Plain English with Derek Thompson - The Meaning of Life and the Power of Regret

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

Derek goes deep with bestselling author Dan Pink on his new book, 'The Power of Regret.' This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the Sixth & I historic synagogue in Washington, D.C. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Dan Pink  Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The press box is here to catch you up on the latest media stories. Hosted by Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker, these guys have the insight on the biggest stories you care about. Check out the press box on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today I want to talk about the meaning of life. I'm kidding. Well, I'm kind of kidding. So in 1938, some researchers from Harvard University

enrolled about 270 undergrad dudes and kept in touch with them for the next 80 years. 80 years. The goal of this study was to learn the secret of a good life. And they measure just about everything you could possibly imagine. IQ, handwriting style, blood earnings, testicles. Yep. The limitations of the study are pretty obvious. These are all white men who went to Harvard. Nonetheless, in 2017, 80 years in the life of this study, Harvard summarized its findings. They said, the one thing, most predictive of happiness out of everything in the world. Can you guess?

Money? No. Health? Important. But no. It was the quality of your relationships. Relationships with your parents, with a partner, spouse, friends, even with yourself. I remember when I read that conclusion a few years ago, my first thought was, all the Disney cliches are true.

Like, this study is neat, but Harvard University might have been able to save its own. $50 million, 80 years, and a crap ton of filing space, if people just watched Dumbo and took notes. And this is an issue that I have with a lot of self-help as a genre, that the genre is basically the reshuffling of cliches that you know are true, but like maybe you need a reminder to prioritize it. Be true to yourself. Okay, take responsibility. Yep. Happiness equals expectations minus reality. But recently I read a book that Blessedly does the opposite. It takes a cliche, no regrets, we've all heard that one a million times, no regrets, and blows it up. The book is The Power of Regret by Dan Pink, and I recently interviewed him live at the Washington,

D.C. Synagogue Sixth and I in front of a live audience, which was a huge thrill, and that is the interview you're going to hear today. Dan's book is very simple, and yet also, I think, pretty profound. It's about why people around the world and Americans in have developed an unhealthy relationship with regret. We tell people don't live in the past. Don't linger on your mistakes. When living in the past, briefly, and lingering on your mistakes, just enough, is what learning is about. It's what growth is about. And there's something a half-step deeper. If you ask enough people what they regret and you piece together all of their answers, a friendship lost, a risk not taken, a bad habit left unfixed.

What you get is a kind of photo-negative image of that 80-year Harvard study. Ask enough people what they regret, and they will tell you the meaning of life. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Welcome, everyone. It is such a thrill to have an in-person event. Give yourself an applause. So at the beginning of the pandemic, I made it a point in my life to meditate every single day. And my mind was like a dog on a leash.

It would scurry, scurry, scurry, and then I would hear someone in tone in my head, bring it back to the breath. Bring it back to the breath. They kept telling me, don't think about the future, don't think about the past, no anxiety, no regret, be here now. Dan's book has undone 20 months of meditation expertise. Dan, tell me why you call...

Well, first, you're welcome. You say that no regrets is life-thwarting nonsense. Why? Yes, I also call it another word that is often referred to as a barnyard epithet that I don't want to say out loud in a synagogue. So first, before I do... I'll answer your question, Derek, but first, thanks for coming out. Holy moly.

This is one of the first in-person book events in Washington, D.C. in two years, and you're here, and you made it happen, and give yourselves a round of applause for that. I'm so grateful. Now, so No Regrets is a very popular philosophy. It is in songs. Ella Fitzgerald has a song called No Regrets. Eminem has a song called No Regrets. called No Regrets. Emily Harris has a song called No Regrets. There are songs about that. Edith

P.F. had a song about that. It is in television commercials. I have in the book, as Derek, as you know, dozens of people who have a tattooed onto their bodies. And here's the thing. It's a really, really bad idea. It's a really bad idea. And the reason it's a bad idea is that everybody has regrets. Every single human being has regrets. The only people without regrets are five-year-olds, because their brains haven't developed, people with lesions in the orbital frontal cortex of their brain, some people with Huntington's disease and Parkinson's,

and sociopaths. Everybody, you can always get a laugh with sociopaths. You're right, sociopaths, only can laugh at. And so, you know, this idea that no regrets is a sign of a serious problem. And the reason for that is that regret is painful. It hurts, but it serves a function. It serves a very important function because it makes us human and it makes us better. And so what I'm trying to do here is just shake people and say, stop it.

This is a really stupid idea. It actually is a life-thwarting idea because if we think that having no regrets is an act of courage, It's not. What is courage is staring your regrets in the eye and doing something about them. Before we jump into the book, how did you come up with the idea of writing a book to try to explode the ubiquitous notion that we should not regret? Well, part of it, Derek, as you know, because Derek, Derek just covers a whole swath of science and economics and other kinds of things.

And one of the things Derek does very well is translate a lot of the academic research into popular understanding. And one of the things you understand about academic researchers is that old line that all research is me search. And, you know, here's the thing. I'll give you that there was a, if there was a catalytic moment, it was when our elder daughter, my wife Jessica is here, give her a round of applause.

We have a, we have a, we have a, our elder daughter graduated from college in 2019. So we're at this graduation, and it's really long. And there's all kinds of stuff going on, and I just start spacing out. And but then I started sort of having this out-of-body experience where I said, wait a second, how can this kid be graduating from college? I mean, she was just born. And then I said, how can I have a kid graduating from college?

Because I'm like 26. And as I started thinking about that, I started looking back on my own college experience, and I said, God, dang, you know, I wish I'd taken more risks. I wish I had been kinder to people. And I came back and started talking to people about that. And to my surprise, instead of recoiling when I brought that up, because you're not supposed to talk about regrets. They leaned in, and they wanted, oh, my God, you know, I know what you're talking about.

And, you know, as a writer, when people, you mentioned something and people lean in, you know, you got something. And actually, forgive this long-winded story, is that I was actually working on an entirely different book at the time. I was working on something completely different. And it's like, golly, like, I can't get this idea of regret out of my mind. I think part of it was my position in life. That is, I don't know if I would have written this book in my 30s.

In my 50s, it felt kind of inevitable because suddenly there's mileage behind me. But hopefully there's mileage ahead. And I'm like, okay, I got to learn from what happened there. to apply over here. And so I surreptitiously started doing research on this topic of regret, looking at the academic research. And about a month later,

I sent my editor, my beloved editor, Jake, an email. Hey, Jake, good news and bad news. That book that you think I've been working on for the last two months, I haven't done a thing. The good news is that I have a better idea. See 25-page proposal attached?

And so that's how I decided to do that. On a writer's note, I totally agree that if you have an idea that other people want to commiserate with you about, that they want to lean in and complain with you about that idea, you're like, if they like the idea, if they say, hmm, that's interesting. B minus, if they say, I want to complain about this for another hour, then you have an idea for a 250-page book. Absolutely. Mazotov on recognizing that.

The book is built around a world regret survey. It's a fascinating map of 17,000 people around the world and the regrets they were willing to share with you online. Tell me a little bit about this project and how it evolved to become, in my opinion, really the quantitative spine of the book. Yeah, so I did a couple of things in this book. One of them was something I called the American Regret Project,

which was a quantitative survey. And the thing about that, which is so interesting, is that in contrast to when I first started out doing this, it's possible for someone like me on his own to do pretty sophisticated survey research for a very low cost as sort of mostly a one-man band. And I was able to do the largest survey, a very, very good public opinion survey

of American attitudes about regret that's ever been conducted. And we found, as Jackie was saying, it's like, if you ask people the question of... So you ask people, do you have regrets? They say no. If you ask people the question, how often do you look back on your life and wish you had done something differently? And you don't say the R word.

You get 1% of Americans saying never. You got 83% saying they do it at least occasionally. So I did that. That was kind of interesting. I really think the game changer, for me, at least just conceptually, was I decided to say, invite people. I need material. all right and I said okay I'm going to do is I'm put up a website and flack it a little bit and encourage people to contribute their regrets and if I get a few hundred regrets

that'll give me some really interesting materials and stories for this book with literally for like two or three tweets suddenly we had 15,000 from all over the world we have we now have in the database oh as Derek said over 17,000 regrets from people people in 105 countries. And that proved to be fascinating because I would come into my office every day, fire up the Qualtrics database, and read through these regrets.

And it was endlessly interesting and kind of amazing what people were willing to share from all over the place. And also then, over time, I started seeing patterns. I think what's interesting is the fact that you got 15,000 testimonies

of regrets in a matter of days, They suggest to me that all these people were trying to meditate like me, and they were pushing the regrets deep, deep, deep down into their soul. And you were just like, you know, an oil scouter. You set up the oil there right over these regrets, and that they came shooting up. That's a great metaphor. Yeah, that's a great metaphor, because I do think that it is out there.

And there is not a single person who I've had a conversation with recently when I say, well, do you have any regrets? And about a third of people say no, and then they tell me their regret. and then the other two-thirds just tell me their regret because people want to talk about it. And, you know, as we might talk about later, the very act of disclosing one's regrets is helpful. That's a positive, beneficial thing on a number of different levels. I think if I imagine myself as someone in the audience, I'm thinking, okay, you have this incredible map of things that people have regretted. You have communicated to me that regrets are a kind of photo-negative of what makes a good life.

So what is it that people regret so that I can go on and live a full good life? You identify four core regrets, foundational regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets, and connection regrets. Let's go category by category. First, let's go with foundational. I want to read an example of a foundational regret from the book. Quote, this is Female 45 Minnesota. Quote, following a career path for money instead of for my passion or work I would actually enjoy. My mother convinced me I would starve to death if I pursued a career in art.

So now I am stuck behind a desk, tangled in management red tape, and the life is draining out of me. End quote. It's an uplifting book. Foundation regrets. I would argue that one's a boldness regret. But I'll come back to that. And I will answer your question, but as is my custom, let me give you a discursive contextual preamble. So one of the things, so I did this quantitative survey saying I'm going to crack the nut by doing this survey of regret.

And what I wanted to try to find out was what do people regret, because there's academic research on what people regret. And it was kind of all over the place. Sometimes the researchers said it's education, it is careers, it's romance, it's family. And I like, okay, I feel like I can crack the nut on this. And so I went out with this very large sample, 4,489 Americans, gorgeously representative of this great country and asked people their regrets and had them put them in categories. And saying this idea that people regret a lot of things isn't very satisfactory. And then I came back with my results.

We crunched the numbers and we discovered that people regret a lot of things. Those categories weren't telling us anything. But when I went to these qualitative things, I started seeing that there were patterns underneath. And let's come back to foundation. here for a moment. We had a lot of people around the world, for instance, who regretted smoking. Okay, that's a health regret. We had a lot of people around the, especially in America, who regretted not saving money. Someone who said, one guy who's in the book is like, I'm 43 years old,

I've been working for 25 years and I haven't saved a dime. So that's a financial, financial regret. And what I found over and over again is that with his first category are these foundation regrets, which are, which sound like this, if only I'd done the work. people who regret not working hard enough in school. A lot of people, I know we have a lot of educators here. Thank you for being educators, especially in this fraught moment. But you can tell a lot of these kids later on in life, I told you so, because they're going to regret not working hard in school,

not working hard in school, not making good health decisions, not saving money. So it's a small thing that accumulate into larger consequences over time. And it's ESOP. People regret being the grasshop or not the ant. And what does that mean? It means that they regret if they fiddle away all of their time and don't plan for the future in some way. And actually, it's really about work and conscientiousness

more than anything else. You have a lot of laments of people saying, God, I wish I had just worked hard, or I wish I had been more conscientious. I wish I had been less focused only on what was right in front of me. And so that's foundation, that's foundation regrets. When I think about some of the regrets that I have in my work or in my career, I feel like they fall into two very different categories. So in one category, there are regrets that I have

about, you know, I wrote my first book. I'm currently writing my second book. I look back at the things that I regret having done in my first book, and I try to learn from those mistakes. I do this with writing all the time. I'm lucky to write for a place that I can, at the Atlantic, where I can write several times a week. I write an article. It doesn't do well. I learn, oh, this is how I can write an article that more people will read.

So I'm regretting and then sort of pulling that regret forward into the future as a lesson. There's other regrets that are harder to act on. So, for example, in college, I majored in political science. And when I majored in political science, I took a lot of classes about World War I. And every class about World War I asked the question,

why did World War I happen? And every class had the same answer. We have no idea. So I feel like I took, all these classes that taught me nothing, and I should have majored in philosophy or history or art or theater or something else instead. But I can't go back to college. I can't go back to my polyside professors and say,

hey, can we have a little bit of a mulligan? So how do I smartly contextualize that second regret in my life, given that it's not clear that I can really change something in here and now about it? Yeah, it's a great question, Derek. And so some regrets we have are sort of open-door regrets and closed-door regrets. So there's some things that we can do something about and some things we can't. That one, I mean, you can't go back and do that. I think what you can learn on that one is you can go to the conditions under which you made that initial decision.

So why did you major in political science? I like politics. It turned out that I was just going to take World War I classes. Did you talk to anybody who majored in political science before you chose this? I can't remember that I did. Okay, so here we go. So let's, so, so, so, so I think that the lesson you learned from that is the very important principle of, I think in this case, the very important principle of surrogation, that the best way to make a decision about what to do something is to find people who are surrogates who've already made that decision, who've already done that kind of thing. So you want to know what it's like going to a particular college or university.

Find people like you who've gone to that college or university. Don't read the brochure. don't go on the tour, find people who've done that. So you had in your head this idea, I love politics, therefore I'm going to major in something that has the word in it, which is not... That was the thought process. Which is not sufficient due diligence, Derek.

What you want to do is you want to have that surrogation. So I think in this case, you can extract that principle of surrogation going forward. And so if you... So let's take your second book now. So if you would come to me and said, should I write a second book, I would say, get out of the business. It's horrible. I'm glad we're working this out. This is the power of regret and action.

Let's go to the second core regret that you identified, boldness. What are boldness regrets? Boldness and regrets are really, really, really interesting, and they surprise me a little bit. And I think they're a good example of how these four core regrets cut across domains. So let me tell you what I mean by that. So we've got in the database, let's go back to college. Did you study abroad in college? That's another regret. I did not study abroad in college. Okay.

So we have so many Americans who went to college and didn't study abroad who regret it. I was shocked at how often I saw that regret come up over and over and over again. And truly, I know we have some, it are always entrepreneurs at Six and I. This is my free business idea of the day. Start a travel agency targeting, serving Americans who didn't study a study abroad who regret it and now have money in their pocket and can do some kind of study abroad thing as an adult. I'm telling you, it's a huge, it's a huge business. So, so we have that. We have that regret didn't study abroad. That's an education regret. Then we have lots of regrets

from people, a lot of regrets from people around the world. I stayed, like the woman you're talking about, I stayed in this lackluster job. What I really wanted to do was start a business. I stayed in this sort of dead-end position, but what I really wanted to do was go out on my own and be more entrepreneurial. That's a career regret. Then we have literally, literally, this is pointed in a way, hundreds of regrets around the world with almost the exact same sentence structure,

which was X years ago, I met a man-slash-woman whom I really liked. I wanted to ask him her out, but I was too chicken, and I've regretted it ever since. I'm not talking about one or two of these. I'm talking hundreds of these around the world. There's one woman, a 60-year-old woman, I think, from Pennsylvania, who regretted not marrying Joe Schmidt.

All right? So that's a romance regret. But all those regrets are the same. That's a regret if only had taken the chance. You're at a juncture. You can play it safe, or you can take the chance. And over and over again, people regret playing it safe. And even people, I had these people like writing these longish things,

even people who took the chance and it didn't work out, most of them are okay on that. It's the people who didn't take the chance, who didn't, who weren't bold, that really gnaws at them and sticks with them over and over again. And category number three is moral regrets. What are moral regrets? Moral regrets are you're at a juncture.

We're always at a juncture with regrets because it's a decision point. You can do the right thing or you can do the wrong thing. You do the wrong thing, like the woman who Jackie mentioned. and people regret it big time. And it's a small category, but it's a painful category. So we have, again, the educators might find this interesting. Literally hundreds of regrets from around the world of people who regret having bullied kids while they were in school. I was really blown away by that.

Enormous regrets about infidelity. Like I'm just looking up at the Ten Commandments there. Like, yeah. Yeah, we got the number seven, Loteenov. You know, we got a lot about number seven on adultery. And to me, I thought those moral regrets were actually somewhat heartening in the sense that you have people who do something wrong, and instead of blithely casting it off, they can't.

It sticks with them. It bugs them. Is there any way that you found people felt that certain kinds of regrets nodded them more than other types of regrets? Like, for me personally, and I'm not representative of 17,000 people, I'm only myself. But the regret that gnaws at me the most is when I wrong a friend. That's the thing I can't stop thinking about. There's a line from, I think it's from Brothers Karamazov, and it's from some translation,

and I'm already paraphrasing it, so don't go looking through the book for this exact line. But the father says, I wronged that man, and I've never been able to forgive him. that regret from wronging someone you love is so powerful that sometimes your subconscious flips it and forces you to hate the person that you wronged. It's just such a powerful thing to live with the regret of having wrong someone that you love. And just hearing, listening to you talk about moral regrets, what do you wonder? What do I do? What do you do?

What did I do? Yeah, what did you do? Yeah, what did you do? Nothing nearly as bad as Papa Karamazov, I promise you. But it makes me wonder whether moral regrets or any other types of regrets had like a larger signal attached to them. It's an interesting question. I'm not sure.

I do know that it's the smallest category, but in some ways for people, you can sort of sense a little bit of that anguish in the way that people write about them and in the way that they talk about them. The other thing that's interesting about moral regrets is people's willingness to talk about them as a form of expiation in a way.

Like, I mean, you might find this interesting as a writer. So I have these people who are confessing, basically, to some bad things, and, you know, including infidelity. And, you know, when I did the interviews with them, I said, listen, let's just talk. And I don't have to use your name. I can use a pseudonym or something like that. And I tell them that, I say, no, that's okay.

You can use my name. And then I write it. And I come back to them for some fact-checking questions. And I say, you know, we can always use a pseudonym or a different name. And I said, no, that's okay. And for one person, I said, listen, I don't do this, but I'm going to show you what I just wrote, because I'm using your name. This is going to be in a book with your name on it that people will read. And she's like, okay, that's fine.

And so there's something, I think, that is cathartic to people about getting it out there. But there is, I think the infidelity regrets non-people for precisely that reason, because it is, it's an act of, it's wrong and it hurts somebody. nominally love. Last category is connection regrets. I'd love for you to talk about connection regrets by alluding to the grant study, which is this remarkable Harvard study where they took the class of 1938, I think, they took a class of Harvard graduates in the middle of the 20th century, and they followed them for 80 years, and they measured everything.

I'm reading that from your book. The length of the study and its detail are astoundingly. Researchers measured the men's IQ, analyzed their handwriting, examined their brows and testicles. They drew blood, took electroencephalograms, a word I learned from your book, thank you, and calculated their lifetime earnings. The audacious goal was to try to determine why some people flourished in work and life and others floundered. Braid together the lessons of the grant study with your conclusions from connection regrets. The biggest category were these things that I call, that we call connection regrets, and those

were all about relationships. And essentially, the pattern was always the same. You have a relationship or should have had a relationship, and it comes apart. And the way that these relationships come apart in 19 cases out of 20 is so profoundly undramatic. It's a drift, not a rift. and what happens is that somebody doesn't want to reach out. Somebody wants to reach out, and they say, it's going to be awkward if I reach out,

and the other side isn't going to care. And they're wrong. And yet they don't do it, and it drifts apart. And then you have these horrible things where somebody passes away. I was a woman in the book who wanted to call her friend who had cancer, and she said, oh, it's going to be awkward, it's going to be awkward, it's going to be awkward, and then what you finally calls that morning, the friend had passed away.

I mean, just horrible things like that. And one of the things that this tells us is that, well, first of all, I think there's a big takeaway here, which is that when people do reach out, here's what happens. It's not awkward, or it's a lot less awkward than you imagine. That other side, they're always glad to be reached out to. I had this woman, I had this frustrating conversation with a woman in the book named Cheryl, who had this college friend named Jen.

And they came apart over like 25 years. And she's like, oh, and she has this anguish regret. And I talked to her so many times. And she's like, oh, I don't know if I should reach out to Jen. She's going to think it's creepy. And I finally said to her, Cheryl, what have Jen reached out to you today? How would you feel about that? And she said, oh, my God, Dan, I would bring tears to my eyes.

It would be the greatest thing to ever happen to me. And I'm like, hello? And so one of the things that you see is that, for me, a big takeaway personally, was that you're at this juncture. And you're wondering, should I reach out or should I not reach out? If you make it to that juncture, you've answered the question. Always reach out. Seriously, when in doubt, reach out. This has totally changed my view on this.

And so when we go back to this point of the photographic negative of the good life, what are people looking for here? When people tell us what they regret the most, they're telling us what they're telling us. us what they value the most. And in this case, in connection regrets, they're telling us what they value is love. And in some ways, we have this circumscribed view of love where we think of it, where we sort of over-indexed on romantic love. And it's bigger than that. It's the love we have for our kids and for our parents and for our siblings and for our relatives and for our friends and for our colleagues. And going back to the grant study, the grant study did all these things. And we're following people for 60 years.

And the guy who started at George Vallant has an unpublished paper. He says, oh, well, we tracked these people for 70 years, but I can summarize this study in five words. He says, and he says, happiness is love, full stop. And it comes out again and again and again and again.

And I think that what's so interesting, for me at least, in taking on this sort of topic that has some negativity to it, that people, oh, wait a second, regret. Why are you writing about regret? Is that what you have with these 16, 17,000 people is this chorus of voices telling us what matters to them the most? What makes life worth living? What is a good life?

And there is just remarkable consensus on that, literally all over the world. I think the mark of a good book is that it has like a top line thesis and then it has sometimes a sneaky bottom line thesis. It's a little bit like a, you know, it's like a secret note on a whiskey that you only get, like just as it's going down. It's like, I think there's something else there. And this book has that.

And that second thesis is that we, Americans certainly, but probably all over the world, are just very bad at sitting with negative emotions. We're really, really bad at allowing a negative emotion to occur, to appear in our consciousness, and to sit with it. We banish it.

In fact, we say no regrets as if it's an order, right? Go away. Why? Tell me a little bit about, because this is such a clear sort of sub-theesis of the book, tell me a little bit about how you think about like sort of Americans and our, like, modern people's relationship to negativity, to negative emotions. Yeah. Thank you for, thank you for asking that because I think it's, I think it is core.

And I do think it's particularly American in many ways. I think that's a very good point. We don't know how to deal with negative emotions. No one ever told us. I don't put it any individual blame. So what happens is that we are, we think, never look back, always be positive. Never look back, always be positive. And then when we feel bad, when we feel crappy, when we feel negative, we think,

oh, wait a second, there's something wrong with me. Or we say, that's not real. No regrets. And we banish it. And so at some level, we take these negative emotions and we ignore them. But you can't ignore them forever. And so what happens sometimes is almost the opposite side of that spectrum is that people then get hijacked by them and get captured by them. And so what we have to do, we haven't been instructed on how to do this.

We think, you know, there's one view. Negative emotions are for ignoring. Bad idea. It's a bad idea. Negative emotions are for wallowing. That's a worse idea. negative emotions are for thinking. Negative emotions are signals.

Negative emotions are information. They are trying to tell us something. And the reason that regret is, and there's research from going back literally 30 years where scientists look at things like everyday conversations and they catalog the emotions that people express, the most common negative emotion that people express is regret.

The second most common negative, The second most common emotion of any kind that they express is regret. The only emotion expressed more than regret is love. So you have this thing. Why is it there? Why do we have this? Because it's functional. It regret instructs.

It clarifies. Regret is a teacher. And so if you banish it, you're not getting the instruction. If you wallow in it, you're not listening to the instruction. But the thing is, no one's ever taught us that in part because we like the instruction, but the instruction comes with a little dose of pain, and we don't want the pain. The problem is you can't get it. You have to have a little bit of that spear of pain in order to get the instruction.

And no one's ever told us that. We think that feeling is not for ignoring and feeling is not for wallowing in. Feeling is for thinking. These negative feelings are signals. It's a knock on the door. It is a teacher at the front of the room. It is instructive. And I wasn't, you know, no one ever sat me down in Columbus, Ohio, and said, Dan, here, let's go talk about how to deal with negative emotions.

No. They said, wait a second. Why are you, you need to smile more. It's like, well, I don't feel like smiling because I'm having a negative emotion. Well, you shouldn't be doing that, young man. Go out and play football. My wife is a PhD in clinical psychology. So I'm actually rather exposed to the joy of negative emotions.

In many ways, it is not because we have negative emotions together, because she has clients, to be clear. She's not here, so I can, I guess, make these jokes. But she's one of the hundreds of people watching on the live stream. So we'll wave to her. Hey. What I think my wife would say if she was sitting in this chair after please asking me to leave is to say,

look, we practice avoidance with our negative feelings. And this book is a kind of exposure therapy for regret. This book forces us to look regret in the face and stop fearing it as much as we have. The emotion that sort of occurred to me is being somewhat similar in how it can be a teacher. And maybe this is just an emotion that occurs commonly in the life of a writer

is jealousy. Jealousy is a really good teacher. How could jealousy possibly be a dishonest emotion? Right. No one wants to feel jealousy. So if jealousy is arising, it's probably telling you something. Now, it can lie, right? Jealousy can lie, but it's telling you that there's something that you want.

And if you sit with it a little bit, if you read something that makes you jealous, if you read a book that makes you jealous, an article that makes you jealous, see something that makes you jealous, and you sit with it for just a bit, why am I jealous? Why do I feel such envy about this? And you sort of explore it just a little bit. you can find something at the bottom that could actually guide you toward better work because it teaches you exactly what you want. And regret, in a way, is sort of retro, it performs a similar function, but just in a retroactive

kind of way. I wanted to ask about the concept of near misses. There's a really fascinating chapter in this book about near misses. Tell me about the Olympics study and what it teaches us about why regret can be so much more pungent when it's a near miss as opposed to something that didn't seem like it was possible in our life in the first place. Yeah, yeah. And this is part of how we reckon. This is also part of how we reckon with the past. So there's a very famous study from 1992. Tom Gillivich and Victoria Medvec did this. And it's, you know, as many of you know, the world of, especially

social psychology has been hit with something called a replication crisis where all these tantalizing findings don't, people rerun the experiments and they don't show up. This one has been replicated. It's kind of intriguing. So they look at Olympic medalists and they have a look at photographs of Olympic medalists. And so of course, on the metal stand, the gold medalist is the happiest, the silver medalist is the second happiest, and the bronze medalist is the third happiest. But that's not true. The gold medalist is beaming.

The bronze medalist is pretty psyched. Happy to be here. And the silver medalist is like, they've just, just finished second in a competition for the best athlete in the world. And they finish second. They're the second best in the world, and they look glum. Why is that? It's because of our brain's ability to do counterfactuals,

and regret is a counterfactual. So you can do what's called a downward counterfactual, right? That is the bronze medalist saying, at least I didn't finish fourth. I have a medal, right? It could have been worse. You could also do an upward counterfactual, and that's in some ways what jealousy is, but it's in very large part what regret is, which is, if only I kicked a little harder,

I would have a gold medal. And this is, and our brains do this instantly, naturally. We are, it's an incredibly powerful, cognitive move that we make. This is why little kids can't do it. Their brains don't have the muscularity to do it yet. And so this ability to think counterfactually is powerful, and it makes us better. It makes us better. If only I'd kicked harder, and then you have people who come back to the next Olympics

and kick a little harder and maybe they win. But these upward counterfactuals, which stink, we hate them. They cause us pain. They make us better. These if only's regret, they make us better. if we're willing to just withstand a little that spear of pain, listen to it, live with it as you say,

and do something about it. And there also are ways built in the science. I mean, your wife knows a lot of these techniques from things like cognitive behavior therapy, but I actually think it even goes broader than that about how do we take this stomach-churning feeling, basically have a existential ant-acid, and then use it as a force for forward progress.

It's cognitive restructuring, yeah. This is what happened to me. I am thinking about it negatively as the silver medalist because I could have been in first place. Cognitive restructure. You are the second best of this thing in the world. You are 99.99% percentile at this thing. You are by all accounts, thrillingly successful.

That's the kind of flip. That's part of it too. And with regrets, there's another set of processes that we can do. Like, I'm learning this myself. Like, like, I mean, I'm reading some of this research on, on, there's a concept called, I don't know, how many are you familiar with the concept of self-compassion? Anybody? Okay, so more than I would have expected.

So that was fairly new to me. And I'm like, I'm reading all this research on self-compassion. I'm like, holy moly, man. Like, somebody should have told me this earlier. And so self-compassion is one of the first steps in reckoning with our regrets. And again, we have this thing where we're almost two binary. So a lot of times when we, let's say we feel regret, we go too far on self-esteem, for instance. So research on self-esteem shows you've got to have some self-esteem.

There's no question. And some of it's pretty good. But self-esteem is not all good because a lot of self-esteem is comparative. A lot of self-esteem is built on in-groups versus out-groups. A lot of self-esteem, certain kinds of self-esteem leads to people not working very hard because they don't want to actually expose themselves to any kind of failure. Now, so in one corner we have self-esteem. In the other corner, we have self-criticism.

And so self-criticism is awesome, right? I love self-criticism. Then I went looking for evidence that it's effective. It's not there. Self-criticism is not very effective. What's effective is this third way, which is self-compassion, which is sort of a gooey phrase, I'll admit, built on the work of Kristen Neff at the University of Texas,

And basically what it says is this. When we have a misstep, when we have a failure, how do we talk to ourselves? If you were to hear, my wife can testify to this, if you were to hear to me when I exercise or run or play sports, my self-talk is almost criminal. It's brutal. It's cruel, all right?

Because I think that that's how I'm going to motivate myself to perform better. But I would never talk that way to somebody else. And so self-compassion is, treat yourself with the same kindness that you would treat somebody else. The other thing is, Just caveat here, it's like, okay, everybody in this room is very special. But here's the thing, you're not that special.

Because if I have a regret about being unkind, which I do, which I felt really terrible about, believe me, I'm not the only one with that regret. There are plenty of people with that regret. So your regrets are part of this condition. And also, do your regrets fully define you? No, they don't. It's a moment in your life.

And so the initial stage is to sort of is to treat yourself with that self-compassion. And it's liberating. And what the research shows on self-compassion is that, in contrast to sort of our popular notions, it doesn't lead to complacency. It doesn't lead to complacency. It actually leads to forward progress. And that's one of the first steps in dealing with processing our regrets. Dan, thank you so much.

Thank you, Derek. Thank all of you for coming out. Plain English with Derek Thompson is produced by Devin Manzi. If you like what you hear, please follow, rate, and review us. New episode drops on Tuesday. Have a great weekend.