Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Duke Behavioral Economist: Why You’ll Regret the Risks You Don’t Take | Dan Ariely - EP 811

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

What if the thing you regret most someday isn't what you did—but what you never tried? In this episode of Passion Struck, John R. Miles sits down with behavioral economist and bestselling author Dan Ariely to explore why we make decisions that don't always serve our long-term well-being. Dan's research reveals a surprising pattern: in the moment, we tend to regret the risks we take. But when we look back over our lives, we often regret the risks we didn't take. The conversation goes far beyond risk. John and Dan explore why vulnerability is one of the biggest areas where people play it safe, how bureaucracy can drain passion from work, why companies struggle to measure the things that matter most, and what we may lose when we optimize everything for efficiency. They also discuss: Why we often choose short-term safety over long-term fulfillment The difference between regretting action and regretting inaction Why romantic relationships are one of the biggest areas where people avoid risk How bureaucracy can quietly kill motivation and passion Why companies measure productivity but struggle to measure care, connection, and meaning What happens when organizations treat people like functions instead of human beings Why AI's pursuit of efficiency could come at the expense of meaning and human development How feeling appreciated can influence motivation and performance Why investing in human capital should be treated differently than simply treating people as a cost The question you should ask yourself: Where in your life are you playing it safer than you really want to? Dan's larger message is difficult to ignore: the life we build isn't shaped only by the choices we make. It's also shaped by the chances we decide not to take. Pre-Order The Mattering Effect: https://matteringeffect.com/. Take the 90-second diagnostic to see if you're disappearing.Explore the Show: https://passionstruck.com/starter-packs/. New to Passion Struck? Start with the best episodes curated for you.Connect with JohnWebsite: https://johnrmiles.comBook John to Speak: https://johnrmiles.com/speaking/Substack: https://www.theignitedlife.net/Children’s Book — You Matter, Luma: https://youmatterluma.com/Support the Movement: https://startmattering.com/. Every human deserves to feel seen, valued, and like they matter. Wear it. Live it. Show it.Passion Struck — #1 Alternative Health Podcast. 85M+ downloads.DisclaimerThe Passion Struck podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Passion Struck or its affiliates. This podcast is not a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What if the things you regret today aren't the things you regret most when you look back at your life? When I sat down with behavioral scientists Dan Ariely, we talked about why we tend to regret the risks we take in the moment, but often regret the risks we didn't take when we look back years later. And then he shared what his research is finding about where we're playing at safest. Take a listen to this. In the short term, we regret the things that we did, but when you look at it from the perspective of time, you're upset with the risks you didn't take. The biggest gap I find, the area of life that they don't take enough risk, romantic love. And people basically say, not willing to be vulnerable.

It's your friend John, and welcome to Passionstruck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want. but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers

to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it. Welcome back to Passionstruck episode 811, and today we're continuing our series, The Adaptive Brain, how your mind learns, changes, and heals. Last week, we looked at change from three very different perspectives. Mark Manson challenged us to move beyond insight and actually change our behavior. Dr. David Perlmutter showed us how the biological environment we create can influence the

health of our brains. An actor Josh Dummel gave us a very personal look at how the environments we choose can shape the person we become. And today, we're turning to something that sits beneath all of those conversations. How do we make better choices? Because we can know what matters. We can know what we should do. We can even know what kind of person we want to become.

And still, our brains have a remarkable ability to steer us in another direction. That's what makes today's conversation with Dr. Dan Ariely so fascinating. Dan is a behavioral economist, professor, and bestselling author of Predictably Irrational. For decades, he's studied the strange gap between what we intend. to do and what we actually do and why we're often far less rational than we think. But one part of our conversation really stayed with me. Dan has been studying how we think about risk and his research suggests something counterintuitive. In the moment, we tend to regret the risk we take, but when we look back at our lives,

we often regret the risk we didn't take. And that raises a much bigger question. Where in your life are you playing it safer than you really want to? We also talk about risk, relationships, work, education, bureaucracy, technology, and even what happens when we become so focused on efficiency that we lose sight of what makes life meaningful itself. So let's dive in. Here's my conversation with Dan Ariely. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your hosting guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

Absolutely thrilled today to have Dan Ariely on Passion Struck. Dan, how are you today? I am lovely. I am lovely. First of all, it's a very nice name for a podcast, but I should say that I was thinking about passion since you wrote me. Why? What element of motivation you chose to capture.

There's lots of motivations. And I think it's one of the most interesting one. It's the top of all motivations, right? something that is driven by passion. You can imagine I want to be professional. You can imagine I want to do things well. I want to improve. I want to accomplish. There's lots of motivations. Lots of words to describe lots of elements of motivation. Passion is the highest order. I think when we get to that one, we've achieved a lot. Thank you for saying that. When I started this journey years ago, the term passion struck wasn't in my vocabulary at all. I happened to be having a conversation with a mentor,

and he made this statement to me that he goes, John, it seems like what you're describing is people go from being stuck to becoming passion struck. And I did what anyone would do after he said it. It clicked, and I went to Google to see if anyone owned the domain. And there it was on GoDaddy and the rest is history. very nice Dan when I look at your entire body of work and I have been a fan for a long time you go from predictably irrational to misbelief to your recent work on social connection

and to me it feels like you've been studying the same question from different angles why do human beings repeatedly move away from the things that would actually make life better is that kind of a fair characterization it's fair but let me explain it a little bit I think that I started by working on why people do things that are irrational. And very quickly I learned that irrational is not always not in our self-interest.

So I started by thinking about a narrower definition of irrationality. Why are people influenced by irrelevant options? Why are we attracted to zero? All kinds of things that are clearly not in our best interest. But later on I moved into describing things that don't make sense for our well-being, irrelevant of whether they are rational or irrational. And if we think about passion for a second, passion is an irrational term. If you wrote a model, often the rational person will go to work to get money to do something else,

sit on the beer, drinking beer or something. model is not the standard model of labor is not a model that we enjoy labor. Labor is negative. And we do it to get money so that we could do other things. And passion, if we said, is a high-order thing, is a very irrational term. But I move to embracing those things as part of humanity. And saying, okay, so let's look at what makes us human. What makes us human is running marathons, which is not enjoyable and climbing mountains and writing poetry and doing startup. And my challenge usually to people is to say, think about the most important three things you have done in your life. Write them down.

And now right next to each of them, how many years, month, weeks, days, and minutes they were accommodating. accompanied by joy versus by tears, frustrations, and so on. And people end up saying the things that we are the most proud of are not the things that make the most momentary happiness. Like this book I wrote did not result in years of laughter. It was frustrating and difficult. And I think that even though it's irrational, it's part of humanity. So going back to your question, I think that my role is to find out what are the things that we do that is actually in our long-term well-being and what are the things we do that are not in our long-term well-being.

And how do we do less of the ones that don't serve us and more of the one that serve us? Because if you look at passion, you can say, hey, people are doing this irrational thing. People go to work and they love what they're doing and they spend extra time and they research at home and they talk about work with her. It's irrational. Let's stop it. I think it's one of those things that it's irrational, but in a good way, in a way that makes us human. We have a capacity to be kind and we have a capacity to be generous and we have a capacity to love and to have the capacity to care and we have a capacity to be passionate. Let's not turn it off. Let's recognize how important it is and let's figure out how do we stop the things that we created in society that turn it off and how do we increase the things that turn it on.

And by the way, with passion or all the words that create extreme motivation, we have sadly created lots of things that turns it off. Yes. We certainly have in those things that are. earning it off only seemed to be growing. I'll continue. Stop me. You know what you want to talk about. But I started looking during COVID and a little bit after COVID at bureaucratic burden. And COVID was an interesting time because lots of companies moved to lots of things online. And online meant procedures.

And it's meant doing things without other people. and doing it in a self-service way. And procedures are designed for some average case. They're not designed to cover all cases. So I'll give you an example for me. I work at Duke University. Pre-COVID, the people from HR set not too far from our office. They would sometimes come for coffee.

We would somehow have receptions. They talk about research or something, and they would come. And we knew each other. And when I needed to solve something, like I had somebody in my lab from South America and the visa was delayed or something was happening, I would knock on the door,

I'd say, hey, we have a problem. And they would say, okay, let's see what we do. During COVID, and I'm telling you this specific example, but it's a representation of lots of things, during COVID, they worked from home, we worked from home. They never came back after COVID. They stayed working from home. And everything moved online.

And now when there's somebody with a visa problem, there's a form. And there's nobody to say, oh, I think we should, we could do this or we could do this or we could be flexible here or we could push this here. And as a consequence, and I'll use the visa example, I have many others, but as a consequence, I had people who their visas ran out. We couldn't do anything. And now we have an employee that we pay salary for, that we promised them working condition and salary,

but also a visa because they couldn't work without a visa. And now we don't give them visa. And we're saying it's not our fault. There was a process. It didn't fit the process. This is what happens when it doesn't fit the process. How motivated is that person now to go above and build? And especially when people work in other countries,

there are often cases that break the standard mold of employment. Sometimes you need to be on a call very early in the morning, very late at night. What's weakened for us might not be weekend for them. Things change. How likely is somebody going to say, you know what? It's Friday night or Saturday morning or 5 a.m., but we are connected to the mission. And it ends up that bureaucracy ends up killing people's motivation.

I think we have an inner need to feel connected to our job and to be passionate about it and to want it. And often not only we don't fuel and satisfy that need, We do the opposite. I was in a history, archaeological museum a couple of months ago, and I had a tour and I got to see all the labs. And first of all, the people, they were amazing.

It was one guy who was working, I think most of the day, to remove a speck of rust from an old coin. He didn't want to use chemicals. He wanted to remove it perfectly and to stay with the best specimen after that possible. But I asked them, I said, look, you're talking with very ancient artifacts. Let's say clay, for example.

And you have people who lived in a very different period. They didn't have the luxuries we have. What percentage of the work, I asked them, do you think they did to create something functional versus to create something beyond that? Okay, so create a vessel. How much work went to create it a bit more pretty that needed to be? or more symmetrical than needed to be. I asked them what is the percentage of efforts

that went not for the productivity itself, but something beyond that. And they said it a lot. They further their opinions and so on, but they said that a potmaker in the ancient world cared about their reputation. And they cared about the aesthetics, and they cared about the symmetry,

and they cared about signs of beauty. And they wouldn't let things leave the floor if they did not pass some self-standard that was way more important that just is this carrying water? We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Dan Ariely. As you're listening today, I'd like you to sit with one question. What risks have you been avoiding

that might actually matter to the life you're trying to build? Dan's research reminds us that our minds are often much better at protecting us from short-term discovery than helping us think about the life. We'll look back on years from now. That idea connects deeply with the work behind my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect, coming this October. Because mattering isn't just about being seen by other people, it's also about having the courage to show up for the things, relationships, and purpose that makes our lives meaningful. If you'd like to go deeper, you'll find the companion workbook for the Adaptive Brain series inside the Ignited Life on Substack.

You can find links for both the Ignited Life and my book in today's show notes. Now, a quick break for today's sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. You're listening to Passion Struck on the Passion Struck Network. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Dan Ariely. When I look at my own experience, given the view that you were just talking about, at one point in my career, I was a senior executive at Dell. And I had thousands of employees who were working with me. And about 90% of them lived in different

geographies than the United States. And so during that period of my life, it was brutal. I was getting up at 4.30 in the morning because I was dealing with Asia and the staff in Europe. I'd then work my whole day, get off of work. And then a couple hours later, I was back at it, working with folks I had in China, Malaysia, and India again. And after a while, I just started to question, which really goes to the work I'm doing today. So much of what I was valued for was my utility, the output that I was delivering. But the more I was doing this job, the more I was losing every single sense of who I was. And really feeling more and more unseen personally. And my passion was just draining from me more and more every day till I reached a point of existential numbness.

And I think this is happening more and more to people as we're losing the deeper needs that we have for identity, belonging, certainty, et cetera. And as I look at AI and what it's doing, I think it's only making it worse. What are your thoughts? Yeah. So let's take AI separately because it's a worthwhile talking about it by itself. But let's think about ourselves. And let's say 20 years ago, what would be our expectations from our employers if something went badly?

If we got injured, if we had a disability. If there was an emergency in the family and we need to take some time off to take care of somebody. If we had some psychiatric episode, whatever it is, what would be our expectations? And we as people, we said we developed evolutionary, and we developed evolutionary in an environment

where the entities that were with us were there for a long time, and we created codependencies. This is friends. I help you, you help me, And we have expectations from friends. If you would call tomorrow to your best friend and say, hey, I'm moving, would you come and help me move this heavy table? And they would say, I have a form. Please submit a request and three copies for this.

We'll get back to, you know, friendship you expect. There's a set of expectations. And those expectations have gains and they have costs. they have gains because we expect and we give a lot if you think about what you give to your friends we give a lot to our friends what if you had a friend that you knew that in a time of need they will do nothing to help you

here's a friend that are very happy to meet you very happy to talk to you but if you ever needed something they would not be there for you how likely would you be there for them Not that much. It's just not part of our repertoire. Our repertoire is we live in a small group of people and we have this bidirectional relationship

and we expect basically what we give. I'm not saying we expect exactly the same thing, but it's mostly the same. Now as companies have transitioned to being less relationship and more functional, many of us are encountering the situation. and says, oh, I had no idea.

I thought we were in a different kind of a relationship. And sometimes we learn it about ourselves, and sometimes we learn it from other people's experience. But all of a sudden, we learned that relationship is very different. And now it is difficult for us to stay passionate. Imagine that being passionate about your work you do is good for the workplace, but it's also good for you. you go happy, you're excited, you're enthusiastic, you have extra energy from itself,

all of those things are happening. It's great. But now imagine I tell you this organization that you work for, they really don't care about you. And they actually are putting you in a cubicle, and they give you a number, they move your cubicle from place to place, they have these policies that show that they clearly don't care about your time or productivity or don't even want to hear your input. Nobody ever says, thank you. You're just here. Don't confuse the facts. You're here for a salary. Your functional cog in the machine, how motivated would you be? And the answer is not so much. In the face of an

organization that tells you that you are, they don't care about you, you're just the function that you are. It's very hard to look at the organization. I said, but I really care. It's fine. I don't think people, many people can be like this. I really care about you. You can really don't care about me. And this would last for a long time and I'm fine with that. It will not happen. So I think organizations became bureaucratic organizations communicate to people that we don't trust you. Please, you can go and have lunch, but we want 17 receipts and proofs. We don't care about your time because clearly what we're doing is not to optimize anything for you. We're doing things from some other goal. And please don't try and do anything different. Do the same thing

that we set up for you to do. Everything else is going to be too difficult. Don't even try. Those organizations don't get to get our passion and everybody loses. Imagine two factories. One factory is able to create motivation and passion. One is not. The factory that has motivation and power. People are happy to go to. Highly productive. Probably stay a little bit extra. Maybe come on the weekend if needed. And then the management is happy and the shareholders are happy. What about the organization that doesn't know how to create purpose, motivation, passion? People hate going. They probably come late, leave early, take more days off. If there's an emergency and something to be done on the weekend, they don't show up. much harder to manage people in that organization.

Certainly, the shareholders are not happy. So I think it's one of those things that companies could be here and you could be here. And if they're here, everybody's better off. The employees are better off, the management, the shareholders. And if you're here, everybody's worse off. Live this passionate life and don't go to work for many hours a day, but do the least possible to do and hate every moment. moment of that's the extreme of course but anyway so that that I think is the place we're going to

and I think we're going there for two main reasons the first thing is that there are things that are easily measurable and there are things that are not easily measurable and we love the things that are easily measurable what is easily measurable what time you show up for work what time you leave. Did you write any emails to anybody else during work? You remember all these technologies surveyed us. Do you look at the screen while you're at work or do you're looking away? We can measure lots of things and we focus on those things.

And what can't we? What can't we measure? We can't measure passion. We can't measure care. I used to run this study and I would ask people, I said, imagine that your current performance at work is 100. How much lower you can go and not lose your job? Quite a lot.

At the hand, now, I can go quite a lot, which means that at the moment people believed that they were creating voluntary effort. I'm here. I can go to, let's say, 80 without losing my job. It means that all of this thing I'm doing because I want to, not because I have to. And then I would ask them how much higher you could go above a hundred if you're truly passionate about what you're doing.

It's quite a lot as well. And that's kind of a waste of humanity. And so if you say what's driving it, I think the first thing is that companies love to measure things. It's easier to measure some things and not others. And the things that are difficult to measure is things like passion. I can measure how many hours you sit by the computer. Very hard to measure your passion. And I used to go to Wall Street executives,

people who invest in companies, and say, you need to measure those things. You need to measure how connected people feel to the company, how connected they feel to the goal, to the mission, to the director manager, how much they feel appreciated, being treated fairly, all of those things. I have lots of evidence that all of this is, important. And they would say, we love only measurable things. And I said, I understand. I would love for

that to be measurable things, but you're wrong, I would say. So imagine that I asked you two questions. Ask you how much in pain are you? And I would ask you, how much in love are you with your significant other? I said, I don't have an independent way to get those things. There's no neurological way for me to measure pain or love that is better than your number. I can't measure the number of emoticons. You send your significant other. I said, but pain on the negative side and love on the positive side, it's an internal state.

And you can say, oh, I'm not measuring internal state, but then you're giving up a lot. Like imagine we thought about humanity without thinking about pain and love. It wouldn't be the same. So one big part of the puzzle, I think, is that we want measurable things, and some of the most important things in human motivation are not easily measurable. Okay, it's not that they are not measurable, they're not objectively measured. They need this subjective element.

The other thing that happened is that companies are becoming very concerned with fear rather than progress. Imagine that we're creature in the jungles. and imagine that we go hunting and the hunting goes well and we hunt a rabbit. That's great. Imagine the hunting doesn't go well and a tiger hunts us. That's terrible.

But the good is also only a little good. The bad is really bad. So nature has made us focus more on the bad side and on the good side. Nature is okay, hunting is great, but you certainly don't want to be eaten by tiger. So let's first worry about it down. And it turns out that we still walk around with that tool.

We're still more afraid of making mistakes than we are to making positive progress. And for organizations, and by the way, it's worse with social media. If you're a CEO of a company and you make a brilliant decision, how much news cover would you have? If you're a CEO of a company and you made a terrible mistake, the opposite of the brilliant one, How much news cover will you have and how long people remember it? There's something very much about that. So we as people don't like risk. We don't like mistakes.

Organizations even more don't like risk and don't like mistakes. And the organization that is becoming a bureaucratic organization, especially doesn't like risk. So think about the bureaucratic organization. A bureaucratic organization really becomes two sub-organizations. One is concerned with the mission. One is concerned with making no mistakes. That's what the bureaucracies.

Everything runs smoothly and no mistake. Imagine that you're a farmer company. You have people who want to invent new medications, take risk, try new things, and you want people who won't, nobody should ever complain about anything. And as organization become two sub-organization, one with the declared goal of the organization, and one controlling the bureaucracy, the bureaucratic one ends up winning.

And the bureaucratic one ends up winning because they are closer to the rules of the law. the organization. So there's a rule for a rule and things go worse. We said that we have this capacity for caring, but organizations have a desire for objective measures which make it tough, and organization develop bureaucracies. And I understand why people develop bureaucracies. It's designed to prevent mistakes, and I study lots of mistakes. I see people making mistakes. but at the same time, bureaucracies with no human judgment end up being not productive organizations.

And then, if I may, I know I'm giving a long answer. The last thing is this question about AI, and I think it's a, of course, there's a lot to talk about, but I would say the following. I would say one of the things that frightens me about AI is efficiency versus meaning. That's what you mentioned in your question. So imagine, so I wrote a few books.

Every book I wrote took me a really long time. I made lots of mistakes along the way. You get a final book at the end, but I went into 17 wrong directions. I started something, I discovered it wasn't right, I went back, I tried something else. The process was very long. I learned a lot in the way, much more than the reader of the bookettes, but it's a complex process. Imagine I now would work with AI. And I would say, maybe I don't need 17 versions.

Maybe I don't need to make mistakes. Maybe I can just publish two books a year. Why publish one every three years? Let me work faster on this. How enjoyable would it be? I think about painting. I don't paint, but imagine people paint. and you feel the feedback from the brushstroke and you make a mistake and you try and correct it.

How is that experience linked to articulating a very good probe to Gemini and having it create the exact painting you want to do? It produces flawlessly. So I worry that in this day and age, we are going to. after efficiency, and I understand why, and efficiency has clear, direct, short-term benefits, but I worry about what we're leaving behind. If I started writing with AI, I would say, where would I be as a passionate creator three years from now? Will I be a good prompt creator? But would I still think about this as my books? Would I know as much? Would I have the same human capital?

And I'll give you the following thought experiment. Imagine AI is getting better. And it's not only software, it's also hardware, so robots. And you just happen to have two apartments, one next to each other. and one of them has your spouse and one of them has a robotic spouse and the robotic spouse is always nice to you and has no complaints and you come home at night and you say which door do I go into do I go into the complex human being who might be in a complex mood today or do I go into the one that today for sure I know will make me feel comfortable and let's say you go at least occasionally

to the AI one. After three years of this, how is your relationship? Not so good, because you've made lots of sacrifices in the short term to pick something that is fun at the moment, but might be not as fulfilling. But it's not just about the moment.

You have destroyed something that can have real beauty from creating. Anyway, very long answer. I'm going to try to give my thoughts on a couple of those different areas. First, I'm going to talk about the work environment. So this is a story. Forgive me for the listeners because I've talked about this a lot. But before I was at Dell, I was a senior executive at Lowe's.

And when I first got there, I inherited this team. I had been there for a couple of weeks. And I get welcomed into the head of HR's office. And she says, John, we have a big issue. and we're going to need you to fix it. It turns out that they had just done the first ever employee engagement survey in the company's history in my group was ranked dead last in the company out of 350,000 people. My group was last.

And as I looked at how to approach fixing it, this was during a time when Dan Pink's book Drive had come out. I was reading Chip and Dan Heath's books, etc. And so I really started to study Richard Ryan and Edward D.C.'s self-determination theory. And as I got more into it, I realized that the group had competence, but they really had no autonomy or agency over the decisions that they were allowed to make. And they really lacked relatedness to other areas of the business. And most of them, if you look at the concept of a line of sight, had no idea how anything that they were. doing was benefiting a customer in the store, shareholder value, or any of the metrics that the company was measuring. Plus, to your point, we were really measuring them on all operational statistics,

but we weren't measuring them at all on who they were as people. So I completely changed the scorecard of how not only I was measuring them, but I was measuring myself. And I spent a tremendous amount of my time going into the trenches and just trying to understand the people I was working with and to making them feel like they mattered. We passed down authority into the organization to the lowest level, allowing people to influence the work that they were doing. And then we were measuring how much did people feel they belonged? How much did they think their managers were listening to their input and valued their input all the way up the chain of command. And when we implemented all these things, within two years, we went from the lowest ranked in employee engagement to the second

highest in the company. And I think there's something to be said for that. Unfortunately, Lowe's didn't take the findings from what happened and implement it in other groups. Had they done that, I think it could have changed the whole company. Very important story. I think that implementing is harder than you give it credit. I think you need it. Take something like feeling appreciated. I've seen company implementing make the employee feel appreciated in a very mechanical way.

Here are all the list of people you haven't written a thank you email to them. Go ahead and do that. I think there's a question of how do you implement and you need the person implement to really buy into that being important. And not only that, but if you go back to your exercise of implementing those changes, these took resources. You looked at the long term and you're willing to cut down short-term productivity because people were busy with other things.

They were thinking in a different way. Maybe some people were not comfortable during the the initial stage, it's really taking a long-term perspective and hurting some of the things the company could be measuring the short term for long-term gain, making it very tough to do. Dan, one of the most essential things that I did during that period is hundreds of employees, and I would write each one of them a birthday card and a Christmas holiday card. but the birthday card, it wasn't just, hey, Dan, happy birthday. I wanted to make sure that person knew that they were seen and valued.

So I wrote them very specific observations of something that they had done that really made a difference to how things were unfolding. And I can't tell you how many people, even to this day, mentioned to me the cards that they received because they had never gotten one like that before and they never got one after. Now, I have to tell you, I hear lots of stories like this, and it's always very sad. And it's very sad because you say, how can it be that somebody didn't get a card like this? The reality is that when you take the human perspective and you go into the workplace, it is so easy to see how to improve things because it feels as if nobody cares.

Now, really what happens is that companies have taken HR department and made up into compliance officers. If you take in the last module for something or another. But an HR department should have come to you. You read the research on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and so on, but the HR department, it should have been their job. It's not your profession. It should be their profession. They should come and you say, hey, John, we notice you're doing so well.

or second from last. Turns out that it's a really important theory about intrinsic motivation. Turns out autonomy is incredibly important for this. Here are some things. Let's work on that together. When was the last time in HR department did that? So when I see these things,

it's wonderful that they work. The social scientists, I say, oh, look at this. Tiny improvement. Send a letter. It makes a big difference. By the way, for me, one of the things that I found very effective, was to ask people, what are your five-year career development plans?

And what can I do to help you achieve those? What courses? Yeah, can I extend that one? Because we did that, but then we extended it. We said, not just what are your career goals, but what are your life goals? Because I was trying to get, because if a person's not happy outside of work, they're not going to be happy inside of work and vice versus. So I would ask them, are you trying to build a family?

Do you have passions like music outside of work? Do you want to go on to continuing education? And the more you leaned into that and people realized that you cared about them, man, it changed. They opened up in ways that were so tremendous to their commitment to wanting to do more. Yeah, that's fantastic. So it's wonderful as a social scientist to see what kind of small changes can actually be beneficial. And it's sad as a human being how much low-hanging fruit there is because companies are, I don't know whose job it is to think about this.

But imagine that we called all the energy in an organization human capital. Who is responsible for human capital? We've done a lot of research for a while about the relationship between human capital and stock market performance. And in that process, what I would try to tell people is that I think human capital is an accounting mistake. When a company buys a warehouse, it's an investment. It appears on the books. When a company invests in its people, it's a cost.

What if we stop thinking about investing in people is a cost? What if there was another ledger on the annual report in the... the quarterly report that we talked about our investment to human capital. What did we do to get our workforce to be smarter, more talented, more motivated, more excited, less concerned, more committed. Now, not as easy to write as how much money did we pay on a warehouse, but it's an unbelievable thing to think about that we don't quantify it and that we just quantify all those investments as if it's a loss.

I got to work very closely with the head of supply chain and the head of distribution, and this was during a time when Lowe's was building out tons of distribution centers. And I think one of the key successes to the advancement of getting people to do things like improve cycle time, those types of things that workers don't really want to do is the leader who was leading this initiative, of Steve Szilaghi was huge at making people feel that they were seen by him. And he would walk into these distribution centers that are a million and a half square foot,

thousands of employees, and he would know people's names. He would know their wives' names, their kids' names. And he would remember that. And I think because he was so good at that, it got people to believe in him and in the actions. And I don't think, if, a different leader was doing the same program, they would have had the same result that he did. I told you that we've been looking at how companies treat their employees, how the employees

react to the company, and what it means for stock market success. The first good thing to say connected to our conversation is that we found that everything that matters is on the intrinsic side, not on the extrinsic side. If you look at payments, titles, health benefit, retirement, These are all nice things to have, but do we see that the directly influence performance as measured by stock market performance? The answer is no. When you look at the intrinsic motivation, I mean, lots of movement. And one of the most powerful one is, do you feel appreciated? I just think what it feels like to go into organization feeling appreciated versus feeling that nobody cares.

It's huge. It's huge. Dan, there's a question I really wanted to ask you. I've spent years studying the work of Tom Gillivich at Cornell, and I've spoken with Brony Ware, who wrote The Five Regrets of the Dying about the regrets people carry near the end of life. And Tom's research suggests that many of our deepest regrets come from inaction,

and Ronnie repeatedly heard that people wish they had lived more authentic, and had invested more deeply in relationships as the number one thing, which kind of mirrors the work of Bob Waldinger. Does that align with what you're seeing? And where do you think those regrets actually begin? So just to maybe cover for the audience, when you think about regrets from actions versus reaction inaction, you say which ones are the most dominant one?

So regret from action can be, I asked somebody out and they said no. I shouldn't have asked her out. That could be a regret from action. Regret from inaction could be I did not try to sign up for this course for improvement, or I did not learn scuba diving, or something I didn't. And Gilovich, by the way, one of the most brilliant people and researchers. And he's also, I think, a role model in every possible way is a human being advisor. Really, there's a list of people who are just good in everything. He's there. He's one of the

very few. But when you think about action and inaction, you say, what is the mixer of our regret from action to inaction in real time versus when we later look back at our lives? And what Gilevich is showing in such an interesting way is that in real time, we regret the things that we did, and end up paying badly. And that's the cost of risk. You do think that are bad and you get a bad reaction. But when you look at it from the perspective of time, you're upset with the risks you didn't take.

And the question is, why is that? And it turns out that in the short term, we look at the specific action we took and you say, ah, I should have known. this woman that I asked her out and she laughed at my face, I could have seen that sign. I could have seen that. So we focus very narrowly on that one incident.

And we say, I can imagine that one incident going a different way. And because of that, we regret actions. Because within actions, there's nothing, we didn't do anything. You can't say, oh, why didn't I take this course yesterday? No, it didn't happen. When we don't do something. We don't do it for a long time. It's not a single moment that you can say my mistake.

So in the short term, we have this what is called counterfactual thinking. If I did something else, this could have gone elsewhere and we focus on that. In the long term, we don't look at the specific. We look at the general picture. And we say, what kind of life have I lived? Forget the little details, this rejection or that rejection. What kind of life did I live? And I'm doing now a lot of research on risk.

And I ask people, I say, okay, the scale from zero to 100, where are you right now in the level of risk that you take? And where do you think you should be for living a good life? You define it however you want. And people think in general that they're undertaking risk. We're here and we should be taking more risk if we wanted to live a good life. And then I break it by areas of life in your investments, in your career, in your education, in your relationship with your kids, in your hobbies, the way you eat, the way you sleep, and so on.

The biggest gap I find what people report of the area of life that they don't take enough risk, do you want to guess what it is? Relationships. Romantic love. And people basically say, not willing to be vulnerable. I'll give you the main version. The main version says, what if she laughs at me? Or what if she's sarcastic?

But then, of course, if you go to people at the end of a 30-year relationship, and you say, what do you regret? I regret never reaching heights of romantic love. I regret not trying. Yeah. That's a huge one. Well, Dan, for those who would love to learn more about your books, your research, everything else, where are the best places for them to go? So I have my standard website is danaurelli.com.

D-A-N-A-R-I-E-L-Y.com. All my books are there. I also have a website where I complain about bureaucracy. It's called the Center for Advanced Bureaucracy. And I basically, it's my rant against bureaucracy. But John, I'm writing now about risk. And when I finish, if it's okay, I'll show the book with you, see what you think. Because I think that for human thriving, both organization and us,

we have to improve our effort around taking risk and we have to figure out what is holding us back from taking more risk. I would love to read it. I felt like I could have done this interview for another four hours. So I hope over time there'll be parts two, three, and four to it. Because I feel like you and I could talk for a very long time on many different subjects. Dan, it was really agree. Dan, it was such an honor to have you today.

And I wanted to thank my friend Nirib Ashon for doing the invite to us as well. But thank you so much for coming on Passion Strath. Thank you so much. I hope today's conversation with Dan Ariely gave you something to think about. For me, the idea that keeps coming back is this. We may regret some of the things we do in the moment, but when we look back over our lives, we may regret even more the things we never tried. That's a very different way of thinking about risk, and it makes you wonder where you might

be playing it safer than you really want to. If something from this conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear your biggest takeaway. Share it with me on Substat, LinkedIn, or Instagram. and if you know someone who might need this reminder, send them today's episode. And if you haven't already, be sure to follow Passion Struck on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, so you'll never miss an episode. Because on Thursday, we're continuing the Adaptive Brain series with Dr. Margie Lockman. Margie has spent more than 30 years studying what happens to us across adulthood through

the midlife in the United States study, one of the longest running studies of adult development. And she challenges one of the biggest assumptions we have about getting older. that midlife is simply a period of decline. In fact, her research reveals something more hopeful. Midlife can be a time when our sense of control, confidence, purpose, and ability to contribute are actually at their strongest. And she left me with a message I think so many of us need to hear. It's not too late to change,

and there's probably a lot more life ahead of you than you realize. I think you're going to love that conversation. No, we cannot predict how long we're going to live clearly. But the statistics are such that when you get to 40, 50, you still have plenty of time left. And you can make those remaining years really awesome and you can be healthy and happy. I think it's really important to focus on things that you are gaining rather than losing, thinking about the gains rather than the losses and trying your best to minimize the losses so that you really can live the rest of your life in a really positive way,

which benefits not only you, but also those around you who are depending on you. those younger and older. Until then, remember, the risks we don't take can shape our lives just as much as the choices we make. I'm John Miles, and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion-struck.