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

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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, can I use another 50 cent word? Epistemological, all right? So when people say stuff, I always want to know how do you know, right? And I expect any time 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 qualitative survey. In the quantitative survey, which I did, like a pretty serious piece of public opinion work, in order to get at demographic differences. And when we crunched 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, surprised me. >> Because people are people and they're like most people. >> 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. >> 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? >> Yeah, yeah, pretty much it. So regrets, see my argument is that regrets operate like a reverse image of what people really wanted in life. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so the idea is that, let's go back to these decisions that we make every single day. So if you think about yesterday, 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, and actions 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. >> 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. 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. >> Yeah. >> And it doesn't matter the domain of your life. If only I'd 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, huge, I was really surprised by this. Huge numbers of regrets about not asking people out on dates. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> 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%. >> Yeah. >> I mean, it really does. >> Yeah. >> And I'll tell you, 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. >> Sure. >> 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 age, 30s, 40s, but certainly 50s, 60s, 70s, inaction regrets took over. >> Yeah. >> You get to your 50s, 60s, 70s, 3 to 1, 4 to 1, inaction regrets over action regrets. >> Maybe the very bold and reckless have died. And so they're a little bit removed from the sample. >> That's a good argument, actually. But I don't know if anybody ever died from asking somebody out on a date, though. But 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.