The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant - Brené with Dan Pink on The Power of Regret

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Dan Pink is one of my favorite researchers and writers. In this episode, we dig into one of my least favorite feelings (but one of my best teachers): regret. In his new book, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, Dan shares findings from two large studies on regret. It’s fascinating. One big takeaway: We have more regrets about the things we did NOT do than the things we did do. Both Dan and regret are great teachers — you’ll be glad you listened Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi everyone, I'm Brené Brown, and this is Dare to Lead. Today on the podcast, I get to talk to one of my favorite researchers and writers, Dan Pink. In this episode, we're going to dig into one of my least favorite feelings or emotions, but let me see if this is true. Let me think about this for a second. Yeah, I actually think it's true. One of my very best teachers, regret. In his new book, The Power of Regret, How Looking Backward, Moves Us Forward, Dan shares findings from two large studies on regret, and the data are fascinating. Let me give you one sneak peek that I think is so interesting.

We have more regrets about the things we did not do versus the things that we did do. Oh my God, I think that's so powerful and so true. Failures of courage, failures of kindness, not taking risks. You know, both Dan and regret are great teachers, great storytellers, and you won't regret listening. I had to do it. it's so bad, but put on bump, okay, Barrett's laughing in the background. You know, it's one of these topics that when I talk about why I think it's important

and how I believe that regret is a function of empathy, people get really crunchy. People are like, I got no regrets. I live with no regrets. And I don't think that's a good idea. I don't think that's about living a courageous life. I think that's about living a life without reflection. And without learning from stuff that makes you,

feel like shit sometimes. And so this is an incredible conversation. I'm glad you're here. I'm not even going to do the regret joke again, even though it's so easy and just so funny. No, Barrett's shaking her head, not funny. Glad you're here. It's something else here now. Something new. From exclusively on Paramount Plus, it's the series Stephen King calls Scarious Hell. Everything here is impossible, but it's also real. Sci-Fi Vision calls it the best show streaming range. now. We're running out of time and we still don't know the rules. Don't miss what the movie blog

calls something you need to watch. Saving those children is how we all go home. From binge all episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. Before we jump in, let me tell you a little bit about Daniel H. Pink. He is the number one New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including his latest, The Power of Regret. His deeply researched work includes the New York Times bestsellers, a whole new mind, drive to sell as human, and win. Oh, God, win was such a good book. They're all great books, but win on time, and the whole construct of time. I mean, it's so, it's mind-blowing.

His books have sold millions of copies. They've been translated into 42 languages and have won multiple awards. Over the last decade and a half, he also hosted a National Geographic Television Series, studied the comic industry in Japan, created a popular master class on sales and persuasion, written the liner notes for a Grammy-nominated album, and delivered more than 1,200 lectures on Sixth Contents. He and his wife have three kids, two recent college graduates and a college freshman, and they live in Washington, D.C. Let's jump in. Dan Pink, I'm so excited that you're on Dare to Lead.

Bray Brown, I'm so excited to be on Dare to Lead. I have to tell you, so that's just start with this story. my very first book that was kind of out there was the gifts of imperfection. And they kept saying, you have to have a big name blurb this. And I'm like, I don't know anybody who's going to blurb this book. So I got a couple of my friends to do it. And they're like, that's really nice. These are great blurbs.

But we need high level blurb. And I was like, this is not going to work. And they're like, who would you think of when you think high level blurb? And I said, Dan Pink. They're like, yeah, ask Dan Pink. I'm like, okay, and if he can't do it, I'll get Gandhi to sign off or something. I was like, there's no way. And somehow I got your email address and I emailed you, and you freaking said yes.

Well, I was glad to say yes because I like the book and your listeners who are only in the ears who can't see us. I'm in my office. And I have that, I know exactly where that book is. That book is still on my shelf, my shelf back there. There was another thing that I have from you, Bernay, where at one point you sent me a t-shirt. It might have been a daring greatly t-shirt. Probably did. Do you have T-shirts for Daring Greatly?

I don't think it was a Gifts of Inperfection T-shirt, but it was a Daring Greatly T-shirt. And I have a rather astonishing and embarrassing into my wife mortifying collection of T-shirts. But that is one of my prize possessions. Oh my God, I'm so glad to be in your T-shirt collection. That's good. All right, I'm just going to tell you right off the bat

that when I found out that you were writing about regret, I literally said out loud, at my desk. Hallelujah. Dan Pink is taking on regret. And I'll tell you why. I write about regret. I think the first time I wrote about it was in Maybe Rising Strong. And there are only a couple of topics that I have written about where people are like,

ooh, go to hell. We hate you. And regret is one of them. That's why I wrote this book. I wanted to take that on because I'm convinced we've gotten regret completely wrong and that we can actually use it as a force for good. That knee-jerk reaction, I mean, you write about it in your latest book, that knee-jerk reaction to saying, no regrets, no regrets,

always look forward, never look backward, is extremely wrongheaded and actually dangerous. Okay, before we get into this book, which I just can't wait. And, oh my God, Dan Pink, the researcher, like the research you've done for this book is mind-boggling. Let's back it up a little bit, and we always start here. Tell us your story. Back it all the way up to being born. Being born. I was born on a July day. I was actually born in Wilmington, Delaware.

My dad was working in Wilmington, Delaware. But when I was a little kid, we moved to Columbus, Ohio, that hotbed of social rest. And I grew up in Columbus, Ohio in a very white, very middle class, very risk-averse, very conservative, very middle America, 4th of July parade, football on Friday night, kind of. of kind of town. And I mean, I had a perfectly pleasant childhood. What saved me, though, in my childhood and the great, great thing about growing up in Central Ohio is that the state of Ohio in general, in Columbus, Ohio in particular, has outstanding public libraries, among the best public library systems in the United States. And so I spent a lot of time in the library. And had I not grown up in Columbus, Ohio, I don't think I would have become a writer. I became a writer, I think,

because I spent so much time in libraries as a kid. So I spent some time in libraries as a kid. I played a lot of sports as a kid. I was a fairly trying to nerdy, but, you know, okay guy, I guess. I went to college. I like college. I went to law school because I was a middle class kid who needed something to fall back on. I decided I didn't want to practice law because that was too soul-hollowing. And I decided to work in politics, which proved somewhat soul-hallowing. And then in this long and twisted tail, in my early 30s, I think I discovered what I had known all along, but was somewhat closeted, was that in my

heart, I was a writer, and that's what I should do. Okay, I'm going to back us up. What sports did you play in high school? Oh, I played every sport growing up. I played Little League Baseball. I played Flag Football. I played basketball. We had a very good basketball team in my high school. I didn't make the basketball either. I didn't make it in junior high either, but I played every form of recreational basketball there was. I played every form of recreational baseball there was. I play tennis. One of the things about growing up in Central Ohio is that everybody knows how to play sports. Even the kids who are more like the more studious kids actually know how to play sports too, which was kind of a revelation to me when I came to the East Coast because I came out of the Midwest

where I was studious and maybe at the median of athletic ability. And then I had some encounters on the East Coast in other places like in Washington and whatnot. And I'm like, holy crap, I'm like one of the best athletes here. This is amazing. You know, I'm meeting in Central Ohio, but you put me with a bunch of lawyers in Washington, D.C., and I can just dominate. Oh, my God, that's funny. Okay, first time you fell in love? Oh. I think, oh, okay, we're going to go there. I am. This is not your average interview here, Dan. No, no, no. It seems like you might prize vulnerability of all things.

I think it was 17 years old. Okay. First. regret you remember having. Can I go back to sports? I haven't thought about this. Wow, that's a good question. It involves sports because I'm an Ohioan. Clearly.

Because of my birthday, I was not eligible for a certain year of Little League. Like, you had to try out to do it. And there were like 11 kids trying out in one spot. And I didn't get it. And I was really bummed out. And the coach at some point, maybe three weeks later, said, well, we might have more openings. Do you want another chance? And I said, no, because I was so pissed off. And I regret, and I realized that was a mistake. About 10 minutes after saying that, I realized that I regret it saying that because I were so, so, so wanted to play baseball. But you were pissed. Yeah. I was, you know, I was also 11. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. College, what were you like? Well, I'm not sure I'm the best judge of that.

Okay. We can bring in a panel of experts. I mean, I was pretty hard working. I actually really enjoyed college. Where'd you go to school? I went to Northwestern University. I was a linguistics major. I had a great academic experience there, very rigorous academics there. I made some lifelong friends. I had a very good time. I was kind of bummed out when college ended.

Tell me about, I mean, I love linguistics. Tell me about the decision to be a linguistics major. Well, it was what I was interested in. So I ended up taking introductory course in linguistics, and it was amazing. It was so interesting. never thought about it before. I'd always been a word person. I'd always been a writer and a reader, even as a little kid, and I enjoyed that sort of thing. But I'd also had, I think, a somewhat mathematical mind, too. And so linguistics is like this perfect juncture of those two ways of

thinking. So in my linguistics classes, I would have a class on metaphor with poets, people who are majoring in like creative writing or English. But then I would have a class in something that was known as transformational grammar, and my classmates would be computer science students, because transformational grammar is a set of rules that make up language and that blah, blah, blah. And so I really found the interesting. The other thing about it is that I was a slight, maybe a mild contrarian. And so everybody else was zinging towards certain majors, and I said, I'm going to zag here. And the other thing about it, though, was that what I realized that the way I like to learn

was sitting with a small group of people talking about stuff and then writing papers, not sitting in a 100-person lecture hall, receiving one-way transmission and then taking a test. And so my courses for most of my, certainly the last two years of my college, and in some ways maybe the last three, were very, very small, often five, six, seven people in the class. And so I actually learned a hell of a lot.

So one of the things that I admire about your work the most is your ability to craft a very tight, story that is so subtly teaching the shit out of somebody. I don't know how else to say it. I'm sure there's a more eloquent way of saying it. Do you think that pedagogy and storytelling that you do so well, and in some ways, incredibly uniquely, do you think that comes from linguistics? Do you think that is where that starts?

Maybe. I don't know if that's where it starts. I think that the rigor of that way of thinking is very helpful. But I think a lot of it comes from. from being a reader and being disappointed when people don't get to the point fast enough, or there's too much fluff, or it isn't well supported. I've gotten in arguments, Bray, I mean, as much as these kinds of arguments can be ferocious, I had an argument once about eight or nine years ago with a buyer for a major book place

where I was trying to say to him, it was a hymn, that most nonfiction books are too long, that most nonfiction books would be twice as good if they were half as long. His view of that was like, you're a complete Philistine. What are you talking about? And I said, I think there's a lot of fluff there. So I tend to write books of the sort that I want to read. And I like things that get to the point.

I like things that are sharp. And the way that I write, I'm sort of an obsessive editor. And so I essentially when I write, the way I edit is peculiar. but I almost always edit on paper. And so I cross out sentences all the time. I make every word fight for its life. Every word on that page has to talk to me and say, I deserve to live on the page, Daniel. Please do not kill me. And I say, well, why do you deserve to live on the page adjective?

And the adjective has to tell me. What's more is that when I edit, I'm sitting here in my office, There's a chair right over there, and my wife, for every book that I've written, has read every single page to me in multiple forms out loud. And I have read to her every single page out loud because basically I'm obsessive. That's a short answer to my long-winded explanation, which is I'm obsessive. I'm obsessed about the efficiency. This answer is completely betraying my philosophy, but people don't have. have a lot of time and attention. And so you want to grab them, grip them, engage them emotionally

and intellectually, because then what you're saying just seeps into their marrow. Plus, you know, it's so funny, the first time I read my books aloud is usually when I'm recording them. And I'm constantly stopping and telling whoever's with me, like, shit, we should strike all that in a second thing. But the reading out loud, that's a really good thing. It's helpful to me in reading out loud, and it's also helpful for me to hear it out loud. And some of that might be, in part of my misspent youth, I worked as a political speech writer. And so part of that is that kind of habit and training. But for me, I process the words differently when I hear them and when I see them, not better or worse, just differently. And every once in a while, I'll hear something. It's like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

and we'll make that kind of change. Yeah, I can tell you that your stuff is really, it's not spare in any way, but it is impactful. Well, thanks. Yeah, we're really going to get to know you in the most uncomfortable way before we go into this book. So Dan's like, shit, what I said out for. Yeah, I know, I know. Let me just pink checks his watch.

No, uh-uh. Okay. Well, you already asked me a question about falling in love, which I don't think... Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, well, it probably can be worse coming from you, but what did he got? Oh, it's going to get worse. No.

Okay, tell me about the political speech writing. Did you love that job? Was it like the West Wing? you had to have been good at it. Okay, all right, here we go. So those three questions there, all right? Yes. What was it like?

It's like the West Wing and did you love it? Okay, I'm going to answer the second way. It is not a thing like the West Wing. Damn it. That is so confected. First of all, people aren't nearly that good looking. People are much more bedraggled. I actually think in some weird way,

the best representation in television of political life is Veep. Even though it's crazy. The amount of just insanity and, and cluelessness that Vee shows is actually in some ways more accurate. So did I like it? See, I was into politics. I was really interested in politics. I thought it was a way to go out and do something valuable to the world.

And I found myself, I mean, I was one of three people in my law school class who graduated unemployed because I didn't want to go work at a law firm or anything like that. And so I went out and found a job on a campaign afterwards. Fortunately, my school had a loan payback program for people earning small amounts of money, which otherwise I wouldn't honestly, I wouldn't have been able to do that. I mean, here's something I don't, when I entered law school, I had been working at a job for a public interest group in Washington, D.C., making $13,000 a year. When I left law school, my first job out of law school on a campaign paid $12,000 a year.

So all those student loans and years of education and the immediate payoff was negative. So well done, Daniel. Yeah. But, you know, I like politics. I like the excitement of it. It's really interesting. I like, you can really get to know people well. So I actually like being in the environment we're all working together toward a common cause.

I like the project-basedness, especially of campaigns because there's a beginning, there's a middle, there's an end, there's an outcome. You learn, you move on. And I liked trying to do good things. I worked as a speechwriter for the Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, Robert Reich. Oh, my God. Did you reel it? Yeah.

When I was there, we worked our asses off. raise the minimum wage. And I'm like, whoa, wait a second. We worked a year, over a year, pushing this and pushing this and pushing this. And the minimum wage went up and people around America got more money. That's cool, you know, but at a certain point, so I was working in the White House and I liked it and I liked my boss and I liked the people I was working with. But A, it was all consuming. And B, there was a part of it that felt a little hollowing. And I'll tell you because I would be sitting at my computer. You know, it's not like the West Wing.

You know what it's like? It's more like people have this notion that speech writing is a bunch of people in smoking jackets, sitting around thinking great thoughts and whispering, ball mott in the ears of the powerful. You know what it's like? Honestly, it is like a urban war zone emergency room. And you are just. just stitching up bodies as quickly as you can,

hoping they don't die on your watch. That's a closer analogy to it, because the pace is so, so, so, so ferocious. It's exhilarating, though. It's really exciting. What happened, though, is that I realized that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in politics because I looked down the road

and saw people who were me 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, and they were not happy. And I knew I would not be happy doing that. The other thing is, is that at the time, from the time I was in high school, really, I was always, quote, unquote, writing on the side. I did writing on the side, writing articles, essays, magazine articles, opinion pieces, blah, blah, on the side for like 15 years before I finally realized, hmm, this thing you're doing on the side might be the thing you should be doing in the center.

And so, you know, and I think there's a lesson there, Bernay. I mean, I'll extract a life lesson from anything, but I think there's a lesson there, which is that we tell these young men and women to, like, file it, like, what's your passion? It's a stupid freaking question. I hate it. And I think that the question we should ask ourselves is, what do you do? What do you do when nobody's watching? What do you do because it's part of you? And I discovered over time that what I did was right, tried to figure stuff out and write about it and tell people about it. And I finally decided to take a flyer to do that. My wife kept her job. She kept her health insurance. And that was 20 years ago, 20 plus years ago.

How many books ago was that? This is the seventh book in 20 years. Yeah. Okay. I mean, you know what it's like to keep cranking them out, man. It's hard. I do. I'm on seven.

We're together. Yeah. All right. Let's jump in. The power of regret, how looking backward moves us forward. Why regret? What led you here? I think it was because I had regrets of my own and that I was trying to figure out.

And this is a book that I would not have written earlier in my life. I can't imagine writing this book in my 30s. In my 50s, it felt somewhat inevitable because I'm at a point in my life where I can look backward and there's some mileage there. I mean, I can look forward and I hope there's some mileage there. And I guess the catalyst was, I mean, we have kids who are roughly similar ages. The catalyst was that my elder daughter graduated from college. And I'm at her college graduation. And I'm in sort of disbelief because I can't believe this kid is old enough to graduate her from college because she was just born last week. And I can't believe that I have a

kid in college because I graduated from college like four years ago. And, and, and, and, and, and, And I started thinking about some of my regrets about college. Like, what was my college? Oh, man, I wish I had been kinder. Oh, man, I wish I had taken more risks. Oh, man, I wish I had worked a little harder. And what I found when I got back and very sheepishly talked to people about it is that people leaned in rather than recoiled, that people actually wanted to talk about it and wanted to engage. And you know, as a writer, that's an incredible reaction.

So I actually was working on a totally different book and said, I can't get this regret thing out of my head. And so I spent a month doing some research. And I was already on the hook to write a completely different book. And I emailed my editor and said, I got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is this book you think I'm working on, I haven't been working on. The good news is that I think I have something better. Please see attached my 25 page proposal for an entirely different book. They must get those a lot because I've sent many of those.

How did it go over? I mean, well enough that I was able to put aside the other one and work on this one for and devote, you know, two and a half years of my life to doing the research and the writing for this book about regret. Okay, so you're thinking about your own life. My daughter's in her first year of graduate school. It seems incomprehensible to me.

Right. Yeah. I have been reflecting a lot on regret. I'm a huge fan of regret, as you know, which made me so excited about this book. Okay, so you, using your word, sheepishly talk to a couple of people. It's resonating.

People are leaning into the conversation. what's your next step? Where does the American Regret Project and the World Regret Survey come in? Okay, so I knew that this topic was out there that was really interesting, and I looked at some of the existing research on it, and I said, okay, this is really interesting research,

but I think it's not complete enough. And one of the things, I mean, you know this very well, one of the things you see about the world of academics is that they're very, very narrowly focused. Yeah. And they don't talk across disciplines. No. And I felt that there was this very constrained way of understanding this topic.

And so the other thing here is that I realize that the world we live in today is different from the world when I started writing books. I'm able to do massive, incredible research projects with only like one or two people from the comfort of my garage here in Washington, D.C. And it's pretty amazing. So I put together something, as you said, called the American Regret Project, which was a 4,489-person public opinion survey, a rigorous public opinion survey, representative sample of the American population, because I said, we haven't had a good survey on regret. We had one okay survey

10 years ago, but we haven't had a good comprehensive survey of American attitudes on regret ever. I'm going to go do it on my own, working with a data analytics company and put it together. And I want to see if there are differences based on race, age, gender, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. At the same time, I did something else that proved to be even more revelatory, which is that the world regret survey where I just invited people around the world to submit their regrets. And we ended up with, it's crazy, because I'm insane, because I read them all, we ended up with 16,000 regrets from people in 105 countries. And that's where I had a breakthrough with those 16,000 regrets from all over the world.

What'd you learn? Well, what I learned is that my quantitative survey wasn't worth as much as I thought, because what happened was this. I wanted to know, what do people regret? That was one of the things that I was trying to figure out. Now, in your book, you mentioned this. You mentioned one of the studies that says, oh, 90% of regrets fall into these certain domains. That's totally right, okay?

And I was like, God, it's unsatisfying, though. It's totally unsatisfying. They're spread all over the place. What's going on? So I said, they're not asking the question right. I'm a better researcher than Gallup. I'm going to go in there and I'm going to figure this out. And so I go in there and I ask these questions about and how people list their regrets

and put them in these categories. Is it a career regret? Is it a finance regret? Is it a health regret? Is it a romance regret? And I found that people regret a lot of stuff that it's spread all over the place. All right. Then, and I'm preaching to the saved here, because you understand that there is a conversation

between hard research and storytelling. They talk to each other. That is, the hard-headed academic research and the storytelling are not separate domains. They are siblings, and they talk to each other, and they enrich each other. You know that, you've done that better than anybody. But for me, those 16,000 regrets were revelatory,

and I'll tell you why. I'll give you one example. What I found is that over and over again, around the world, people kept expressing the same four regrets. And these four regrets had nothing to do, little to do at least, with the domain of life. Career, health, finances, whatever. It had to do with something deeper. And this is where my linguistics training paid off because Noam Chomsky taught us that

languages have a surface structure and a deep structure. Regret has a surface structure. Career, education, health. Regret has a deep structure, something else going on. So let me give you, I think, the best example of this. So I had, and this is so fascinating, these regrets are just absolutely. fascinating. I mean, each day the database would have, oh, a few more. And I'm like, holy, moly, this is incredible. So if your listeners want a business idea, I'm here to serve.

Because I'll tell you, for all you entrepreneurs out there listening to Bernay's show, here's an idea for you, a travel agency that serves people who went, Americans especially, who went to college and didn't study abroad and now regret. Wait, just stop. You think I'm, don't laugh, man. I'm dead serious about this. No, I hear this all the time. Yes. So that's a regret.

That's an education regret, right? In our surface structure. Right. Okay, then I have huge numbers of regrets. The universality is amazing. And you're making me think about linguistics a lot, which I didn't expect to do. But the universality of these regrets in the way that the sentences are constructed are incredible. I have literally hundreds of regrets that have essentially the same construction, which is this.

X years ago. I met a man slash woman whom I really liked. I wanted to ask him or her out, but I didn't because I was too chicken and I've regretted it ever since. That's a romance regret. Then I have other regrets. I have a regret, hundreds of them. I stayed in this lackluster job when I really wanted to start a business, but I didn't have the guts to do it. So that's a career regret.

So you've got these three regrets in totally different domains, but it's the same regret. if only I take in the chance. Taken the chance. And that to me, it was, again, this conversation between the hard research and the story after story, after story, after story. And when you hear that, when your ear is attuned to it, as your ear is so brilliantly attuned to these stories, you say the people are trying to tell me something. And what they told me is over and over again, there were four regrets that they had.

And the domain of life was less important than there's a deep structure of here. human aspiration. I am geeking out so hard right now that I can barely focus on this conversation. I'm just telling you that I am nerding out, y'all. It's like Dan's trying to sweet talk me. Okay. Deep structure, right, versus surface structure. This is the linguistics approach.

Yeah. And we're so embedded right now in a conversation, the subject of this conversation that's happening right now is this awful. false debate around quantitative versus qualitative, that there should be no debate. We need both. If you told me you learned three wonderful things from two stories, I wouldn't mean anything to me. And if you told me, you learned from 100,000 things, but you don't give me the deep structure, it means nothing to me. We need the lake that is both two miles wide and 20 miles deep. And that's what you've done. So FN Bravo. Well, thank you for that. And thank you for that analysis, even though I'm not a

Baptist, but I wanted to scream hallelujah on that one. Yeah, no, this is it. Should it be qualitative or quantitative? Yes. I mean, we have all these false dichotomies everywhere, but, you know, the answer to either or is often yes. Yeah, I had to choose this tiny shout out before we get back to regret for Karen Stout, who was a mentor to me, and she studied Femmicide, the killing of women by intimate partners.

And I was the first qualitative dissertation in my PhD program, and I had to fight for six months to even let it happen. And she ended up telling me around domestic violence, she said it would be so. great if I could just go into funding agencies in the city and say, here are some incredible stories, but I can't. And it'd be so great if I could go into the funding agencies, the same people, and say, here are the statistics, but I can't. If you don't have the data and you don't have the story, you don't have what it takes to move people. Amen, sister. Yeah, so just incredible. Write it on a rock. Write it on a rock. Oh my God, tabletize it. Yes. Okay.

Tell me about how you, because you're who you are, I'm going to use this language. Tell me how you language what's underneath the, what seems to belong in different domains. How do you language, I didn't ask him out, I didn't leave the job, I didn't take the chance. How do you language that when you're talking about regret? What is it that people deeply regret? What they regret is failures of boldness, period. Now, again, they don't necessarily use the word bold, all right? But they're not singing the same lyrics, but they're playing the exact same melody in this.

That's the key. As a metaphor to understand that. And the only way you get to that is by reading all these things and having all these voices and stories in your head and then interviewing all these people and having them pour their heart out to you about something they did years ago that they still feel bad about or something, some kind of tragedy

that they've actually learned from. And it's interesting because it's partly the melody that you're hearing rather than the lyrics. But if you're attuned to the melody, you can then describe what that melody is. And the melody in this case was were failures of boldness. Now, to your point earlier

about the reinforcing ways these things, things go. This is also consistent with what the academic literature tells us, and also my own quantitative survey. You write about this in your book, too. Over time, over time, people regret inactions way more than actions. I'm going to stop you here. This is maybe one of the most key things that I've learned, and I want you to teach it to us. Say what you just said again. Without question. Over time, people regret what they didn't do more than what they did do. That inaction regrets, regrets of inaction are far more common than regrets of action. And this is especially true as people age. One of the things that's interesting on the demographic differences,

which are not vast. This is from my research, is that age 20, people have about the same number of action regrets and inaction regrets. But as they age, it's all about inaction regrets. And so we end up regretting what we didn't do. And many of our omissions, our omissions are omissions about boldness, omissions about taking the chance. We find ourselves in so many cases in life, Bray, at junctures. This particular juncture of people, I can play it safe or I can take the chance. I can play it safe or take the chance. And overwhelmingly, people regret playing it safe more than taking the chance, even when the chance doesn't work out. Now, this tells us something. And as I say in the book, these four core regrets, all right, they are,

another metaphor here, a photographic negative of the good life. If we understand what people regret the most, we understand what they value the most. So all these 16,000 people, think of them, I'm not a musical person, but this is my second music metaphor here. I'm with you, bud. Love it. I wish. I have a regret about not playing a musical instrument, and I'm not alone. I got so many musical instrument regrets, it's crazy. I had to start taking some out of the book because I was like over-indexed on like clarinets. So one of the things that you see is that the, These four core regrets, including boldness, are the photographic negative of a good life. When people tell you their regrets, they're enduring regrets, and they're all the same over

and over again, they tell you what matters most of them out of life. And one of the things that matters most of us out of life is doing something, learning, growing, trying stuff, leading a psychologically rich life. That's who we are. And so to me, what we want to do as a prescription is give ourselves permission to be bold in many ways, but also not put all the on individuals, but in organizations, in schools, in churches and synagogues, and mosques, and community groups is actually create environments where people feel comfortable being bold. And forgive me for this sermon here, one last word here, is that one of the aspects of being bold that surprised me.

It wouldn't surprise you. It surprised me, though, and I think it could be gendered here, is that we go into my database together, which could be fun. We go into my database together, and we do a search for the phrase, spoke up, spoken up, speak up. I regret that I didn't speak up. I regret that I hadn't spoken up when I needed to. I regret that I didn't use my voice. all of these regrets about people not being bold

in simply saying something and asserting themselves and expressing themselves. And I can't put all the onus on the individual for that one. You have to put some of the responsibility on the context and the situation that they're in. And to me, one of the biggest things we can do, again, in all these domains of life, is give people the psychological safety

and the permission to be appropriately bold. God, this is so fascinating. You know this is coming. It's like you just strap yourself in. Like, you know this is coming. This is not unconnected to vulnerability and courage, right? Uh, no. It is not.

Uh, no. Tell me more. Well, tell me what you left thinking. Okay. So high level thinking, Bernay was right. All right. I can not my three word. My three word distillation of it.

Bray, I had this conversation today. No joke. The day that you and I are talking about this, I did a virtual event for a very large multinational company where I was talking about some of the regrets, some of people's regrets and basically what these core regrets teach us about what people want out of life. But then I also got some questions about how do we process our own regrets? And one of the dimensions by which we process our own regrets is we disclose them. We disclose them. And the research on disclosing, you know it, is powerful. Disclosure is an unburner. burdening, but back to language again, disclosure is also a form of sense making. When we convert these

blobby negative emotions to concrete words, it defangs them. It helps us make sense of them. Sonia Lubomerski has some brilliant research showing that when we write about negative experiences, we feel better, but when we write about positive experiences, we feel worse. Why? Because we lose the thrill in the mystery. So for negative experiences, disclosing them, unburdens and make senses, but here's the thing. So I tell me these guys, and mostly guys, our fear is that when we disclose failures, setbacks, missteps of our own,

we think that people will like us less. And the evidence, you know this, Bernay, I'm preaching to the saved here, the evidence is overwhelming for 30 years of behavioral science, that when we disclose those things, people like us more. And literally today, they respond, so I was talking about that,

Are you saying that we should be more vulnerable? And I wanted to say literally, have you not been paying attention to the last 10 years of this? Come on, guys. And I'm like, yeah, I guess so. That's another way to put it. But anyway, the shorter way to put it is Brune was right. That vulnerability, I'm just repeating, I'm just talking your, I'm, I'm seeing from your. But this is related to regret.

It's a huge. Vulnerability of what? But I'm singing from your hymn book here, you know? The vulnerability isn't a sign of weakness. of strength. It doesn't make us less. It makes us more. And it's true with regret. And you can't process your regrets. You have to be both somewhat soft-hearted, but also very hard-headed. So when we think about our regrets, one thing that we should do is we should sort of reframe how we think about ourselves through self-compassion pioneered by your fellow Texan, Kristen Neff,

sort of treat ourselves with kindness rather than contempt, recognize that at some level we're not that special. So if I have a regret about not being kind, I really, that I have to think it's like, well, am I the only one with that kind of regret? No, I got hundreds of people who have that. Disclose them to make sense of them and to unburden them and to defang them. But then also do the hardheaded stuff of self-distancing and extracting a lesson from it that we can apply to the future. And the thing is, it's like, we don't know how to do that because all of the messages we get are like, think positive, be positive all the time.

Never look backward. And when people have negative emotions, as you write about in the Atlas of Emotions, when people have negative emotions, they think there's something wrong with them when in fact, everybody has negative emotions. And the most common negative emotion of all is regret. I mean, you go after no regrets in your book very, very well. To me, it's like, I've done the research. The only people without regrets are five-year-olds because their brains haven't developed the dexterity to process regret. No joke. There's a lot of research in child development about when kids are able to process regretted, not until they're seven or eight. The only people without regrets are five-year-olds,

people with lesions on the orbital frontal cortex of their brain, some people with Parkinson's and Huntington's disease, and sociopaths. So everybody else has regrets. Not having regrets is the sign often of a grave disorder. And the reason for that is for regret's presence and for it's ubiquity, is that it's useful. It's there for a reason. Regrets teach us. They instruct us. They clarify the world for us if we're open to receiving them, which is why in your book, you don't take the, oh, never look backward. You say, you know what? Facing your regrets requires courage. Having no regrets is not a sign of a life well lived. It's a sign of a life without reflection. Bingo.

I have to say that I could give you a list, and it would include musical instrument. It would include not being able to play the guitar, probably, embarrassingly. I'm not unique. But I have to say that the biggest regrets I've had in my life that I still have thought about and I still think about, and boy, have they taught me. It's like being an ex-smoker. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I just can't even stand the idea of having to quit again, so that's why I don't start.

I don't ever want to feel this regret of courage or a regret of not being as kind as I could have been. For me, those are just like, and I love how you say just getting the domain list in finance and relationships and, you know, this is so unsatisfying because no matter the domain, it always comes down for me personally as failures or inadequacies of courage or kindness. Yeah. I mean, that comes out a lot in the research. And personally, that's definitely true for me. But give me an example of one of your regrets of kindness. Because that's one of the things that bugs me, Bernay, when I look at my own regrets, is especially earlier in my life, I was not nearly as kind of a person as I could have been.

And I wasn't a bully either. In some ways, that's worse, that I was sort of unkind by inaction. But tell me one of your kindness regrets. Well, I can tell you that. I'm talking about the commencement address quote that I use in when I write about regret. The George Saunders. Yeah. Yeah, I love George Saunders, and that speech is brilliant.

He just said something like, what I regret most are failures of kindness, when someone in front of me was being mistreated, and even if I wasn't the person doing it, that I didn't just, not just say something, but just rushed to say something. And so I think there have been moments in my life, high school, early career, where I saw

someone getting just put down or humiliated and out of my own fear, I didn't participate in it and I didn't drive it, but I didn't step in and say, uh-uh, like this is so messed up. And I have to say that I was not raised in a family where no regrets was the rule. It probably has something to do with being raised Catholic. Like we had to think about stuff that we had done.

We had to think about how it made us feel and then what path are you going to take to not feel that way again. And so I would say very early in my life, I was the person, even in my 20s when I was waiting tables and bartending, there were hostile environments. If something was sexist or hurtful, I'd be like, not even toward me, I'd be like, oh, no, no, I'm not watching this and this is bullshit and what are we going to do about this? I regret times where I have been blaming and hurtful to people because I'm afraid. So it's taken me until I was 50 to understand how scary I can be when I'm scared as a leader, as a parent, as a partner. And when I get scared, I scramble and can blame. And I regret that.

I regret being shitty to my husband when I'm scared about work stuff. But help me understand this. You've been my therapist, Dan. Completely unlicensed and untrained and unqualified, but I'm here to serve. But you are a West Wing political speech writer, so I feel like we're ready. I almost hate calling it regret. But it is regret. I know a lot about the affect, and I know a lot about the neurobiology of the affect.

It is 100% regret. But I don't call it that because somehow, I feel like that word has been pathologized. But it is regret. I'm going to tell you this. I've never said this before. It was something I read in your book, quote, page 8. Regret is not dangerous or abnormal.

A deviation from the steady path to happiness. It's healthy and universal. It's an integral part of being human. Regret is also valuable. It clarifies. It instructs. Done right. It needn't drag us down.

It can lift us up. I have regrets to be. be honest with you from last week. I regret firing off an email to my kids' school when I saw the number of COVID cases and they're not doing mandatory mask wearing. And I regret how I handled that. And so I'm not ashamed of it. I'm not embarrassed by it. But I firmly believe that regret is a function of empathy. And when I think about how I did it, today I didn't fire off another email, but I wrote it. And I started with,

y'all have done an incredible job managing this. I don't know how you've handled it so well, but you have. Proud for my kid to go to a school that's been this thoughtful. Can you help me understand some of the decisions you're making? But that email,

which I got back an email right away saying you're the only parents that talks to us this way. But that email that I wrote was completely fueled by the lessons of regret. Explain that to me. this is why regret exists.

Regret teaches us if we're open to the teaching. The problem is, is that regret also hurts a little bit. It hurts and it teaches, but you can't have just one. So in your case, this is textbook of how you deal with your regret. You felt that spear of pain, that negative, oh my God, I can't believe I did that. If only I hadn't been such an ass, right? So you have two choices there. you can say, ignore it.

I ignore it. Boost your self-esteem. I'm awesome anyway. I'm the king of the unit. Or you can say, oh my God, I'm the worst person in the world. You can just spin yourself up. Oh, my God, I can't believe I did that and ruminate over it.

Or you can think about it, right? And to me, we haven't been taught how to process our negative feelings. Now. Some of us are taught, ignore your negative feelings. Some of us are taught negative feelings are the only truth wallowing them. And to my view is that, negative feelings are for thinking. Negative feelings are signals from the world trying to tell us something. And what happened in your case is that it was a negative feeling. They're trying to

tell you something saying, you know what? A, that was not empathetic to these people who are working very hard. And B, it was actually an ineffective way to get done what I hope to get done. However, you disclose that. You sort of forgave yourself a little bit. You disclosed it. You made sense of it. and you extracted a lesson from it, and that lesson always begins next time, and then the next time you apply that lesson. That is how human beings grow and learn, and that's why regret is powerful.

If you had taken another route, you would not have learned and grown, and that's why, this is why, I mean, there's research from all the way back from 1980s showing that you record people's conversations and identify the emotions that they express, and the most common negative emotion is regret. And the second most common emotion,

of any kind is regret. The only thing mentioned more often than regret is love. And there's got to be a reason for that. Why? Wow. Regret serves a purpose. It serves a purpose. You know, and you're telling a story of how regret instructed you. It's socially adaptive. And you became better as a result of it. Yeah, it's socially adaptive. Adapt, yeah, exactly. I mean, let's geek out on evolutionary biology, evolution psychology. Yeah, it's adaptive. It wouldn't exist as a trait unless it had some kind of function. And here's the thing. I mean, you write about this in your text. of all these different kinds of emotions that we feel. But we have to have some negative emotions. We should have more positive emotions. Positive emotions are great. They make life worth living.

We want to have more positive emotions and negative emotions. But negative emotions need to be part of our portfolio because they teach us if we respond to them appropriately. And I'm convinced that we know how to respond to it appropriately. We just haven't been taught. And the process is very, very simple. I love that. And I have to say this. I'm going to say something and you say true or false. Okay. Regret is difficult when you struggle with a fragile ego. True. Would you like me to? I can elaborate, but I like the true false game.

Yeah. Yeah, no, elaborate. And I'll have another true false for you. Okay. So I think that the fragile ego is something that self-compassion can address. Because here's the thing. I just want to clarify this for everybody whose feelings are about to get hurt. You're all very special, all right? However, you're not that special. All right? Your experiences often are not wildly different from other people's experiences.

And so sometimes when we think about our regret, we say, oh, my God, I must be the only one who has ever had a failure of kindness. I must be the only one. I'm so unique and special. I'm the only one who had a failure of courage or failure of kindness. And that's such a threat to our ego, we just bat it away. When in fact, if you say, you know what, maybe being unkind as part of the human condition occasionally. Maybe it's part of the broader human experience. Maybe you're kind of like other people, and what you should do is just treat yourself

with kindness and try to extract a lesson from it rather than protect your ego. God, I mean, you're remaking regret. So you've got self-disclosure. You talk about Jamie Penny Baker's work at UT. All roads lead to Austin. I mean, hook them horns, baby. Come on, let's just call it what it is. Kristen Neff, self-compassion and self-distencing.

So you're saying you've got a regret. Self-disclose. Just be honest about it. Because let me tell you something. This is where I love this intersection of your work on regret and my work. Shame. Regret can slide into shame.

Do you agree? Absolutely. Shame needs three things to grow exponentially, right? Secrecy, silence, and judgment. Boom. Shame cannot survive your remaking regret approach. If someone did what you're recommending in the book, shame actually cannot hang on.

Because first of all, self-disclosure, shame is like, shut up, do not talk about this regret. That takes on the secrecy leg. We knock out the secrecy leg. Now we got two legs left. Right. And then you've got self-compassion, which is the opposite of judgment.

Absolutely. Yeah. So instead of saying, God, I'm such an asshole, I can't believe I fired off that email. I'm like, you know what? You're scary when you're scared? And you're scared. Like everyone else is scared right now.

Kids going back to school. Is it okay? Is it not? You know, like it's all right. And this is everybody. And then the self-distance scene, which is really one of the things I love about Neff's work on self-compassion is her definition of mindfulness. Because a lot of people say mindfulness is like you've got to not, don't ignore the feeling, feel it.

Check, I agree. But then Kristen Neff comes back and says, but don't get stuck in it either, y'all. Whoa, whoa, wait. Absolutely. Yeah. And so then you go to Ethan Cross's work at Michigan, which is pull out of the amygdala and think about what's happening, not feel what's happening.

Don't become the wound. Think about the wound. It's so smart. But I think it's the way to do things. And you've been trying to help people overcome shame, which is in many ways more debilitating than regret, because shame is, you've written this beautifully. It's about who you are as a problem.

person more than it's your act. Regret is about a particular action. It can spin into self-loathing about your being. But shame is really about who I am as a person, and that's why it can be so debilitating. But again, I really believe, Bray, that, and maybe the pandemic is going to force our hand here, is that we just haven't been taught about how to deal with negative emotions. And so people get captured by them. They either live. in denial saying, no regards. Or they get completely debilitated by them. And I think it's because America, especially,

you know, positive thinking, don't worry, be happy, smile, smile, smile. And I do think that there's a kind of gurgling thing. And maybe you started the tsunami with the talk about vulnerability, kind of saying, wait a second, maybe we need to rethink how positive we're going to be. Positivity is good, but you need a little negativity. because negativity teaches us and it makes us better and whole.

Yeah, that's why the thing I say about regret all the time is it is a fair but tough teacher. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, that's just it. I love this book. But I love that metaphor, actually. I wish I had used that. No, but I mean that very seriously.

So let's anthropomorphize, forgive my 50 cent word. Yeah. Let's anthropomorphize regret. A regret comes to us. Who is regret? You could say, this regret is a meaningless stranger whom I can ignore. All right? Right. That's ignoring it. On the other hand, you could say, this regret is St. Peter at Heaven's Gate, passing judgment on my value as a human being. Or you can say, this regret is a teacher. This regret is Mrs. Williams in third grade,

who's teaching us how to do math. And if you think about regret as your teacher, rather than as a stranger or rather than as your judgeer, then it can be very, very healthy. And I should have put that in the book. I love what we're doing here because I do think regret is not just a teacher, but it's the teacher that has your best interest in mine. Agreed. So is going to grade your paper pretty ruthlessly,

not because they're mean, but because they believe in your talent. I do. I think it's the best kind of teacher. I love that. I love that. So what's your advice on getting people to reframe regret as a teacher? I think you're right when you said earlier that we sometimes pathologize regret, the very word we don't like to talk about it. When I did this quantitative piece of research, I asked people a question about regret without using the R word. I asked 4,400 Americans, how often do you look back on your life and wish you had done things differently?

And we had 1% say never. We had 83% say they do it at least occasionally. And because I didn't say the word regret. If I said, how often do you have regrets, you would have this kind of instinctive, I don't have any regrets, I don't have any regrets, because we pathologize the word. Now, question to you, how do you help people see that that figure coming to them with that label regret is not a meaningless stranger and is not a judger, but is a teacher? This conversation, your book, that's how you do it. Someone has taken on shame and vulnerability, which people are like, ooh, that's why I really wanted to start with the linguistics piece. because you are a really good teacher. Oh, thanks. And you do have the ear of a lot of people. I mean, like, you and I both do a ton of work in organizations.

I would say probably 90% of my work as an organization is probably the same percentage for you, would you say? Yeah. And that's strategic on my part because I don't think you change the world unless you change work. And so this is how you do it. I think you have this book. We have these kind of conversations.

but we also try to do things like, one of the things I thought when I was reading your book, and I think we're going to do this, is we talk about key learnings in our organization, but on a macro-organizational level, which is a lot of people listening to the Dare to Lead podcast, we should talk more frankly about the regret when we do end-of-year key learnings or...

Oh, interesting. I'll tell you why. because key learnings in my experience, whether I'm working with a C-suite in a Fortune 50 company or I'm doing it in my own organization, key learnings are often born of regret. And divorcing regret from key learnings gives us a partial teaching.

Interesting. It gives us the, what did you say? from Chomsky, it gives us the shallow learning. Yeah, there's a surface structure and a deep structure. So I think in organizations, when we separate key learnings from regrets, we're not doing the deep work. These are humans that had emotions around making decisions. And so I think we just have to do what I try to do with vulnerability.

And a lot of other people do it with vulnerability, which is next time I'm talking to my kids or I'm doing a talk, I'll say I have a ton of regrets, some old that I've worked through this way and talk about your book and some from last week. And I don't want to ever stop having regrets because I never want to stop learning. Right. Amen. Amen. I think that's it. And I think if we can tie regret with learning. Yeah. And I'll be honest with you. Like this is something I feel like I feel like should get off the podcast and say,

but I'm just going to say it on the podcast. And how people draw a line between no regrets and fragility of ego is important. Because the future belongs to the curious and to the learners, not the knowers. And part of being a learner is having the courage. to feel the frisson of regret. Exactly. The discomfort. That's exactly right.

And it's what we were saying before. It doesn't feel good and it teaches, but you got to have them both. It's a combo platter. It's a combo platter. Let me tell you, also it doesn't feel good. My squats don't feel good.

My lunges don't feel good. My effing push-ups don't feel good. I can do a half one. But I'm building a muscle, and I think regret can be a muscle. Mm-hmm. You know what I mean? That we have to build.

Yep. In addition to telling everybody I know to get this book and for us reading it as an organization, I'm going to not back off using the word regret when I talk about my own. Well, Brana, I think that would be a big thing. And honestly, and I do think that what you did on vulnerability is a model for that. Can I tell you something? Sure. How I got to this.

So I was struggling while I was writing this book, early on when I was writing this book. I was really struggling. I'd come to my office. I just spin my wheels. I get nothing done. week would go by, two weeks would go by. And I just, like, struggling. And it got so bad that I reached out to some friends and said, you know what? I think I need a coach. I need somebody to talk to. I need a coach to help me, like, get my car out of this right. And so a friend of mine who's like former executive

knows all these executive coaches and things like that. She said, I got the guy for you. So she put me in touch with this guy and he said, I don't really do much coaching anymore, but I'm happy to talk to you. So he talked to me and I told him what was going on. And literally 15 minutes into the conversation, he said, well, you don't have a purpose. You don't know why you're doing this. I was like, what? Of course I know why I'm doing this. He said, well, so we don't even talk anymore.

What I need you to do is I need you to write me an email. Just in a few sentences telling me the purpose of this book that you're writing. And I was like, oh, man, I'm having a hard enough time writing. You're going to give me another writing assignment, you know? What the heck? Who are you? That's low. That's low.

Okay. And so it takes me like three weeks, but I'm thinking about it the whole time. and I finally realized what it was. And it was so powerful to me that I sent him the email. He said, okay, now we're talking. And I actually posted the email for your, I mean, I'm reaching over right here in my office. And what I say is, and this is the word, the verb that I'm going to use here, is like, the purpose of this book is to reclaim regret as an indispensable emotion.

And what you've done with vulnerability is, reclaim vulnerability as something essential to the human experience and powerful for making our lives better. And I am your fast follower on this linguistically. What Bernay did for, I mean, I should have done this in the pitch for the book now that I think about it. What, what, oh my God, I got to write this down. No, seriously, what you did for vulnerability, I'm realizing in this conversation is what I'm trying to do with regret is reclaim it. It's been claimed by people who don't understand it. I want to reclaim it for the rest of us so we can use it as a powerful force for forward progress.

God dang, I got goosebumps. Like, yes. People are like, Dan and Brunay have gone into some kind of vortex and we're just watching now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it. We're in some kind of cave somewhere

listening to our own echoes at this point, but I'm enjoying it. Me too. Like, yeah, and luckily it's my podcast. This is like the first podcast that I've done in a while where I'm taking notes, as you can see here. Okay, so here's what I think.

vulnerability, the mythology about vulnerability, the primary mythology is really tough, which is vulnerability is weakness. Yes. And so I think the work ahead of you around regret is not just what is regret and why is it important and good, but it starts with dispelling the bullshit about it. Absolutely.

What you're up against is this kind of whole yolo, no regrets, kick ass, and it's faux courage wrapped in fragility. Well said. You're the model. No bullshit. You're the model because you won back, I mean this, you won back vulnerability. How'd you reclaim vulnerability? One conversation at a time.

One conversation at time. It's not like you sent up an email blast to 10,000 people or posted something on social media. How do you win it back? You win it back one conversation at a time. And because you started those tens of hundreds of thousands of conversations about vulnerability, people's lives are better. If I can do something like that with regret, this teacher, then I could feel pretty good about this latest project. I'm cheering you on and I'm going to participate when you ask.

So I love it. Thank you. All right. You ready for rapid fire? Oh, yeah. Fill in the blank. Vulnerability is? Essential.

Okay, this is a good one. What is one piece of leadership advice that you've been given that's so remarkable you need to share it with us are so shitty you need to warn us? I had somebody who was higher up in an organization. I don't want to reveal anything more of this. Who criticized me, who basically took me aside and said that I was doing it wrong because I was, in his words,

kissing down and kicking up, that I was treating people below me too well and people above me without a lot. enough deference, and that was the wrong way to do it. I'm assuming this is going on the shitty side of this thing. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry if it didn't make that clear. Yeah. No. I mean, that was like, whoa. That's, whoa. That, I mean, that is. Like, okay, I'm sorry. Like, you just said the quiet part out loud. Aren't you ashamed of that?

You know? Okay. That's so good. Okay. Here's a good one. What's the hard leadership lesson that you have to keep learning and unlearning and relearning, that lesson that the universe just keeps putting in front of you? That everybody doesn't see the world the way I see it and doesn't have the same view of quality or excellence or speed or goodness and that they're not wrong, they're just different in the way that blue is not a better color than yellow, it's just a different color than yellow. And sometimes I'm mystified that people don't see that.

the world exactly as I do. And I shake my head and then say, okay, here we go again, universe. Sorry. That's right. My wife even says that to me. Well, I'll start a conversation about something. And she says, I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm not in your head. And so recognizing that people are not in your head is something that I've tried to get better at, but I've learned it a lot over and over. I've learned it this week. All right. What's one thing that you're really excited about right now? I am really excited that my son is in his freshman year of college and seems to be having a great time, that my middle daughter is in her first job and is flourishing, and that my elder daughter is applying to graduate school and about to enter a different chapter

of her life. Oh, my God, those are so good. Tell me one thing you're deeply grateful for right now. I mean, I don't want to sound cliche. My wife. It is unimaginable to me, my life without my wife. There's some interesting research on, well, I'm going to sort of drain the emotion of it so I can actually talk about it without cracking. But there's this technique called the mental subtraction of positive events where you sort of feel better about your situation when you imagine what your life would have been like had something good not happen. It's sort of the George Bailey. Oh, yeah. It's a wonderful life technique. Yeah. And I truly am grateful for Jessica every single day. And I mean that consciously. I'm not saying that to bullshit. I'm saying that because I think about

it all the time. I shudder to think what my life would be like without her. Beautiful. All right. We asked you for five. songs you can't live without. Let me tell you what you gave us. Bad reputation. I love Joan Jett. Okay, Joan Jett. I'm going to make a film recommendation to your listeners. There's a documentary about Joan Jett. It is one of the best music documentaries you'll ever see. Joan Jett rules. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm a huge Joan Jett fan, so I love this. Where's the documentary and what's it called? It's streaming, I think, on Netflix or whatever your streaming provider is, and I don't remember what it's called, but we'll put in the show notes. We'll put in the show notes. Okay, so first song, bad

reputation Joan Jet and the Black Hearts. Fight the power, public enemy. I know what I know by Paul Simon, modern major general by W.S. Gilbert and author Sullivan, and thank by Aretha Franklin. In one sentence, what does this mixtape say about Daniel Pink? Daniel, hmm, that's a good question. Daniel cares about language and he wants to push things a little further along, but do it with good humor. I don't know how I was going to get out of that. But if I can sort of drain the mystery of it by unpacking. So that song, you know, the Gilbert and Sullivan song, Modern Major General is such incredible hilarity and wordplay. I encourage your listeners. I mean, I have it on Spotify. I have it on my playlist on Spotify. You know, it's like, I am the very model of a modern major general. I have

information vegetable animal and mineral. I know the queens of, you know, and so it's this sort of incredible linguistic marvel. But then Fight the Power is a brilliant song from late 80s hip hop that was the soundtrack for the movie do the right thing. Oh, God, yeah. And then I know what you know, one of the best lyrics in all of music where at the beginning of the song where Paul Simon sings, she looked me over, I guess she thought it was all right, all right in a kind of a limited way for an off night. That is a great lyric. I know. But thanks for doing that. That was like the most enjoyable exercise of the last two weeks for me when your teammate Gabby said, we need your five songs. And I'm like, what? And I'm okay, I'm into this now. Well, Dan,

Let's just say the book is the power of regret, how looking backward moves us forward. It's a game changer. Well, thanks. And I think there's so much hard shit going on in the world right now that if all we do is just barrel forward without pausing and looking back and thinking, wow, I don't feel good about that, what can I learn? I mean, this is a time. And this is not just a time, in my opinion, for individual regret, but organizational. thinking, but also community and macro and political demystifying and reclaiming regret doesn't have just interpersonal consequences. I mean, I'm going to give you my seventh amen of our

conversation. Amen. Thank you for being on the podcast. Thank you for this conversation. It was enlightening and moving, and I have now two pages of notes. Awesome. I loved this conversation. I loved this podcast conversation. I mean, I don't need to tell you because you've listened to it if you're at this point now. Hardcore geek out. It had it all. Qualitative data, quantitative data, evidence with stories, data with a soul. This is my wheelhouse here. I love this. You can find Dan's book, The Power of Regret, wherever you like to buy your books. We'll also post a link to it on the Dare to Lead episode page on Braybrown.com. You can find Dan on. online at Danpink.com. He's also on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, his handle on all those platforms at Daniel Pink. All that stuff is on the episode page as well. I love the work that he's doing. I love having a partner in this kind of cultural effort to reclaim regret. I do think it is a tough but fair teacher, the kind we need, and I love the data. Don't forget that every episode of Dare to Lead has an episode page on Bray Brown.com. You can listen

to every episode there if you'd like. You can learn more there with resources, downloads, and transcripts. And you can also sign up for our newsletter. As always, everyone can listen to the Dear to Lead podcast and unlocking us on brunaybrown.com. Excited that you're here. Thank you. Stay awkward, brave and kind. Deer to Lead is produced by Brunay Brown, Education and Research Group. Music is by The Sufferers. Get new episodes as soon as they're published by following Daredelead on your favorite podcast app. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.com.com.