Motivation Daily by Motiversity - One of the Greatest Speeches Ever | Daniel Pink

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

Daniel Pink's Life Changing Advice (Must Listen!!) #1 New York Times Best Selling Author shares his greatest advice. After hearing this you will rethink everything! Order Dan's New Book: The Power of Regret: https://amzn.to/3o66dMISpeakerDaniel PinkDaniel H. Pink is the author of seven books, including the forthcoming The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward (Riverhead, 2022). His other books include the New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind — as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human. Dan’s books have won multiple awards, have been translated into 42 languages, and have sold millions of copies around the world. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.Follow Daniel:https://twitter.com/danielpinkhttps://www.facebook.com/danielhpinkhttps://www.danpink.com/Music:Epidemic SoundDisclaimer: Some of the links above may be affiliate links. If used to make a purchase, we may receive a small commission. Thank you for your continued support! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello listeners. Motivosity is excited to share that we have launched a new podcast called Morning Motivation by Motivore. If you are looking to start your day with positivity and the most uplifting motivational audio, this is the show for you. For today's episode of Motivation Daily by Motivority Podcast, we are sharing a recent episode from the Morning Motivation Podcast. If you like it, go follow the show. New episodes are being released every week.

The link is in the description. No, there are no straight lines. So for me, there was not a huge amount of long-term planning. At a certain point, 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. What's next? E.L. Doctoro, the great novelist, had this lovely metaphor for writing.

I think it's true in some levels for careers and for life, which is that you're driving on a dark night and you have your headlights on, and you can only see, you know, a few meters ahead of you. And that's sometimes aggravating. But the thing is, you can make the whole journey that way. And that's sort of how I feel about it. So what I do, when you asked about books, it's like, I don't have any long-term strategy for the books.

I just find something that I find an idea, a set of stories, a concept that I find so irresistible that I'm willing to endure the torture of writing it and to get the pleasure of being able to talk about it for the rest of my life. 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. So what I'm trying to do in this book is reclaim regret as an indispensable emotion. What's more is that in a weird way, regret also taught me about.

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. I think you're going to see regret in a new life and not be scared of it, but instead realize that regret gives you the clues to lead a life of success and meaning and contribution. One of the things that's interesting that I find is that we tend to think that leadership is about, mostly about assertion. mostly about announcing and talking, when in fact I think that it is as much about humility and listening as it is on anything. And the thing is, it's like most of us are terrible listeners, in part because in our schools we don't teach people to listen. If we had to distill it to four words, talk less, listen more. I understand that no regrets philosophy.

The problem is that it's not possible because we all have regrets. Now, we should try to minimize our future regrets, but the idea that 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 is, you know, 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. And our most prominent negative emotion is regret. And 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. 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. 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 what you have to do is, 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 view of negative emotions. Some of us think, oh, positive all the time. 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 systematic way. And I think there's a good way to do that. Don't ignore it. Don't dodge it. Just confront it. It's much less fearsome than you think. And this way that I think that we can process our regrets is very healthy.

So one thing you can do is you can refra—you know, like I feel like there's three simple steps that you can take to turn your regrets into engines for progress. One of them is to reframe the regret and the way you think about yourself. So a lot of times when we have a regret, one reason that we try to avoid it is that if we really confront it, we start lacerating ourselves, saying, you know, our self-talk is you're an idiot. What are you talking about? And what we should do instead is, it sounds gooey, but what we should do instead is treat ourselves with kindness. There's a body of research in what's called self-compassion, which is treating ourselves with kindness rather than contempt, thinking about our own missteps as part of the human condition, not something that only we do, looking at our missteps not as fully definitional of who we are, but it's just one part of who we are.

And so just sort of being a little better to ourselves. The second thing you can do, which we see, which is a reason why we had 16,000 people offer up their regrets, is disclosure. Disclosure is itself inherently valuable. We know that it relieves the burden, but the other thing, when we talk about our regrets or even right about them, we take this blobby, amorphous negative emotion and convert it into words, and that makes it less fearsome. and it begins the sense-making process. So there's a pile of evidence showing that talking about a regret, even writing about them privately, is a way to defang them.

And finally, what we need to do, which is essential, is we need to, you know, we can look inward, all right, we can express outward, but then we've got to move forward. And the way to do that, in my mind, is to take a step back and extract a lesson from it. What would you tell your best friend to do? If you were looking back on this decision 10 years from now, what would you want to have done? If someone else were in your position, what would she do?

And I think this process of looking inward and treating ourselves with some kindness, expressing outward and disclosing the regret as a way to make sense of it, and then moving forward by taking a step back and extracting a lesson, is relatively simple to do and allows us to take these regrets and not be scared of them and not let them debilitate us, but to enlist them as forces for moving forward. What I like to do is I'm sort of trying to reach the people on either side of that. So the people who feel debilitated by their regrets, in my view is, listen, take one, go through this process, you can enlist it as a force for good. But I also want to do a wake-up call to the people who think they don't have any regrets. And so what I want to do is in some sense, I guess,

normalize it because it is normal. That's the thing. Regrets are part of the human condition. They exist for a reason. They're part of our cognitive machinery. The only people without regrets are five-year-olds, people with brain damage and sociopaths. The rest of us have regrets, you know? And so instead of denying that humanity, let's embrace it and use it.