RegretPower

 I recently read The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward by Daniel Pink (2022). 

My top takeaways:

• Healthy regret clarifies, instructs, lifts us up, makes us better.
• Regrets fall into four core categories: foundation regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets, and connection regrets.
• Regret is better understood as a process, not a “thing.” (Verb, not noun.)
• Healthy regret may make us feel worse today, but better tomorrow.
• Regret’s three broad benefits: 1) sharpen our decision-making, 2) elevates our performance, and 3) strengthens our sense of meaning and connectedness.
• Regret deepens our persistence.
• We’re more likely to regret the chances we didn’t take than those we did.
• Hearing ourselves say “too much” or “too little” is a signal of Foundation Regrets.
• Intentional reflection on our regrets is fuel for our growth.
• Beliefs about morality across societies coalesce around five themes: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/disloyalty, Authority/subversion, and Purity/desecration.
• If an important relationship is broken….place the call, make that visit, say what you feel. Initiate the mend.
• Self-disclosure builds affinity much more often than it triggers judgment.

My favorite quotes:

 

“One influential study found that roughly 95 percent of the regrets that people express involve situations they controlled rather than external circumstances.” (p. 22)

 

“All deep structure regrets reveal a need and yield a lesson.” (p. 129)

 

“George Vaillant, another Harvard psychiatrist, headed the Grant Study for more than thirty years. In an unpublished 2012 manuscript, he reflected on what he’d learned from the experience. After eight decades, hundreds of subjects, thousands of interviews, and millions of data points, he said he could summarize the conclusion of the longest-running examination of human flourishing in five words: ‘Happiness is love. Full stop.’” (p. 144)

 

“Regret depends on storytelling. We are both the authors and the actors. We can shape the plot but not fully. We can toss aside the script but not always. We live at the intersection of free will and circumstance.” (p. 209)

 

Dan Pink always makes me think. He takes me to unexpected places, and causes me to reflect deeply on my beliefs and my enactments. A very worthy read.