Episode 246: Daniel H. Pink: How to Use Regret

March 30, 2023 Guest User

Daniel H. Pink is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including his latest, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. His other books include the New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind — as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human. Dan’s books have won multiple awards, have been translated into 42 languages, and have sold millions of copies around the world. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.

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Human beings are undeniably complex, and what motivates us can often be a mystery, even to ourselves. So, how do we go about gathering and analyzing the data that will help us answer the most fundamental questions about our lives and our purpose? The answers may lie in an unexpectedly rich source of knowledge, our regrets. While regret is likely to have a decidedly negative connotation for most of us, it is also extremely powerful and can teach us a great deal about ourselves and what we value. It is an emotion that is present in all of us, and social scientists (like anthropologists and sociologists) have been fascinated by the subject for decades. Today on the show, we are joined by one such expert, Daniel Pink, author of the book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. In our conversation, Daniel shares details about the research he conducted for his book, how he determined the four main categories of regret, and what we can learn from our regrets by confronting them head-on. We also discuss Daniel’s 2011 New York Times Bestselling title, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and what he thinks about working from home in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Daniel is an exceptional storyteller and is highly knowledgeable on the subjects of regret, motivation, and the important role they play in our lives. To learn more about the many facets of regret and how it can help you thrive, be sure to tune in today!

Key Points From This Episode:

Understanding regret as an emotion, why it differs from disappointment, and how regret can help us make better decisions. (0:03:00)
The four main types of regret (foundation, boldness, moral, and connections) and the methodology Daniel used to determine them. (0:07:30)
The role that outcomes play when it comes to boldness regrets. (0:13:09)
Why Daniel believes connection regret is so common, and what regret reveals about our values. (0:14:13)
The World Regret Survey that Daniel conducted as a systematic survey of regret, and his findings that regrets of inaction tend to stay with us much longer. (0:17:14)
What people can learn from past financial decisions that they regret and the challenge of addressing foundation regrets. (0:20:42)
The surprising benefits of regrets and how to learn from them. (0:21:31)
How regret anticipation can be used to help people save for retirement. (0:22:46)
Daniel’s system for addressing feelings of regret, why it’s important to confront them rather than wallow in them, and the importance of being kind to yourself. (0:24:01)
The overwhelming amount of decisions we make in our lives, when to choose the best versus something that is good enough, and how to optimize future regret. (0:27:56)
An overview of the many complex factors that motivate people, intrinsic and external motivators, and how Daniel’s research on regret affected his perspective on motivation. (0:31:16)
Daniel’s thoughts on working from home when considering autonomy, mastery, purpose, and motivation. (0:37:17)
The motivational model that Daniel sets out in his book Drive and some of the common misconceptions he has observed in reporting on his book. (0:39:33)
Why people are purpose maximizers, not profit maximizers, and how this should impact the leadership of a company. (0:41:26)
Daniel’s response to the question “How do you define success in your life?” and why he doesn’t think about the word ‘success’ very much. (0:47:08)

Read The Transcript:

Ben Felix: This is the Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision making from two Canadians. We're hosted by me, Benjamin Felix and Cameron Passmore, portfolio managers at PWL Capital.

Cameron Passmore: All right, Ben. I'm guessing most listeners and viewers will know this week's guest. It is Daniel Pink, the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including the most recent book, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, which is a book we reviewed back in Episode 189, and a book you referenced and dug into for your paper, The Finding and Funding a Good Life paper.

Ben Felix: Yeah, I was working on that paper. It was almost done. I had a section on regret, because similar to what Dan talks about in this conversation, I think there's a lot of information in regret about what makes us happy, as counterintuitive as that may sound. So I've gone down this rabbit hole of finding research on regret and there's lots in academia. Then, Dan's new book came out when I was just about to finish the paper. So I paused with writing, read it, and incorporated some of the ideas that he had in there, which are really good. I think what he's done, the primary research that he did for his book is not academic research. I think that's okay. Dan's a very good storyteller. He tells the story of his book with the data that he collected, and I think he did a great job, relaying that to us in this conversation.

Cameron Passmore: As you said at the back end of our conversation, we know the four categories of what people will regret in the future and I love the line. "A regret is the reverse image of what people want out of life. What you regret is what you value." So we got these four categories, and what they're going to be. You can learn a lot from these four categories. He says, "You know what you're going to regret in the future."

Ben Felix: Yeah. That's the four core regrets. That's Dan's interpretation of the data set that he collected, but you look at it and it's hard to disagree with. But it is very interesting to think about that in a lot of cases. You can't say everybody. I don't even know if he can say most people, but in a lot of cases, people will look back and have regrets that fall into similar categories, which is what he was trying to get out with the research that he did.

Cameron Passmore: He's also the author of the wildly popular book, and often quoted, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. He has a phenomenal masterclass, for those with a membership in there, on sales and persuasion. He also wrote the book To Sell is Human. And did you know Ben? He was also the chief speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore back in the '90s.

Ben Felix: I did know that. Yep. That's very cool.

Cameron Passmore: Very cool. Anyways, I thought that was a great conversation.

Ben Felix: And we talked about drive too. We didn't just talk about regret, we talked about driving, motivation and purpose. I think it was a really nice conversation.

Cameron Passmore: Work from home. Yeah, good perspective. Okay, good to go.

Ben Felix: Yep. Let's go ahead to the episode.

Cameron Passmore: All right. Here's our conversation with Daniel Pink.

***

Daniel Pink, welcome to the Rational Reminder Podcast.

I am so glad to be here and glad to spend some time being reminded of being rational.

Excellent. It's very cool to have you join us. So right off the top, Dan, how would you describe the emotion of regret?

Wow. Okay. Let's go right to it, the emotion of regret. Well, you got it right at the outset that regret is an emotion. All right. So that's very important to understand. It's an emotion that makes us feel bad and that's important to understand. But it's emotion that makes us feel bad when we do something that is peculiar to our brains. It's kind of magical. We look backward to the past, think about something we wish we had done, something we wish we hadn't done, something we wish we had done in a different way, and say, "If only I had done something differently or done something in a different way, then my present would be different." So it's this emotion that makes us feel bad based on our past decisions, because we think that our present will be reconfigured because of those past decisions.

Now, one more thing before I shut up. It is a ubiquitous emotion. It is one of the most common emotions that human beings have. If you don't experience regret, you might be having – I'm not joking around, you might actually have some kind of medical problem.

Okay. Now, how is regret different from disappointment?

Good question. I guess I can use this word on, because you guys have so many technical folks on here. It's all about agency. All right? So all you social scientists out there, it's all about agency. Okay. Regret is your fault. Disappointment is not your fault. I'm glad you asked that, Ben, because that's a hugely important component of this. So I'm looking around here in my office, I have a window right there. Okay. It's been raining a little bit here in Washington DC where I live. Imagine that it's raining outside, I can't regret that. I didn't have any control. I don't control the skies, right? I can be disappointed because I wanted to go out for a walk or something like that, but I can't regret that. However, what can I regret? I can regret it if, "Hey, it looks like it's going to rain. I'm going to go off for a walk anyway without an umbrella." I can regret that. Then it starts raining, I mean, I can regret that because that's on me. So it's a very important distinction.

Actually, when we try to make sense of our emotions, understanding where we have agency and where we don't have agency is really fundamental. A lot of times we're over index on our beliefs about our own agency. When we acknowledge that there's some things over which we don't have control, it actually is psychologically healthy.

Is living with no regrets realistic or even healthy?

Well, no. Let me give some context to that question. There are people out there who will say, so many of them, "I have no regrets. I don't regret anything." That's largely delusional. What we know, from a pretty significant amount of research here. Okay. So first of all, social scientists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists have been studying this emotion for about 50 or 60 years. Among the things that I have discovered is, as I mentioned earlier, is that incredible ubiquity of this emotion. It is one of the most common emotions that human beings experience is arguably the most common negative emotion that human beings experience. It is widespread. So widespread that the only people who don't have regrets and this is what I was alluding to a moment ago, our five-year-olds. Five-year-olds don't have regrets, because their brains haven't developed that kind of time travel ability that I described a couple minutes ago. People with certain kinds of neurodegenerative disorders or brain lesions don't have regrets, because it's literally a sign of a malfunctioning brain, and sociopaths. Otherwise, everybody has regrets.

I think the real issue here is that we have never been taught what to do with our regrets. All right. We’ve basically been sold a bill of goods and the bill of goods says this, "That the way to live wealth is to always be positive, and never be negative, to always look forward and never look back." That is not a good idea. That idea is contradicted by a wide and deep body of science. Now, the key here is, we don't ignore our regrets. We don't wallow in our regrets. We confront our regrets. We use them in the way that some of your listeners might use their Bloomberg terminal, right? As sources of information, as data, as signal for making better decisions.

Can you talk about the main types of regret?

Sure, and let me tell you how I got there, because I think it's informative and also, I think that your listeners might not turn off their phone immediately if I start talking about methodology. One way that I investigated this motion was to look at the existing science on this topic. Again, as I mentioned in developmental psychology, cognitive science, a lot of social psychology, a lot of neuroscience. But I also did some research of my own, two big pieces of research on my own. One of those was what I call the world regret survey. That was just a giant collection tool, where I invited people around the world to submit a big regret. Right now, we have a database of over 24,000 regrets from people in 109 countries. It's unbelievable. It's just incredible.

So what I found in, now, again, I know there's a lot of interest in AI, artificial intelligence right now. I initially tried to make sense of those using some of the software. One thing is called Text IQ to sort of make sense and it wasn't useful at all. Now, it'll get there immediately, like I did the research for this before ChatGPT. What I could have done is put all the regrets into ChatGPT and let ChatGPT do the analysis and then write the book. Alas, I was a little bit too early for that. However, what I did do is I ended up reading through not all these regrets, but the first 15,000, 16,000 of them. What I found, again, to answer your question, Ben, is that around the world, people seem to have the same four core regrets.

Let me make one other wonky point, and then I will actually answer the question that you asked. The way that scholars had traditionally analyzed regret, I determined, was a little bit off. They typically looked at what people regret by the domain of life. This is an education regret. This is a family regret. This is a career regret. I felt that there was something, if you actually go to the texture of people's languages, if you actually read what the stories are telling you, you find something else. So four core regrets. I'm happy to talk about them now. I'm happy to have you guys jump in with any clarification from my turgid and long-winded response.

No, keep going with the four core regrets and then I want to dig a little bit more into the underlying regrets after that.

Rock and roll. Okay. The four core regrets are, number one, what I call foundation regrets. All right. Remember, "if only" is the catchphrase of regret. So we can identify all these core regrets by the "if only" that it triggers. Foundation regrets, "If only I'd done the work." These are people who made small decisions early in life that compound – important word – to big bad consequences later on. No single individual decision is cataclysmic, but over time, compounding. But I started teaching my kids about compounding interest when they were like three years old, because it's so powerful and inexorable. This is the case of people being burned by that. Specifically, "I didn't exercise or eat right, and now I'm in bad health. I kind of blew off school, didn't work very hard in school, and now, I actually don't have the skills to compete in the labour market." Okay, foundation regrets.

Second regret, good example of the cross-domain aspect of it. Boldness regrets. Boldness regrets are, "If only I had taken the chance." These are people who are at a juncture in their life, they can play it safe or take the chance. They can study abroad or they can stay in their dorm. They can ask that person out on a date or they can avoid doing anything, and therefore, avoid rejection. They can start a business or they can stay in a lackluster job. Overwhelmingly, when people don't take the chance, they regret it. Not all the time, but a huge portion of the time.

Third category, moral regrets. "If only I'd done the right thing. If only I'd done the right thing." Huge numbers of regrets about bullying early in life. Huge numbers of regrets about marital infidelity, other kinds of misdeeds. It's the smallest category of the four, but it is – you read this language and I did a bunch of follow up interviews as well. It's something that really, really, really excites people.

Final category is what I call connection regrets. Connection regrets sound like this, "If only I had reached out." These are about relationships, not only romantic relationships, but just a whole suite of relationships, where the relationship wasn't tact or should have been intact and it comes apart. Most of the time, it's not – doesn't come apart dramatically. It just drifts apart. So what happens is if someone says, you want to reach out to an old friend, but you say, "Oh, it's going to be really awkward, they're not going to care." You want to tell a relative that you love them, but you say, "Oh, it's going to be really awkward, and they're not going to care." So you don't, and you wait, and then it becomes even more awkward, and you don't do it, and sometimes, it's too late. Connection regrets are, as I said, "If only I'd reached out."

Those are the four core regrets that people around the world seem to have. The universality of it really blew me away, you guys. Because a lot of times, when I would read a regret, I wouldn't say, "Oh my God, that person is American." "Oh my God, that person is Canadian." "Oh my God, that person is French." It was pretty remarkable. And we have to survey up in Chinese. We had the survey up in Spanish. We had entries in Portuguese. We had entries in French. Even when you translate those, you see incredible commonality across the globe.

So you said the moral one was the smallest one. Which one was the most often cited category?

Out of those four, it was connection regrets. Connection regrets were the largest category. Boldness regrets were close behind.

On boldness, since you had all the contexts here, because they are written responses. Did the outcome matter? Like if someone took a risk and got a bad outcome.

That's a really good question. That's actually a really important question. Because we know from other research on decision making, that people are a little bit outcomist. So that, basically, they say, if the outcome was good, that means the decision was good. What I found was that people were less outcomist when it came to boldness than I thought. So I had plenty of people who said – starting a business was a good example. There were people who said, "My big regret is that I started a business, and I didn't know what I was doing, or I got a bad partner, and it went south on me and I regret it." But there are probably equal numbers of people who said in an interview on our side, "I started a business, it didn't work. But I'm glad I did it, because now I know, and you don't have to wonder about it and I learned something from it."

Then there were legions more who said, "Oh, if only I started a business. I always wanted to start a business, but I was too much of a wimp to do it." So people were less outcomist than I expected.

Do you know why connection regret is so common?

Well, I can speculate. I think it's because – and I'll take a step back in my speculation. I think it's because each of these regrets reveal something. This took me a while to get to. When people tell you what they regret the most, they're telling you what they value the most. Let me just double click on that for a moment. Think about all of the decisions that you made today. Think about all the decisions you made today or even last week. So I ask you, Ben,. What did you have for lunch last Wednesday? You have no idea. We make all these decisions. We do all take all these actions. We make all these choices in a given day, and most of them, we don't remember. And that's fine, that's healthy. But there are a few that not only do we remember them, but they bother us for years. That's a very strong signal. That's the thing about regrets. It's giving you an incredibly strong signal.

The signal is this, it clarifies what you value and instructs you on how to do better in the future. Now, the clarification comes, because these regrets are essentially reverse images of what people want out of life. So these four core regrets give us clues about sort of what constitutes a life well lived. Foundation regrets give us a clue that people value some stability. I think there is, a lot of times in some of the popular accounts, we think that a good life is all about meeting this, meaning and purpose, and whatnot, but it's also about stability. It's also about not being on a wobbly platform, feeling like the floor is going to fall out beneath you.

A good life is also about learning and growth. That's what boldness regrets are. A good life is about being good. That's what moral regrets are. To answer Cameron's question, connection regrets are about love. Not only romantic love, but the full 360 of love that we have toward the people in our lives. I think what it suggests and there's other research like this, that the most important thing in our lives, what gives our lives meaning, and wholeness and satisfaction is the love we have for other people and the love other people have for us. I mean, it sounds gooey, but that's what this regret research is telling us. That's what Harvard's famous Grand study is this basically 85-year longitudinal study of why some people flourish and other people don't. That's what it tells us. I mean, over and over again, that's what the message is. I think that's why, Cameron, the connection regrets was the largest, because essentially, love is the most important thing.

You mentioned a bit of an anecdotal account earlier of not really noticing differences in regrets across demographic groups. But I think you also looked at that more systematically. Did you find any differences?

Yeah, it's another great question. I want to hit on your word systematically. This one survey that I did, the World Regrets Survey, was a giant collection tool. I didn't randomly interview people. So I'm loath to make any kind of big demographic judgments based on that. However, I also did another piece of research here in the United States called the American regret project, which was the largest public opinion survey of American attitudes about regret ever conducted. We did a very, very good. I'm very proud of this. Very good public opinion survey, and a very big sample, intentionally big sample precisely to answer the question that you're asking.

We oversampled in every demographic category, by race, by education, by gender, by region and we shouldn't find that many differences. This whole point of this very expensive and difficult public opinion survey was to detect some of these demographic differences. There were not that many. There were some differences between men and women, in sort of like the surface domains so that men were more likely to have career regrets, women more likely to have family regrets, but not by a huge margin. There was one moderately interesting finding where people with high levels of formal education had more career regrets than people with less formal education, which is like, yeah, I had a hmm on that. But then it sort of makes sense, if you have more formal education, you might have more career options, which means you have more options that you decided to forego, so that's possible. But that wasn't not massive.

I'll give you the one big demographic thing that we found and it was big. I went, did this survey, hoping that it would have all of these nuggets and I had gravel, and then one golden gleaming nugget. All right. I was thinking that I would be panning for all kinds of great minerals here and I ended up with gravel, because that's what the truth was. But then one really big shiny thing and the data were just overwhelming in this and it was this. It has to do with age. I asked people their regrets in this systematic public opinion survey. I asked them their regrets. I had them sort them into the traditional categories. I also had them sorted by action and inaction. Is this a regret about something you did or is it a regret about something you didn't do?

Here's what I found. People in their 20s, to some extent in their 30s had about equal numbers of regrets of action and inaction. But as people get older, it's not even close. Even by the 30s, 40s, certainly 50s, 60s, 70s, the inaction regrets outnumber the action regrets by a massive margin. Like two to one, sometimes three to one. Over time, what really sticks with us are regrets of inaction. I think that goes a little bit to one of your earlier questions, which is that, if you look at something like connection regrets, they tend to be regrets of inaction. If you look at something like boldness regrets, they tend to be regrets of inaction. It's really what we didn't do that sticks with us for a long, long, long time.

That is so fascinating. Your line, "A regret is the reverse image of what people want out of life." So I've got a hack question for you, perhaps selfishly. So as people think about their financial decision making, can they learn from their regrets that they may have made in past financial decisions? If so, how can they do that?

Sure. I think they can. I think it's important to interrogate that and examine that. The trouble with foundation regrets is that they take a while to repair just because they took a while to metastasize, they take a while to cure. So, with foundation regrets, there's this old kind of hackneyed Chinese proverb that says, "The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is now." I think that that offers some advice on how to do that. So I think that people can look as they can dispassionately at their previous financial decisions, and learn from them and then do differently in the past, but not realize that it's going to be cured right away.

We've talked about this in bits and pieces, but in your book, you review a bunch of great research on it, so I still want to ask the question. How would you describe the benefits of having regrets?

Oh! Well, we have some good evidence on this. Among the benefits, again, if you treat it right. So I'll give you an example. Some research where you put people into a negotiation session, they negotiate, they come out. The researchers asked them what they regret. So they basically instructed them to invite this negative emotion. Bring on the regret, not no regrets. Bring it on. When people do that, they tend to be better in the next negotiation. So there's evidence that reckoning with your regrets helps you become a better negotiator. It helps you, – this is near and dear to some of the stuff that you guys work on — it helps you avoid some good research on how it helps you avoid cognitive biases. That if you reflect on regrets, like, "Oh my God. I got totally caught up in escalation of commitment to a failing course of action. Oh my gosh. I so regret confirmation bias." If you feel bad about that, you are more likely to avoid it next time.

There's some massive research on problem solving. So try to solve a problem. Summon the regret for what you did or didn't do. You do better on the next one. There's some interesting research among executives on strategy that show that executives who actually confront their regrets rather than elide them are better strategists. There's a ton of research on reckoning with regrets as a source of kind of making meaning in your life.

How do you think regret anticipation can be used to help people save more for retirement?

Interesting. There is some research on this. Have you guys talked about the Hal Hershfield research where people use the age in the age advanced –?

We've had Hal talk about it?

Yeah. Okay. Great. So I won't repeat that, but I think that's pretty ingenious work. One reason, according to his research, that we don't save for retirement, is because we think that future me is a different person altogether. Like, "Why should I save for that guy, he hasn't done anything for me." So I think that that's one way to do it. When it comes to this particular decision, I think it's important for people to – I don't think it's right for people to constantly say, "Oh, should I go out to dinner tonight or I'll regret spending money on this dinner 10 years from now?" I think that can be debilitating. I think what's most important is to say, "If I have a conversation with the me of 10 years from now, I don't want the me of 10 years from now to be hacked off that I didn't build a stable foundation for myself and for my family. Therefore, I'm going to do everything I can to put in place systems, automated systems, so that I am regularly and systematically saving money and investing money in a sensible way."

Again, this is something that you've touched on in bits and pieces, but I think it's important to ask explicitly. Someone has a regret; they realize that they regret something. How do you think that they should respond to that feeling, that emotion?

Yeah, it's super important and no one ever tells us how to do this. I'll start at the high level. The high level is, don't ignore it, but also, don't wallow in it. That's actually really important. There's basically a skill, a process for doing this. The way I look at it is a process that is inward, outward, forward, inward, outward, forward. So inward is, how do you look at the regret and yourself? For that, a lot of times when we make mistakes, particularly financial mistakes, we say, "Oh God, I'm such an idiot. What was I doing buying Ether? Oh my God. I'm a total moron. I put all my money into Nokia before the iPhone." So we tend to be extremely harsh on ourselves. The research in what's called self-compassion shows pretty clearly that's not a good idea.

What you should do is, is in general, the inward is treat yourself in the face of a mistake or regret, treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Recognize that regrets are part of the human condition. This is one thing a lot of people think that they're the only people who have regrets when everybody has them. Any regret, if your listeners send me regret, we randomly select three of your listeners. They each send in a regret. It would take me about 48 seconds to find an essentially identical regret for each one of those in my database. I mean, we're not that special, everybody has regrets. Then also, recognizing that any regret you have is a moment in your life, not the full measure of your life. So you need that inward look to move on. Now, once you move on, there's a strong case to be made for disclosure. It's not coincidental that 24,000 people were willing to share their big regret with a complete stranger. One-third of them roughly opted in for follow up interviews. So not only do I want to tell a complete stranger my regret, but I want to talk – I'm going to give him my email address, so he can talk to me more about it.

People think that when they disclose a vulnerability, others will think less of them. When in fact, there's some pretty good evidence, it's the reverse, that people admire you for that kind of honesty, that kind of courage. Then the most important thing is that, and this is actually super important is that our emotions, both positive and negative emotions are abstract, like that's what an emotion is. That's what makes positive emotions feel so good and it's what makes negative emotions feel so bad. So when we write about or talk about our negative emotions, we perform a kind of conversion. We convert this abstraction into something more concrete and that makes it less menacing. So inward, reframe it for yourself. Outward, disclose, at least talk about it, write about it.

Then finally, you got to draw a lesson from it. The way that people draw lessons from it, is by taking a step back and not only saying, "What lesson do I learn from this?" But doing some self distancing and saying, "If my best friend were in this situation, what would I tell her to do? What would I tell her the lesson is? If I made a business decision that was awful, if I were replaced tomorrow, what would my successor do?" So treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt, talk about it, disclose it, make sense of it, explicitly draw a lesson from it. Even though that sounds a little bit cumbersome, once you start doing it, it's like any kind of learned behavior, it's a process that becomes kind of habitual. If you do it, as I said, there are lots of benefits. There are certainly more benefits than ignoring your regret, and way more benefits than wallowing in those regrets.

Okay, so that's regrets that you have. The other thing that I liked in your book is you don't talk about avoiding future regret, which of course makes sense, because we've talked about how it's important. Can you talk about how to optimize future regret?

Yeah. This is a tough one, because there's a little bit of nuance here. So theoretically, what we would want to do is just minimize future regrets, right? That makes perfect sense. Totally makes sense. It's harder than it looks. The reason for that is that we make a huge number of decisions. If you're putting that kind of analysis on all your decisions, it will grind you to bits. What we want to do is, this is like social psychology 101. There's a – and you guys are probably talking about this too. There's a difference in the research on decision making between what I call maximizers and what I call satisficers. Maximizers want to make the best decision in every case. "I want the very best ETF. I want the best roofer in Washington DC to fix my slate. I want the juiciest hamburger in the Delmarva area for lunch. I'm going to get the best of everything."

What we know is that maximizers and satisficers say, "It's good enough. I just have a hamburger, it's good enough, whatever the hamburger is. Most of these ETFs are the same. I don't really care about one basis point lower in fees, I'll deal. There are plenty of good roofers, I'll just take whatever roofer there is." Here's what we know, maximizers are often slightly more successful, they are also miserable. They're miserable, because you can't maximize on everything. Again, going to, Ben, one of your earlier questions here. I think this is the thing that's so exciting about this emotion of regret, is that you pop the lid on it, and inside are like these pretty fundamental questions about how to live your life.

So one of them that you brought out was the difference between where do you have agency and where do you not? What's in your control and what's not? If something's not in your control, don't stress out about it, because it's futile. Right now, in this case, the difference is this. There are some decisions on which you should maximize. There's no question about that. But most decisions you should satisfice on. And that's hard for a lot of us to do. My view is that the optimal way of doing this is that you maximize on avoiding these four core regrets. You maximize on avoiding the regret of not building a stable foundation. You maximize on your regret of not wasting your time on this planet in trying stuff. You maximize on being good. You maximize on building connections of love, and everything else you satisfice on. Because, again, let's go to housework.

If you were to have a conversation with yourself 10 years from now, the you of 10 years from now, really doesn't care what hamburger you chose. The you of 10 years from now doesn't care whether you got the best roofer in Washington or the third best roofer in Washington. The you of 10 years from now doesn't care whether you bought a blue car or a gray car. The you of 10 years from now does not care about those other things a lot. So, if we maximize on those important things, and satisfices on everything else, I think that that at least gives us a map, a route to a life well lived.

I think that's an awesome place for us to shift to your other great book, Drive. Dan, what motivates people?

Oh! All kinds of things motivate people. People are awesome. They're incredible. They're complex. They're crazy. Let's talk about that. What a great way to sort of get into this topic. So, we have biological drives. We eat when we're hungry, we drink when we're thirsty, we have sex to satisfy our carnal desires. Biological drives are part of what motivates people. We respond very much to rewards and punishments in our environment, right? If the City of Washington DC says, "We'll give you $20,000 for putting a green roof on your house." You can tell, I've had roofers in my house. So I've got roof on the mind here. And I actually have a green roof. City of Washington DC will give you $20,000 if you create a green roof. I'm going to be more inclined to create a green roof. If the city of Washington says, "We're going to find $20,000 to everybody who has a green roof." I'm likely to avoid building a green roof, right? We respond very well to rewards and punishments in our environment.

But human beings are more than that. Those are just two dimensions of what motivates us. There's a third dimension that often gets overlooked. It's this, we do things because we like doing them. We do things because they bring us pleasure. We do things because we learn, and we grow, and we contribute to the world. We do things because it's the right thing to do, irrespective of any of the external motivators out there. That's a hugely important part of who we are. That part often gets neglected. The places where it's neglected are arguably the most – the two most important character forming institutions in the world, which are schools, and offices.

Essentially, what we do is we have a lot of these motivational regimes that stop at that second drive, that say, "Okay. If I want people to my company to perform better, what I need to do is I need to give them say, "If you do something great, I'll give you a bonus. If you do something bad, I'll fire you." That that's the way to get good performance. Once again, we have evidence here that that's right sometimes, but it's wrong a lot of the times.

Did any of your perceptions on motivation change after your research on regret?

That's an interesting question. Not so much deeply. The core idea in that, especially when it comes to organizations, is what I call these "if then" motivators. If you do this, then you'd get that. Not all rewards, but "if then" motivators. If you do this, then you get that, are great for simple and short-term tasks, and not so great for complex and long-term tasks. That's one thing that shows up very, very clearly. I think that when you start looking at what truly motivates people, which is a sense of autonomy, determining their own lives, which is getting better at something that matters, a sense of purpose, then I think you see a little bit of cross pollination there. That mastery is very much what people were seeking in boldness regrets. It's like, "I have so many regrets about not playing a musical instrument. Never learned how to speak another language. Never knew what it was like to run a business." I think that connects the master. I think that purpose goes a little bit to the moral regrets. I think that it goes a lot to the connection regrets as well. I think that they are simpatico. I don't think they map perfectly at all, but I think that they rhyme.

Yeah, interesting. So it's more of a rhyme than something that would have changed your perception.

Yeah. One thing that it might have solidified is that, I think we're slightly over indexed in our culture and the way we think about ourselves in the world on thinking about individual difference and not thinking about individual universality. If I care about providing a stable foundation for my family, if I care about doing something bold before my time on this earth expires, if I care about acting morally, if I care about loving people, and also if I don't work or at school, consider myself like a horse who's responsive only to carrots and sticks. My guess is that, we could go to a directory in Albania and pick a random Albanian, she is going to basically share that sentiment. And then we can go to somebody in New Delhi, India and he will basically be like that.

Human beings, obviously, we have differences. But I just think that the way we think about it is a little over indexed on those differences, those feelings that somehow your experience on the planet is so radically unique from anybody else's. I just don't think that's true. I really don't. I think that there are these universals. I think the motivation research tells us that, and the regret research tells us that.

That’s really interesting. Totally anecdotal. But there was on the radio yesterday, there was an interview with a National Geographic journalist who spent the last 10 years walking across the world. He basically said what you just said, that that's been his experience.

Oh, it's interesting. Yeah. I don't mean this in the Disneyland “It's a small world after all” kind of sugary way. I just think that, you got to remember, we're all the same species. A 50-something dude like me in Washington DC is the same species as a 17-year-old woman in Bangkok, Thailand. They're the same species as a 96-year- old dude in Siberia, right? It's the same species. Within species variation, there's some obviously, but it's not nearly as much as we think. That actually should be a source of comfort, I think. I actually think that it should, in an ideal world, inform some of our decision making. Not financial decision making necessarily, but just our decision making about how we want to configure our world.

I like to pivot back to motivation at work. So you wrote Drive obviously long before the pandemic. Do you have any thoughts on mastery, autonomy, purpose and motivating team members in a work from home environment?

Yeah, it's an interesting question too. I think that on the question of autonomy, I'll go back to an even earlier book that I wrote 20 years ago called Free Agent Nation, where I talked about how people are going to be working for themselves, are going to be working independently, they're going to be working at home. Especially when it comes to the working at home part, people said I was nuts. It's like, "Okay. That'll never work. We don't have the technology, can't trust people to do it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Okay. That's cool. Then, 20 years later, 18 years later, we had this massive worldwide experiment, where basically, everybody figured out how to do it in four days, and it worked fine for two years, allowing people that kind of autonomy worked out fine. It worked out well. That is a very difficult egg to unscramble.

I feel like the pandemic has made many organizations, but certainly many people say, "Listen, you should just start with autonomy," that the idea that the only way I'm going to do good work is if you control me, or you actually see me in the office for white collar workers is absurd." I think that the autonomy case has been made a lot easier by the pandemic. That's a big change. When it comes to providing these things, I think it's a little bit more challenging, particularly when it comes to purpose, or even a sense of belonging. I think it's hard. I don't think it's impossible, but I think it's harder to foster a sense of purpose and belonging. Like, we're all in this together, and we're doing something that matters when all of your colleagues are postage stamp size people on computer screens.

This is why I think and I think the evidence is pretty much there already, that we're going to go to this world of kind of permanent hybrid, where white collar workers are going to have some days in the office and some days not in the office. Those are going to be very different kinds of work days. The days not in the office are going to be much more about heads down work, solo work, asynchronous work, autonomous work. And the days in the office, ideally, we'll be much more intentional and purposeful about things that we can only do when we're collaborating when we're together.

So your model in the book Drive, mastery, autonomy, purpose is widely quoted and cited. Have you seen any common misconceptions when people use your model?

Okay, yeah. I'll give you two. First is, if I make the argument saying, "Hey, guys. The science shows that ‘if then’ rewards don't work very well for complicated, complex work and long-time horizons. It also shows that the real source of high performance and almost everything is intrinsic, not extrinsic motivators." Some people will conclude from that, "Oh, this is great. Money doesn't matter." That's a colossal misconception, a colossal mistake. You still have to pay people, you still have to pay people well, you still have to pay people fairly. All right? This is really an argument against these high stakes' contingent, "if then" rewards. It's not an argument saying that human beings are not extrinsically motivated in any domain. That's fundamentally false. We are. So that's one misconception.

The second misconception has to do with, "Okay. I can think of three now, so I'll give you three. One of them is a misconception, because I got it wrong. So that'll be the third one. On autonomy, there is a misconception that the choice is binary, that you either have these very controlling environment or this wild and woolly, totally autonomous environment. That's not the case. The amount of autonomy that is good for a 22-year-old just out of university, or a 48-year-old expert with 20 years of tenure is different. Autonomy doesn't mean, it's not off on, it's a dial. So you can go from zero to 10 and the good leaders have to calibrate that.

The third and final misconception is one, that it's a misconception that I created because I got it wrong and it's this. It has to do with purpose. When I wrote about this, I wrote about purpose as doing something in the service of something larger than yourself. I'm feeding the hungry. I'm solving the climate crisis. I'm doing these big, transcendent things. What I neglected was a different kind of purpose, which is simply, are you helping out a teammate? Are you helping out a customer? Are you solving a problem? Are you getting a project out the door for your team today? I look at it now, it's a clumsy way to put it as, capital P, Purpose, which is like, feeding the hungry, like big, transcendent "I'm making a difference in the world." But also small p, purpose. "Hey, I help my team get a project out the door today. I help that customer solve their problem. I'm a cook in a restaurant, and I made 48 meals that people enjoyed, and I improved their life today a little bit.

There's some good evidence that but small p, purpose is a very powerful motivator too. So the misconception people have is a misconception based on, "Am I not getting it right the first time?" Which is that, really, purpose is two things, not one thing. Capital P, purpose, big transcendent, I'm making a difference. Small p, purpose, day to day, individual, personal, not transcendent, but deeply meaningful. "Am I making a contribution?

So as a follow up to that, I think you wrote in your book To Sell is Human, I think it was in that book. You wrote that people are purpose maximizers, not profit maximizers. Can you talk about the impact of that on the leadership of a company?

Well, that was actually in Drive. It's basically saying that in some ways, in certain instances, that the single-minded drive for profit maximization might not be the best route to profit maximization. That, actually, having a sense of purpose, having a sense of mission, it might be the most important thing, and profit can be the consequence of that. I don't have a good term for this, this kind of phenomena, but you sometimes see that in people out there who are like, "I want to pursue success." Then you have other people out there who are just saying, "I want to do great work and something that matters to me." Many times, those people achieve success more readily than the people who are actively pursuing it. That's not all the time, but it's a lot of the time. I think there's something to be said about maximizing your purpose. I think that companies that do that often will be quite profitable. When it's only profit maximization, I think that there's a kind of a narrowing of focus that often involves juicing revenue through unethical means or cutting costs to the bone. No one goes rolling into the office joyfully because their boss says, "And in order to increase profits, we're cutting expenses 7% this year," and that's going to boost our profit margin. No one says, "Oh my God. I can't wait to go into the office and figure out ways to cut 7%."

You briefly made the illusion, but do you think the same thinking applies to individuals in their lives, pursuing purpose instead of –?

I think there's some good evidence of that. That, when we think about “what is a good life?”, we might be — and other people have written about this, Ben, plenty of other people. We might be saying, "Well, a good life has certain kinds of trappings. A good life is when I am happy in the kind of smiling, blissful, on-a-beach sense." What we see is that a good life is a life that is meaningful, that ultimately, the people who are the most satisfied are the people with a sense of meaning in their life. Then that meaning can derive from the work that they do. The meaning can derive from the close relationships that they have. But a good life, a happy life – happiness is not spending your days smiling all the time and playing beach volleyball all the time. It's okay to do that sometimes, but that's not when people reflect on their lives. They don't say, "Oh my god, I had such a great life. All I did in my life was drink daiquiris and sit on the beach."

When people face these kinds of crises, you often see this with very, very wealthy people. They have all the money in the world that they can buy anything that they want, and they thought that that would be the source of their happiness. When in fact, they don't have any purpose and they don't have relationships of love. I think that there's something to be said for pursuing meaning rather than success.

Let me offer another piece of advice there from Tom Rath, who wrote StrengthsFinders, that I think is pretty interesting advice. He suggests, especially for younger people, a lot of times younger people ask themselves, or older people tell young people “You're trying to figure out what to do with your life? Well, what's your passion? What's your passion?”. Then, even those of us my age who are contemplating career transitions or whatever, it's like, "Okay. What's your passion?”. And Tom, and I agree with him completely, says that's a terrible question. It's too self-involved. It's too self-absorbed. I think there's a better question we can ask ourselves, particularly when there's juncture in our lives, which is, "Where can I make my biggest contribution? Where can I make my biggest contribution?" When people think about it that way, what you end up with is often the markers of traditional success and a sense of meaning.

That's a good approach and I also like. This is one of the reasons that I was excited to read your book when it first came out is, I think you would probably agree, because you talked about it earlier. You can use regret for the same thing, you can think about your future self, and think about what your future self might regret and that can help inform what you should be doing as opposed to like you said, asking –

But the thing is, we know what your future self is going to regret, right? Because your future self is like those 24,000 people. Your future self – everybody listen to this. It's like, let's come back, we'll do a follow up show in 10 years. My guess is that and bring your listeners on. It's like, what do you regret in 2033? The regrets are going to be, "I should have built a stable foundation, I should have taken more chances, I should have done the right thing and I should have reached out to people I care about.

That's why it's so exciting that you've done that empirical work, but you've synthesized it down to the four core regrets. I mean, I think it's brilliant for thinking about the future. Our final question, Dan. How do you define success in your life?

An easy one. I don't, actually. Only when forced by people like you. That word is not a word that is in my head a lot at all, honestly. But if forced to do that, I would say, getting up in the morning, and doing what I want to do and something that contributes a little bit. I think that'd be part of it. Then also, going back to what seems to be sort of a latent theme in all of this is that, having people in my life whom I love and who love me. I can't imagine that and I think that that is not something I necessarily realized early in my life. I'm not sure that even my sort of wagging my finger at younger people saying, "This is the truth of your life is going to be effective." I think that on some level people have to get there. But if you have some stability, if you're able to do stuff that you want to do, and learn, and grow, and you have people in your life who love you and who you love. That's pretty good.

Pretty good. That's an awesome answer. Great to have you on. So great to meet you. Dan, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for this very interesting conversation. I appreciate all the great probing questions.

All right. Thanks, Dan.

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