The Daily Stoic - BONUS | The One Thing You’ll Regret More Than Failure - Daniel Pink

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Starting point is 00:01:27 philosophic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visitdailystoic.com. What surprised you about what people said they would regret? Well, I did a few different things to get at this. Like, I'm a big, I mean, like, I'm going to, can I use a, another 50 cent word?

Starting point is 00:02:25 Epistemological, all right? So when people say stuff, I always want to know how do you know, right? And I expect anytime I say something for people to also say, how do you know? And so in the research on regret, there were three legs to the stool. One of them was 60 years of research in a whole variety of academic fields. But I also for this decided to do two research projects of my own. One was a quantitative survey, a giant public opinion survey on American attitudes about regret, about which more in a moment. And then I also collected regrets from all over the world. So we have a database of 26,000 regrets from people in 134 countries. And so what surprised me, particularly about that third leg, was the universality of it. That really surprised me. I expected much greater variance in what people were regretting. And there was at the very, very granular level. But there was surprisingly little variation based on nationality, relatively little based on gender, a tiny little bit based on age. And so that's the impression that I got from the, from the qualitative survey, in the quantitative survey, which I did like a pretty serious piece of public opinion work

Starting point is 00:03:32 in order to get at demographic differences. And when we crunch the numbers, there weren't that many. Like I spent all this time and effort and cash to do this like a really good piece of survey research, you know, oversampling in every category so we can make claims about, you know, well-educated people, you know, people with high degrees of formal education like this. and women like this, and there were very, very few differences. And so the universality of the language in the qualitative one and just the fact that there weren't many demographic differences in the quantitative one, surprise me. Because people are people and they're like most people.

Starting point is 00:04:06 Most people are like most people. Yeah. And I mean, it's really, it's really the case. I really think, what do most people want? Most people want, they want some stability in their life. They want a chance to learn and grow. I think most people are good and want to be good. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:04:20 And they want love. And that's true whether you are in Austin, Texas or whether you are in Kuala Lumpur or whether you are in Dubai. And so did their regrets reflect choices that took them away from those things? Yes, yeah, yeah, pretty much it. So regrets, see, my argument is that regrets operate like a, you know, a reverse image of what people really want out of life. Yeah. Okay. So the idea is, is that, you know, let's go back to these decisions that we make every single day.

Starting point is 00:04:49 So, you know, if you think about yesterday, you know, you made, I don't know, maybe 50, 60 decisions. You don't remember most of them today. Yeah. Okay. A week from now, you probably won't remember any of them. But there are certain things that you've done or haven't done, decisions or indecisions, actions, inactions from five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago that not only do we remember, but they bug us. Yeah. That's a very strong signal.

Starting point is 00:05:14 Yeah. Like, that's something to pay. That is a signal to pay attention to. And what it's a signal of is what we value. So we have this big category of things called foundation regrets. Foundation regrets are, I spent too much and saved too little and now I'm broke. Yeah. I didn't exercise or eat right and now I'm profoundly out of shape.

Starting point is 00:05:30 I never read or studied and now I'm ill-informed and don't have skills. All right. Foundation regrets are about, I think, ultimately about stability. We have a lot of regrets on boldness. Not being bold enough. Absolutely. Yeah. Huge.

Starting point is 00:05:43 Yeah. And it doesn't matter the domain of your life. If only had started a business. Yeah. You take the number of those people with, I started, my regret is that I started a business and went south on me. Yeah. You know, 50 to one. I mean, seriously, a huge, I was really surprised by the huge numbers of regrets about not asking people out on dates.

Starting point is 00:06:02 Yes. You're probably more likely to regret the thing you were afraid to do than the thing you boldly did. That is, I don't want to say 100% true, but it rounds to 100%. I mean, it really does. And I'll tell you some more about that. I can lock that down. So huge numbers of regrets about being at a juncture in life where you can play it safe or take a chance. And when people don't play it safe, when people don't take the chance, most people, most of the time regret it. Not all the time, not everybody, but overwhelmingly. We also see in the one demographic difference I found in the quantitative research. And forgive me for getting in the weeds about these two different ways of knowing. But in the quantitative research, the one demographic difference was age. And what you had is that people in their 20s had roughly equal numbers of regrets of action and inaction. And as people aged, 30s, 40s, but certainly 50s, 60, 70s, inaction regrets took over. Yeah. You get to your 50, 60, 70s, 3 to 1, 4 to 1, inaction regrets over action regrets.

Starting point is 00:07:09 Maybe the very bold and reckless have died. Could be, could be. So they're a little bit removed from the sample. that's a good that's a good argument actually but you know it's probably more likely i don't know if anybody ever died from asking somebody out on a date though so but because the thing but i there's a there's a there's a the other reason is that when we do things we can make sense of it we can find the silver lining in it but when we haven't done something particularly done something bold particularly done something meaningful it gnaws at us

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The Daily Stoic - BONUS | The One Thing You’ll Regret More Than Failure - Daniel Pink

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