A Counterintuitive Strategy for Sharper Decision-Making, Stronger Performance, and a More Meaningful Life. | Daniel Pink

23:55And they have to simply evaluate how happy the people look. Okay. Get gold, silver, bronze, how happy they look. And so invariably the person who looks the happiest is the person who won the gold medal because they won a gold medal at the Olympics. But the second happiest person is overwhelmingly the bronze medalist because the bronze medalist is doing a downward counterfactual saying, at least I finished third, not like that schmo finished fourth and doesn't have a medal. The silver medalist is the least happy person up there, even though they're in second place, because they're doing upward counterfactuals.

24:31Ah, if only I had pedaled harder, I would have gotten to gold. Regret is because our, I mean, you know this, our brains are amazing. All right. Our brains just do these amazing things. And one of the things they do is travel through time, change events, come back to the present, and it's just incredible. And so it's a superpower in a way. And so again, upward counterfactuals make us feel worse, but help us do better. But downward counterfactuals are useful. They make us feel better. And sometimes it's good just to feel better, even though it doesn't help improve our performance. Fair enough. Another of your recommendations, and this kind of harkens back to your articulation of amazement at the fact that so many people not only wanted to fill out your survey, but speak to you, a stranger, about it.

25:16Another strategy you recommend in the book is disclosure, getting it off your chest. 100%. We have a lot of evidence about that. And let's explain why that's the case. That helped me understand this. So certainly disclosure is, there's an unburdening there. You're sort of lifting the weight from your shoulder. And that's certainly true for moral things. But the other thing about the disclosure is that we have research like from Jamie Pennebaker at Texas showing that when we write about these things, there's evidence that if you write about your regret for 15 minutes a day for three days, it helps defang it significantly.

25:53And the reason for that is that our negative emotions are blobby. They're amorphous. They're vaporous. And when we write about them or talk about them, when we name them, they become more concrete. Therefore, they become less menacing. There's research out there showing that writing about your negative emotions is helpful. Writing about your positive emotions isn't always helpful because you want to just have that general glowy, amorphous thing. If I were to say, you were to say to me, list 17 specific reasons you love your wife, it sort of takes some of the charm out of it. You know what I mean?

26:28And so there is a big argument for disclosure. The other thing that we care about, what we're concerned about with disclosure is that we fear that when we admit our mistakes, when we disclose things that we're not necessarily proud of, that people will think less of us. And there's some pretty good evidence that not all the time, but most of the time, people think more of us. They actually admire our candor. They admire our courage. And so there's a very strong argument for disclosure and just wrestling these amorphous negative emotions to the ground. Just to say to the listener, I interviewed Jamie Pennevaker, who's really the granddaddy of journaling for dealing with difficult emotions.

27:11And so I'll drop a link in the show notes if people want to go deep on his work. But Daniel, you talk not only about journaling for 15 minutes over three consecutive days, but also about you can call somebody or you can even talk into your voice recorder on your phone. There are lots of ways to unburden. Absolutely. Absolutely. The key here is going through this kind of transformation process. It's basically taking something that is amorphous and blobby and making it more concrete. And words are more concrete than this kind of dull, vaporous feeling. This is one reason why cognitive behavior therapy often involves naming the emotion that you're feeling.

27:48Because when we name things, we sometimes feel like we have dominion over it. And it aids in the sense-making. Absolutely. Because you take something that's kind of a background static of regret or shame or fear and you put a name on it, it just feels much more workable. Yeah, you can see it. You can hold it in your hands in a way, metaphorically, rather than just feel this menacing cloud above you. And that sense-making is extremely important in looking at it and then extracting a lesson that you can apply in the future. Another recommendation in the book is to create a failure resume. What is that about?

28:28So this is an idea from Tina Selig at Stanford, which I love and I've done. I sort of have a refined, somewhat edited view of this now. So here's what I did based on this idea. So what you do is you make a resume, you make a list of all of your failures, setbacks, screw-ups, blunders. All right. But you don't leave it there because it's not an exercise in self-flagellation. Then you have another column that says, what lesson did I learn from this? And then the third column, what am I going to do about it? And so what you do is you take these things that sort of linger in our head and you memorialize them, be specific about the lesson you're learning from them, and then have a specific action you can take afterward.

29:08Now, doing this over a lifetime, this is painful, doing it over a lifetime, I don't recommend that. What I do recommend is people to take, say, five failures, setbacks, screw-ups, list them, say what you learned from them, and then what are you going to do about it. For me, when I did this more massive comprehensive list, what I discovered, and it was actually super helpful to me, was that I was actually making some of the same mistakes over and over and over again. That helped me surface that. It really did. Because when you look at the lesson, it's like, oh, here's that lesson again. Oh, here's that lesson again.

29:43Oh, here's that lesson again. There's a reason why in the military they do after action reports. Absolutely. Exactly. A hundred percent. I'm a big believer in that. I'm also a big believer in, again, using our brain's time travel capabilities of also doing a premortem on things. Our brains are amazing. You know that. So I do a premortem for basically every important project I do. What you do is you think about, you say, it's three years from now. And this project is a complete abject disaster. What went wrong? You get in your time machine, you go to the future. What went wrong? And then you list the things that went wrong.

30:23Because in many cases, it's easy to anticipate that. We didn't have enough budget. We didn't get the right people on board. We didn't have approval from the regulators, whatever. Make that list. You get back in your time machine to the present and don't do those things. And so a premortem is, I truly do it for every single project that I do. Because we can also anticipate our regrets. That's another thing that we can do. We can anticipate our regrets and construct our present day to try to avoid them. Yeah. Yeah. So in the book, you use this expression, regret optimization framework. Is that what you're referring to?

30:55Yeah. I mean, regret optimization framework was an idea that was popularized by Jeff Bezos, who famously had a story where he was contemplating starting Amazon. This is back close to 30 years ago. And he was working in this very lucrative finance job. And his boss said, you're crazy to do this. And he, as the story goes, he took a walk and he thought to himself, like, what am I going to regret when I'm 80? And he said, I'll regret not taking the shot. So the idea was to optimize for avoiding future regrets. There's a downside of that too, because there's some other research, Barry Schwartz is famous for this of in decision making about the difference between maximizers and satisficers.

31:38That is maximizers try to make every decision so that it's the very, very best that they can do. And satisficers make decisions saying, okay, that's good enough. And what the research tells us is that maximizers do a little bit better, but they're freaking miserable. And so, you know, I think what we want to do in our optimization is we want to avoid big regrets and just satisfy some of the things and everything like that. So for instance, okay, true story. So I was in an airport today. I was just flew in today. It's in the Albany airport. It's 1130 AM and I'm starving. So I have like Chick-fil-A chicken nuggets.

32:17So I sort of regret that. Okay. Cause it's not optimal nutrition and I'd actually don't feel great right now. All right. But if at that point I tried to optimize for future regrets, every single decision, you're going to go crazy. And what we should be doing is optimizing for the things we know we're going to regret. And here's the thing. There's a principle of social science minted by Dan Gilbert, which is brilliant. And he says, it's hard to follow. He says, most people are like most people. Okay. And most people, because they're like most people don't realize they're like most people. Most of us are fairly similar.

32:52And so I can make a pretty safe bet what I and other people will regret in the future. And here's what it is. If only I'd done the work, if only I'd taken the shot, if only I'd done the right thing, if only I'd reached out. And so what we should be doing is maximizing for those and really just satisficing on a lot more stuff, really just satisficing on a lot more stuff. I buy it. Let's go back to, we've just taken a detour, a good one, into anticipation of regret. Yeah. Let's talk more about processing of existing regrets. Another thing you recommend, and this seems to come up in at least a plurality of my interviews on this show, but one of the things you recommend is self-compassion.

33:37Can you say a little bit more? First of all, I'm so glad that it does come up so often because I have to say when I was working on this, it was actually a new concept to me. I didn't know very much about it. So for your For listeners who missed the previous 37 episodes on self-compassion, it's an idea started by Kristen Neff, also at the University of Texas. And it has to do with what do we do in the face of a regret or in a mistake? And what it tells us is that we should treat ourselves with kindness rather than contempt. I mean, that's basically what it is. Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt.

34:11You know, a lot of people, especially a lot of high achievers, when they screw up, when they make a mistake, their self-talk is absurd. It's brutal. It's vicious. It's lacerated. And what Kristen Neff's research tells us is don't do that. All right. We have research on self-esteem, modest boost. We have research on lacerating self-criticism, does almost nothing for performance, but self-compassion does something for performance. So the key here is when you have a regret, treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Don't treat yourself better than anybody else, but don't treat yourself worse than anybody else.

34:47And also recognize that your regrets are part of the human experience. I mean, at some level, you're not that special. Any regret, I walk down the street here in Washington and just tap someone on the shoulder and say, what's your big regret? I can find that regret in my database in 94 seconds. We're just not that special. So you're not that special. Everybody has regrets. Treat yourself with kindness. Don't treat yourself worse than anybody else. That is a way to begin some of this sense making. What's so interesting about self-compassion, and I'm a major proponent of it, and Kristen has been on the show many times and is a friend, and I, you know, so I'm in the tank.

35:21What's so interesting about it is it's a paradox in some ways that, like, you can't change until you accept yourself. Does that make sense what I'm pointing to? I know this is a secular show, but I was going to say amen. Yeah, that's exactly right. Somehow we've gotten the belief that treating ourselves support. I think there's a thing with high achievers too, that they think that lacerating self-criticism is somehow motivating, that it's going to improve their performance, that being tough on themselves in that way. And there's no evidence of that. I mean, there really isn't. The other way to look at this, the way I look at it, and believe me, I know about lacerating self-criticism, all right?

36:00I have like a, you know, all but dissertation on PhD in lacerating self-criticism. And the thing is, if you were to broadcast my self-talk, the way I talk to myself. If I were in an organization and you were to take my self-talk the way I talk to myself, and I were to talk that way to somebody else, HR would be in my office in 10 minutes. Somehow we haven't quite gotten that message. I think it seems maybe for certain people, self-compassion seems superficially soft, but the evidence is overwhelming. This is a form as an answer. Hey, man, back at you. Yet another thing you recommend is self-distancing.

36:36What does that entail? Well, here's a way to think about it sequentially. So you start by like exercising some self-compassion by treating yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Then you maybe disclose, you talk about it, you write about it to make sense of it. But what you have to do is you have to extract a lesson from it. You have to learn from it. All right. You can't just say, oh, everybody has regrets. I have a regret. End of story. No, that doesn't make you better. What you want to do is you actually want to think about it saying, okay, what lesson am I learning from this that I can carry forward?

37:06And here we confront, which you might've done shows on too, is Solomon's paradox, right? Solomon's paradox, which is that this principle in psychology named after, surprisingly, King Solomon, who was this wise and sagacious guy who totally mucked up his own life. And what it tells us is that human beings are pretty good decision makers, but we stink at making decisions in our own life many times. We're too close to things. We approach our own lives like scuba divers in the water when we should be approaching them like oceanographers. And self-distancing is a way to look at our lives in a different way.

37:41So there's some research, some interesting research showing that in self-talk, if I say to myself, I need to return phone calls and emails faster or else people think I'm rude. All right. I could say you need to return phone calls and emails faster. So shift from first person to second person. Or Dan needs to. so that kind of distancing there's some other i'll give you the the single best decision making i'm going to see your jeremy ad and raise you a heuristic or i'm going to give the single best decision making heuristic that i know which is um somebody comes to you for advice i don't know what to do i don't know what to do and just it helps if you stroke your chin a little bit beforehand stroke your chin and say okay what would you tell your best friend to do and people immediately know.

38:26So when you have this regret, you say, okay, what would I tell my best friend to do in the face of this regret? You can do things like, what would the me of 10 years from now want me to do in this situation? For all of your business listeners, Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, had a brilliant self-distancing move where he said that when he was facing a tough decision as an executive and he didn't know what to do, he would always ask himself, if I were replaced tomorrow, bro, what would my successor do? And he always knew. And so again, we're often too close to our, we know too much. We're too enmeshed in the details sometimes to make good decisions about our own lives, particularly things that are painful, that are emotionally brought.

39:08And so explicitly saying, what would I tell my best friend to do? What would I do if I were replaced? What does the me of 10 years from now want me to do? That can be really, really useful. And there's some really fascinating research on that as well, showing the power of that. This is really helpful.

39:26Coming up, more practical tools for dealing with regret.

39:38In my mind, there are two bodies of work that have been on parallel paths, and you're probably familiar with both of these bodies of work in psychological research, but they really they meld well in my mind. So there's self-compassion. And in Kristen's work, she recommends often what's called the mindful self-compassion break, which consists of three parts. The first is mindfulness, just seeing clearly this is a moment of suffering. The second is, and you referenced this, acknowledging universality, common humanity. I'm not the only one with this problem. And then the third is to talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend.

40:14And so that's self-compassion. And then there's also the work of Ethan Cross at the University of Michigan, who's also been on the show a couple of times. And he's the one who's really shown that if you talk to yourself using self-distancing, and you referenced this, you know, using your own name, that it can be more effective. And so it's like the third part of the mindfulness self-compassion break of like talking to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend. And then adding in this distant self-talk, to use the term of art, seems to be like to supercharge the whole thing. I write about both Neff's work and Ethan's work, and I think they're powerful, and I think they go together well.

40:50And I think what's interesting here is that we haven't, we'll throw in Pennebaker and make it a hat trick. We have a lot of research on that. Well, let me make an observation that might be interesting. So we have evidence of this. We have science behind these things, and we know how to do this. And yet we're not equipped to do it, and we haven't been taught how to do it. But I think what's interesting is that that's in the secular world. In the religious world, there are mechanisms, rituals, practices that are rooted in these same kinds of ideas that people do. So in Catholicism, it's confessional.

41:22You unburden yourself. You transmute your amorphous emotion to a disclosure that says what it is. You know, you get some guidance from an authority on what to do next. Jews have a whole day of the year that is about atonement, where you're forced to reckon with that. There are other rituals in Judaism where you take a mistake or regret, I can't think of what it's called, and you light it on fire and you throw it into the river. And so we have, and some of the, you know, the mindfulness stuff, as you know better than anybody, is rooted in some forms of Buddhism. And so the secular world, though, hasn't equipped us to deal with this universal painful emotion.

42:01The religious world has. It's developed these rituals and mechanisms, things like that. But if we look to the science, and I think you're exactly right. Neff, Cross, Pennebaker as well, and many other people, it's giving us instructions about how to live our lives more fully, how to live our lives better. When we know that our lives are going to have pain, they're going to have unpleasantness. We're going to make mistakes. We're going to screw up. We're going to feel bad part of the time. And I just feel like, especially in America, we just haven't been taught in a secular world how to reckon with that, which is why, Dan, I mean, it's why your stuff is so popular, because people need that kind of mindfulness.

42:45They need a practice, they need a ritual, they need a set of tools to make sense of a complex world and also to make sense of a flawed self. Yeah, well, thank you. And I also, I just do want to acknowledge and agree with your point that there's a lot to be learned, even for those of us who have some wariness when it comes to organized religion there are yeah there's a lot to be learned and you you described the show earlier as secular i would say it's like i mean to a certain extent yes but it's like more syncretic it's like um nice okay it's two to one now yeah that you owe me one uh it's like what works and i'll take it what works from any tradition and here's the thing i if you look at like i'm doing some research now on wisdom.

43:29And if you look at what psychologists and scientists have learned about wisdom, and you look at some of the wisdom traditions that were minted well before we had anything close to the scientific method, there's a lot of similarities, you know? And, you know, if you look at some of these regrets too, I mean, I think one of the things interesting about these four regrets, it took me a while to get there, is that they give us instruction, okay? So we can have like in a given moment, you can have a regret. You can treat yourself with self-compassion. You can disclose it and write about it. You can extract a lesson from it through self-distancing.

44:06But at a broad level, regret teaches us something else too, because what I discovered in interviewing all these hundreds of people about their regrets is that when we know what people regret the most, we know what they value the most, right? This is actually really important. Go back to this, all the decisions we make. Yesterday or today, let's think today. Today, I don't know, I probably made 70 decisions in the course of the day. Tomorrow, I'm not going to remember most of them. But there's certain kinds of decisions and actions and inactions from a year ago, from five years ago, from 10 years ago, to 20 years ago, that not only do we remember them, they bug us.

44:44That is an incredibly strong signal. And these four regrets that we surfaced in this big world regret survey, I think they operate as a reverse image of what people want out of life. What do people want out of life? I think foundation regrets are about stability. A good life is stable. A good life is not precarious. A good life is not wobbling underneath your feet. Moral regrets. A good life is good, right? A good life is true and just. Every religious tradition teaches us that. Boldness, regret. I think that boldness, regrets are about mortality in a sense. We know we're going to die, right? And you're here for this like vanishingly short amount of time.

45:27Like, when are you going to step up? Like, my God, you're not here forever. Why don't you ask Shirley out on a date? You're not going to be here forever. Why don't you start that cake baking business, whatever, you know? And then connection regrets are about love. So what do we want out of life? We want some stability. We want some goodness. We want some growth and we want love. And so again, these negative emotions, particularly this apex negative emotion of regret is giving us the tools and it's giving us the insights to lead our lives with greater richness, with greater fullness, with greater love.

46:01Well said. I just want to touch on a few of more strategic suggestions from you before I let you go. You talk about starting a regret circle. What is that? Yeah. So this is something that some people have done. There's certain kinds of group practices that are kind of interesting in here. So what you can do is you basically, you know, gather your friends. Everybody talks about a regret that they have. So what you have is you have the disclosure. You have the sense of solidarity that you're not alone. But what you also have is you're enlisting, let's say you have six people, you're enlisting five other people to help you see what you should do.

46:35So you're overcoming Solomon's paradox in that. And so that's one thing. The other thing that you sometimes see, it's a really interesting story. There's been some few feature stories about it, but people doing obituary parties so that they will gather with their friends and then write their obituary and read it. So what you're doing is you are going forward in time and imagining backward. There's a famous story about Alfred Nobel, where he woke up one morning in the late 1800s, and in this French paper, he saw his obituary, right? But they mistook him for his brother Ludwig. So he's a little bit wigged out by reading his obituary.

47:13But what really wigged him out was the headline, which is, forgive my bad French, Le Marchand de Mort est mort, all right? The Merchant of Death is Dead. It's very important when I speak French to sound like Peter Sellers, as you can tell. The Merchant of Death death is dead. And he's like, wait a second. Like I'm this great industrialist. I'm this great human being. And they're calling to me in my obituary, the merchant of death. Cause he invented dynamite. He had munitions factories, et cetera. Yeah. He was a great inventor, a great chemist, but what he invented were things that went boom, basically dynamite blasting caps.

47:48When he finally did die, like 20 years later to his family's surprise, he changed his will, uh, and didn't leave any money to them, but left all his money to start the Nobel prizes because he had that glimpse of his obituary and he knew what people would say about him. So people have sometimes obituary parties where they write their obituary and read it to other people. So there is a sense out there that people do want to reckon with these negative things. They just don't know how. And as you were mentioning before, some of the academic work from people like Kristen and Ethan can help really, really help people do that.

48:22Last question, because then we're going to run out of time. one of the other things you recommend is to adopt a journey mindset what does that mean yeah yeah there's some interesting research jennifer ocher has done some of this research basically there's something called in in psychology that you know we've all confronted called the arrival fallacy where we think as soon as i get i'll give you my own life okay arrival fallacy my first book is like i say oh my god i just i really want a book on the best seller list all right and once i get a book on the best seller list i'm gonna feel great All right.

48:53So I get a book on the bestseller list and it feels great for a day. And then I'm like, oh, shit, what can I do to stay on for next week? All right. And so what you have to do is is actually not fall for that. And instead, just sort of focus on the journey. And there's some very good there's some research from Jennifer Acker at Stanford, as I mentioned, showing that people who really do say I'm doing this interview with Dan Harris, not to try to peddle my books to try to achieve some instrumental end, but because it's part of my own exploration of these ideas because it's an interesting conversation, because I'm on the path to talk about things that really matter.

49:29And as cheesy as that sounds, there's some very good evidence that that approach is psychologically healthy. Notwithstanding the fact that you just said what you said, as we vector toward our final seconds here, can I just get you to remind the audience of the name of your book and also your previous books? Because people may want to go deeper on this subject and others that you have touched? The name of this book is The Power of Regret, How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. And I have a bunch of other books whose titles I don't really want to recite, but you can find them at your favorite bookseller or at danpink.com, D-A-N-P-I-N-K.com.

50:06You know, I've been around for a while. I'm in my mid-50s, which means that I just turned 61.

50:15The last thing I just want to say to you is, first of all, it's ridiculous, and this is my fault, that I'm interviewing you about this book three years after it came out. So I just want to beg you, and this is not to shift the blame here, but just to beg you that anything you're doing, anytime, you should pitch me directly or my team because you are on a short list of people that I and we will always support. So please. It's very kind of you. I appreciate that. I'm now in my, you know, I'll spare you the full contours of my midlife crisis, but I'm now doing a bunch of different crazy things that I'm not sure will ever work or why I'm doing it.

50:52But that's another story. But if I have anything, if I ever have any work product that's worth promoting, I'll call you. I'm your boy. Hit me up. Yeah. Daniel Pink, huge pleasure. Thank you for making time for this. Okay. I really enjoyed it, Dan. Thanks so much for having me. Take care.

51:09thanks again to dan pink awesome to talk to him don't forget to check out my new meditation app 10 with dan harris you can download it at danharris.com there's a free 14-day trial if you want to check it out before you buy anything not only do we have a growing body of guided meditations but every week every tuesday at four we do a live meditation and q a session In fact, tomorrow, January 27th, the session will be led by Bart Van Melleck, who's our Teacher of the Month. Come check it out. We do these every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. And if you don't make it live, we put the video in the app the next day so you can watch at your leisure.

51:48Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.