own way heartening. It shows that I think people want to be good. And the final one are connection regrets.

connection regrets are if only I'd reached out. These are regrets about relationships where you have a relationship or you should have had a relationship and it comes apart usually through drifts and you want to reach out but you don't because you think it's going to be awkward and the other side's not going to care

so it drifts out even more and then in some cases it ends up being too late and so these four regrets to me reveal what makes life worth living. What do we want out of life? We want a stable foundation. We want some stability. We want a chance to do something. We want a chance to learn and grow and lead a psychologically rich life.

We want to do the right thing. I'm convinced that most of us want to do the right thing. And what do we else do we want? We want love. We want connection to other people. And that's what makes life worth living. In a weird way, regret also taught me about what makes a good life. Because I had collected 16,000 regrets from people in 105 countries. And when they told me their regrets, in a sense they were also telling me about what made life worth living. How do I turn that? How do I take something that feels like it hurts and turned into progress?

This is important. In some ways, it's central. Regret hurts. There's no question about that. But here's the thing. Regret also instructs. And you can't have one without the other. So if you avoid the pain, you don't.

get any of the learning. So what you have to do is be able to process that pain. And I think there's a way for us to do that, to take our regrets, use them as signals. We haven't been taught to do that. That's the problem. We have this weird approach. We have this weird view of negative emotions. Like some of us think, oh, positive all the time, and da-da-da-da. That leads to delusion. Some of us get so absorbed in our negative emotions that they, in some ways, exonerate us from making progress. That's a bad idea too. What we need to do is we need to process our negative emotions in a, in a systematic way. And I think there's a good way to do that. What we need to do is we need to think about our regrets, and when we think about our regrets,

the evidence is pretty clear that they can help us make better decisions, solve problems faster, be better strategists, find greater meaning in our life. What I had is I had this giant database of regrets, and I would look on my computer screen and see them listed there. And you know what? It wasn't that much of a downer because I felt like people were trying to make sense of it. There's some interesting research in this. One of the things that we think about disclosure of our vulnerabilities and our setbacks and so forth is that people will like us less. And in fact, they actually like us more when we do that. And so I actually had a lot of respect for people willing to disclose and willing to explain. And I felt like I was actually helping them make sense of this regret.

So it wasn't that much of a downer. Over and over and over again around the world, the same four regrets kept coming up. And I found that fascinating because there wasn't much national difference. What's more, as I said earlier, these four regrets are revealing. Because by revealing our regrets, we are revealing what we value the most. And so to me, these four core regrets operate as a photographic negative of the good life. That is, if we understand what people regret the most, we actually understand what they value the most.

So in a weird way, these 16,000 regrets are not a downer as much as they are a pointer to what makes life worth living. Many of these decisions are less monumental than that it is kind of a focusing illusion, that when we're making a decision, we think that that's the most important decision there is. And so for me, I think a, a tool is to make decisions for fundamental reasons rather than instrumental reason, which goes to what you were talking about before, about careers as a line, that if we make decisions,

if I decide, I'm going to major in this because it's going to lead to that, which is going to lead to that, which is going to lead to that, which is going to lead to that, I think that's a bad idea, because it's a bad bet, because you have no idea where it's going to lead. If you major in something because you like it, because it's interesting, because you find it compelling, major in that because you're going to learn a lot, you're going to do really well, and you have no idea where it's going to lead. And so, you know, the reason that I like making decisions for fundamental reasons rather than instrumental reasons is not because I have this noble view of the world, is that instrumental reasons don't work because the world is so complicated. So you're better off

just making decisions for fundamental reasons, doing things you care about that are meaningful and that contribute and being alert to opportunity along the way, recognizing that, as you said earlier, that the path is not a path, it's the opposite of a line. It's a messy, three-dimensional squiggle. So many of our viewers and listeners are worried about their career. Like, I don't have clarity. I need the one thing. Can you give us a sense of your career? Like, how did you end up where you are now? Was it a straight line or something? else. I don't know what the opposite of a straight line is. You know, like, is a straight line a circle? Is a straight line like a jumble? No, there are no straight lines. I don't say this like to be glib or to be a joke. It's like there was not a huge amount of like long-term planning.

At a certain point, I think, I felt like I needed a long-term plan. But then what I also found is that any long-term plan immediately hits the ugly truth of reality. And then, becomes a joke. And so for me, I think very carefully about what's next. Any regrets you'd care to share? Anything that feels like, you know, that stands out? Yeah, all kinds of regrets. You know, I have regrets earlier in my life about not being a kind enough person, not bullying people, but actually being in situations where there was someone on the periphery or someone being left out and noticing that and not doing anything. That really bugs me. Like many people, there were a lot of people who talked about really,

regrets about, regret of not going to funerals. And there's one funeral that I'm thinking of, a guy who I worked with, I wasn't like a close friend, but I didn't go to his funeral because I was like really busy that day. And I still regret that. So that's a, that's a smaller one. I'm a, you know, for the folks who are interested in careers, which is a lot of your audience, I know, one of my favorite techniques is what Tina Seelig at Stanford University calls a failure resume. Like, I've made a failure resume, a list of all of my setbacks and mistakes and blunders, and you list all those. Hell yeah. You list all those, and then you think about, like, what did you learn from that? And then how can you apply it going forward? And so, so again,

you know, for me, you know, you can't spend a few years on a topic without it changing it, particularly a topic with such emotional freight as regret. But the idea that you should never look backward on your life and say, oh, I wish I had done things differently, is actually a terrible blueprint for living. And I think one of the problems, especially in North America, is that we're a little over-indexed on positivity. You know, positive emotions are incredibly important,

and they should outnumber our negative emotions, but we need some negative emotions because they instruct us. Our most prominent negative emotion is regret. Because regret teaches us, it instructs us, it clarifies us, it clarifies what we should be doing and how we should be doing it. And so we need to understand how to deal with our negative emotions. We can't ignore them like no regrets. We can't wallow in them like, oh my God, it's so terrible, I'm such an awful person.

So among the misunderstandings are we think that. When we experience regret, it's somehow an aberration, when in fact everybody experiences regret. Regret makes us human. Regret is part of the human condition. What's more, we think that regret makes us weaker when in fact the research shows that done right, regret can make us stronger, that we can enlist our regrets as an engine for forward progress.