Daniel Pink: Regrets, Timing and the Key to Good Breaks

0:01Hi everyone, I'm Nikolaj Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian So-en Wealth Fund, and today I'm thrilled to welcome Dan Pink, who has written seven New York Times bestsellers. He's done groundbreaking work on the power of regret, work, creativity, behavior and so on. And so today we'll talk mainly about regret, drive and timing, like when. So welcome Dan. Thank you, thank you. Great to be here. Great. So your latest book, The Power of Regret, explores that we should kind of learn from our regrets. Now, my philosophy has always been to kind of try to learn from it and move on, but you think a bit differently.

0:34No, I think we're actually fairly close. What I'm really pushing back against is this idea, especially here in America, where people say, I don't have any regrets. Everything happens for a reason. That the path to a life well lived is to be positive all the time, never be negative, to always look forward, never look back. And that is profoundly bad advice. What moment do you want to kind of write about this? I had regrets. Of what? Of my own. Such as? Well, I mean, the catalyzing moment was when our elder daughter graduated from university, and I was sitting in this very large auditorium, and I was having this kind of out-of-body experience that many parents have, where you see a kid, and you think, like, just yesterday, this 22-year-old woman was two years old.

1:23How did this happen? And then, internally, I thought, how is it possible for me to have a 22-year-old kid when I'm, like, only 25 myself? And it's It just didn't compute. And I started thinking about that. I started thinking about my own college experience, and I had some regrets about my own college experience. I wish I had taken more risks, wish I had been kinder, wish I had worked harder. And when I came back to Washington, where I live, after this graduation, I knew that nobody wanted to talk about regrets. I was really conscious of my regrets at that time because of this marker in my life.

1:58But I knew that nobody wanted to talk about regrets. And why is that? You know, it's one of the most popular tattoos. I'm not very into tattoos, but supposedly it's one of the most popular tattoos. No regrets. But because the tattoo is that that too is BS. The tattoo is the tattoo is performance art. When I came back thinking that nobody wanted to talk about regrets and I talked about my own regrets, I discovered that everybody wanted to talk about their regrets, that everybody had these regrets. They were just looking for the opportunity. So what we had, what basically what's happened, Nikolai, is that we've been sold, especially here in America.

2:27And I think that there is something there's no regrets. philosophy is distinctly American because I think Americans are over-indexed on positivity. Scandinavians, they understand negativity. Well, we are dark. Yes, precisely. You understand negativity. And so what I'm saying, what we know empirically, this is not a philosophy, what we know from science is that the path to a good life is to be positive most of the time, but not all the time, to look forward a lot of the time, but not all the time. And so what I'm trying to do is recalibrate our understanding of this emotion. Because if we interrogate it, if we understand it, if we scrutinize it, if we listen to our regrets, it leads us to a better life.

3:05But it's universal. You say it's particularly in America, but it's universal, right? It's all over the place. Regret itself is universal. Absolutely. The response to regret, there's no regrets all positive all the time, is uniquely American. But regret is one of the most common emotions that human beings have, regardless of your nationality. In particular, investors, I think, right? We regret all kinds of things we did and the things we didn't do. Yeah, so that's interesting. You have something called counterfactual thinking. What is that? Yeah, well, counterfactual thinking is one of the great superpowers of our brains, and it underlies our ability to experience regret.

3:37It's when we go look backward in time and imagine a scenario that runs counter to the actual facts. And it is an incredible cognitive capacity. It's one reason why five-year-olds don't have regrets, because they can't do counterfactual thinking. And so it's part of what makes us. So how does that work for an investor then? How can an investor use that? Well, it depends. So I think it's tricky with an investor because you can, so you can go back and look at a, you can go back and look at a decision that you made, right? And you can evaluate it in two different ways for an investor and other kinds of things as well.

4:09You can, you can evaluate it based on the actual outcome. And I think that's dangerous. I think what you should, you need to do is evaluate it based on what you knew at the time, What you knew at the time and was this a good decision at the time? You can say, you know, I put$2 million in a crypto fund because it seemed like the thing to do and maybe it worked out. But that might not have been a good decision at the time. It could have been that you put$2 million into some other kind of fund and it was a smart decision at the time and it hasn't worked out or hasn't worked out yet. So you have to scrutinize the decision itself rather than the outcome.

4:47So Howard Marks is talking a little about that. that we should be careful judging a decision on the outcome. Annie Duke, who's been on your show, has talked about this. Indeed. She talks about people being outcomeists and that's a dangerous way to evaluate decisions. Yeah. Okay, you mentioned that there are several types of regrets. I think you divide them into four, and one is the foundation regret, right? Right. The fact that you didn't work harder. Yeah, pretty much. Well, you worked hard. You did a law degree at Yale, so you must have worked very hard. But the, yeah, so just to give some context to this, what I did is I did a, I gathered regrets from people all over the world.

5:27I put an online survey, a qualitative piece of research. And we now have a database of regrets from about 26 ,000 people in 134 countries. So it's pretty remarkable. And around the world, it seemed people had the same four core regrets. One of them was this regret that I call a foundation regret, which is, actually, it's interesting because I think there's a financial component to it. It's small decisions people make early in life, no single one of which is cataclysmic, but that leads to terrible consequences later on. And so the classic one is I spent too much and saved too little and now I'm broke.

5:58So this is like the marshmallow test, right? A little bit. Yeah. Okay. So people are good at deferring. You know, you rather party than doing your homework. A little bit. A little bit. I mean, in the book, the example I use is the famous fable of the grasshopper and the ant. Yeah. Yeah. And so and so but it doesn't really demand. I think one of the interesting things about regret is what's going on underneath the surface. So it's not about financial regrets. It's about not doing the work in the short term that pays off in the long term. So it could be things like health. I ate too much. I didn't eat right and I didn't exercise and now I'm profoundly healthy.

6:35I didn't treat my kids well and now I'm estranged from them. So it could be things like basically small decisions that accumulate early. It's like that old Hemingway line where these two characters are talking and one guy says, the American guy says, I went bankrupt. And the guy says, how'd you go bankrupt? And he says, two ways, gradually, then suddenly. And that's how people experience these foundation regrets. Absolutely. Well, we can talk about budget deficits perhaps another time. OK, boldness regrets. Well, I mean, budget deficits are the ant in the grasshopper right there. It's just that the reckoning, the winter, seems to be endlessly deferred in that case.

7:16Boldness. Boldness. Very common regret, and I think a really interesting one about the human condition. You're at a juncture in your life, you can play it safe, or you can take the chance. And overwhelmingly, people regret not taking the chance. Much more than even people who took a chance and it doesn't work out for them. It's not taking the chance. And again, it's not domain-specific. I stayed in this dead-end job instead of starting a business because I was too scared. I didn't ask somebody out on a date. I didn't travel. I'm at a juncture in my life. Play it safe, take the chance. And when people don't take the chance, not all the time, but overwhelmingly, they regret not taking the chance.

7:54When should you have been more bold? When should I have been more bold? Oh, I should have been more bold about my overall education choices. Going to law school was a quintessential act of timidity, not boldness. What I should have done is followed what I was really interested in. And today I would be, I don't know what I would be, but I would not be, I would not have taken that detour into law school. That's one example. I think about it even now in my professional life, like literally. Is there a gender difference when it comes to bold? Interesting. It's unclear. That's an interesting question.

8:28It's unclear. I did another piece of quantitative research of an American sample looking for gender differences. and there weren't that many. There is some research on, it's my most popular footnote I've ever written in this book, it's on sexual regrets. And essentially what it comes down to, to your point, is that men tend to regret the people they didn't sleep with and women tend to regret the people they did sleep with. So it seems like there might be a difference in boldness and regrets based on gender. But I don't have enough data to say that with any. certainty no what about um leadership so it's interesting you know we've had a lot of ceos on this uh podcast and several of them say they have no boldness they have they have no fair gene what do you mean well they're never they're never oh fear oh yeah no no no fear gene um you know what fear is a valuable emotion to have you know um again you don't want to over index on fear but you want to have a little bit it's like it's like all these emotions you want to have here you go So there's a portfolio theory of emotions, you realize.

9:34It's like you want to have more positive emotions than negative emotions, but you don't want to have a portfolio that's only positive emotions. You actually, come on, you want investors to have a little fear. No, totally. You know what I mean? So if you have a no fear gene, you're probably, my hunch is that in general, the no fear gene has been not completely edited out of the population, but has been diminished because people with no fear aren't around to pass on their genes. You want a little fear. You want a little fear. Just as you want a little regret. You want a little sadness. You want a little grief.

10:08In your portfolio of emotions, you want some of this stuff that is unpleasant. Yeah. What about moral, kind of the goodness side of things? You're at a juncture in your life. You can do the right thing. You can do the wrong thing. And I have found, in just my 26 ,000 people, overwhelmingly, when people do the wrong thing, most of us, most of the time, regret it. We still do it, but a lot of us regret it. Because I think generally most of us are good and want to be good. And feel crappy when we're not good. Connection. About relationships, not only romantic relationships, just relationships that were intact, should have been intact.

10:43They come apart. You want to reach out, you don't. And then you regret it. And what's interesting about a lot of these relationships is the way that a lot of relationships come apart. And this full spectrum of relationships. not only romantic relationships, but relationships with friends, with siblings, with parents, is that it's undramatic. They drift apart. They don't... Sometimes they do that, but in many cases, they drift apart. This person wants to reach out. They say, oh, man, I haven't talked to Nikolai for like five years. It's going to be really awkward if I reach out, and he's not going to care.

11:18So it is often a reason why you drift apart, right? You come back to your reunion, your 30-year reunion or whatever, and you think it's going to be great fun, and then pretty quickly you understand why you don't meet up every day. In some cases, yes. So the thing is, you don't have regrets about that. You don't have a regret about relationships that drifted apart and you don't care about. If you drift apart from someone and you say, oh, I haven't talked to Fred for 30 years, I don't care one bit, that's not a regret. That might be a wise decision. But there are many instances in our lives, particularly with friendships, where we do regret drifting apart.

11:50And I have several people in the book who, you know, based on even my interviews with them, started changing the story by like reaching out to people whom they hadn't reached out to before. Now, you say you should tell people about your regrets, right? Yeah. Why? A couple of reasons. Number one, it's an unburdening of sorts that there is. There's some evidence that when we it's sort of a lifting of the weight of your shoulders. But I think there's a more important one, more important reason than simply the unburdening. And it's this. There's a sense making function. We have a lot of evidence about this.

12:22When people write about their regrets or talk about their regrets, there's a transformation that occurs. Regret, like all negative emotions, is blobby. It's amorphous. It's vaporous. When we write about them or talk about them, we convert that vapor into words which are concrete. And those are less menacing. And we can scrutinize them. We can analyze them. We can interrogate them. So I think there's a very strong argument for doing that. What's more, you mentioned leadership before. We make a forecasting error sometimes when we say if we talk about our mistakes or our vulnerabilities, people will think less of us.

12:59And in many cases, not all, but in many cases, they actually think more of us. They admire our candor. They admire our courage. Well, nobody likes perfect people. That's true, too. I mean, that's a more parsimonious explanation. Why do we try to be perfect when nobody likes us if we're perfect? Because we're making a forecasting error. I mean, truly, it's like, I mean, human beings are awash in all kinds of predictive errors about, first of all, they make the biggest errors that they think people are watching them and care about them much more than is reality. Nobody's watching you. And people only care about themselves.

13:33I give you, that is one of my most profound, forget about writing or research, as a lived experience, that is one of the most transformative things that ever happened to me. is when probably in my late 20s, early 30s, I basically stopped caring about what other people thought of me because I discovered that they weren't thinking about me. They were thinking about themselves. What are the implications of that finding? The fact that nobody really thinks about us. We should do what we think is the right thing to do, what moves us, what we care about, and not construct our lives around how other people are going to evaluate us.

14:14And so I think that it leads to greater boldness. I think it can lead to greater authenticity. I think it can lead at the individual level to greater happiness. There are a lot of people who are, there is some sort of latent evidence in some of the regret research that a regret that people have is leading someone else's life rather than leading their own life. Okay. I love it. So to the listeners, just don't think about what people think. Just do what the heck you want. Again, a little bit. Again, I'm not, the world is not binary. You want to think about, I mean, you know, you want to care at some level about what people think, but you don't want to over-index on that.

14:55But I think it's important to figure, you know, it's a lifelong quest. It's not like I figured it out at age 60. Who am I? What am I about? Who do I care about? Who do I love? What contribution do I want to make the world? That's not an that's it's not like like God or or Darwin delivers that answer to you in a little box. It's something that you spend your life moving towards. Yeah. One kind of last fun thing from the book, I thought, was that you photograph the Olympic kind of champions. Right. The gold medal winners are really happy and the bronze people really happy. The silver people not happy.

15:32What's that about? Well, it's interesting. This is a really interesting piece of. So, I mean, you know, you have a background in social psychology. This is one of those very provocative findings in social psychology that has been replicated multiple times. So it goes back to counterfactual thinking. There are two kinds of counterfactual thinking we can do. We can do a downward counterfactual and an upward counterfactual. All right. An upward counterfactual is when we imagine how things could have been better. Upward counterfactuals, that's regret. They make us feel worse, but they can help us do better.

16:02Downward counterfactuals are when you imagine how things could have been worse. So I see a lot in the database, particularly when it comes to romantic regrets, mostly women saying, I regret marrying that idiot, but at least I have these two great kids. So I can imagine how things could have turned out worse. In the Olympic medal example, the silver medalist was like, oh, if only, I write about a bike race, if only I pedaled a little bit faster, I could have been a gold medalist. the bronze medalist is like, oh, at least I finished third rather than that schmo who finished fourth who doesn't have any medals at all.

16:36Exactly. I think it's so funny because I did this very difficult study in the intelligence service where we studied Russian. And we were 16 people. And I was second to last. I was just kind of hanging on with my nails. I'm so happy. I'm like super happy. Can you imagine? Being in last play? I nearly failed. And I managed to scrape through. That's a downward counterfactual. Totally. Yeah, so downward counterfactual is if only, downward counterfactual is at least. Yeah. So at least I didn't finish last, at least I passed.

17:13Moving on. Next book, Drive. The surprising truth about what will motivate us. And you talk about the importance of autonomy, mastery and purpose. Tell me about it. Should we start with mastery? Mastery. Masteries are, well, the reason these things are valuable is that we have, once again, overstated the efficacy of a certain kind of reward, what I call an if-then reward. If you do this, then you get that. What psychologists call it controlling contingent reward. What the research shows pretty clearly is that, not in all cases, but in many cases, if-then rewards are good for simple tasks with short time horizons.

17:52they're less good for creative conceptual tasks with longer time horizons. And so what you're better off doing is creating a reward system that's focused less on the narrow reward and more on these other elements of your work life. So one is mastery. Master is our desire to get better at things, to improve, to grow. There's some fascinating research from Teresa Mobile at Harvard Business School showing that the single biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is making progress, making progress in meaningful work. This is why people play musical instruments on the weekend. It's why they do sports on the weekend.

18:29It's why they have hobbies. It's why even people who are seasoned professionals and have every kind of extrinsic reward they could possibly imagine, they still want to do a little bit better. They still want to try something else. Why does micromanagers kill pleasure? Well, that has to do more with autonomy than with mastery. But micromanagement can be a barrier to mastery. But here's the thing. Part of this goes to what you believe about human beings. Do you believe that most human beings are autonomous and self-directed and want to do decent work? Or do you believe that most human beings are shiftless, lazy, and don't care?

19:08Now in many cases, people believe the first thing about themselves, always, but they believe the second thing about other people, which doesn't actually compute. And so micromanagement is towards autonomy. A basic need that we have is to be self-directed, have some amount of sovereignty, some amount of control over what we do, how we do it, when we do it, where we do it. And micromanagement kills that. And what we want are people, I'm surprised this word hasn't taken up because somebody use it in an interview with me, when I was interviewing somebody, we need macro managers who essentially set the direction, hold people accountable, and give people the tools they need to get better and do the best work they possibly can.

19:54I think it's interesting. Sam Altman, he said that when you ask people to do something, don't be too descriptive about what you want to achieve. About what you want to achieve? Yeah. Yeah. That's possible. I think you certainly don't want to be too descriptive about precisely how to do it in many cases. and what you want because what you could be doing it's an interesting insight because sometimes when you say here's what I want to achieve the people doing it might actually have a higher level of achievement in mind when you don't when you're less directive. So the way to understand autonomy is to understand is to understand its opposite.

20:24This is actually to me a thinking tool that I use all the time. So you take something like autonomy. Autonomy is not something like you know a glass or a pen or anything like that. It's not concrete. It's not something that you can picture and we sometimes have a harder time putting getting our minds around that so a tool that i use to think about those kinds of things is to imagine what's the opposite and the opposite of autonomy is control and i'm convinced that human beings have only two reactions to control they comply or they defy and and um and i think if you're running an organization if you're teaching kids in school if you're coaching a team you don't want people perfectly compliant and you certainly wrong people who are defined.

21:06You want them engaged and the way that people engage is through self-direction. The way that you engage is through self-direction. The way that I engage is through direction. The way that everybody watching or listening to this engages is by having some sovereignty over themselves, by having some direction over their own lives. Well if you control after five years you got the wrong people left on the firm right? That's a great point because everybody else exits. So what you have is you have an army of compliant people. Yeah terrible. Now you You talk about task, time, technique, and team. Yeah.

21:35What is that? Four Ts. Those are the dimensions of work that people seem to want some autonomy over. So time is, you know, I want to be able to come in when I want more or less. This is one reason why in professional services the billable hour is absolutely destructive of autonomy and we have some interesting research that it's destructive of well-being. task is I want some control over what I do team is I want some control over who I get who I work with and and technique is I want some control over how I do what I do and those are going to vary based on the task so for instance you don't want a brain surgeon to have like you know a surgery team doing brain surgery to have you know 100 autonomy over technique hey today we're going to try something new in your brain surgery.

22:27That's probably not a good idea. But what are the implications for bonuses, for instance, in the financial sector? We got some bonuses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It depends. It's actually trickier than people on either side of it. There's some ideology on both sides. There's ideology among some people saying bonuses are dehumanizing, they are overly controlling. There are other side that says bonuses are the only way people will do things. It depends. I think that the optimal compensation structure is, first of all, hire great people, pay them a healthy base salary, and then offer bonuses based on simple, straightforward criteria that are hard to gain.

23:06One of the things you see about bonuses is, one of the things you see about bonuses, particularly in, less in financial services, but in other kinds of areas, is that the compensation schemes are so incredibly complex about what you're rewarding and how much, that you basically need an entire administrative apparatus to run the bonus scheme and then basically a judicial arm to litigate the disputes within that. In financial services, or just like investing, yeah, I mean, if your portfolio goes up, you deserve a piece of the action. If you're working at a company and you're a big contributor and the company makes a greater profit, you deserve some of that profit.

23:45There's no question about that. So simple, not high stakes, and connect it to measures that matter. You argue that the school system is a bit screwed. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I use that precise language. No, no, but you've talked about kind of performance goals versus learning goals. Oh, heck yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I mean, it depends on where in the world you are. I don't think it's true everywhere. In the United States, particularly in certain elite corners of the United States, It's basically all performance goals. Performance goals is getting an A on the test. Learning goals is mastering the material.

24:28And believe me, you can get an A on a test without mastering the material. I'm a case in point. I mean, when I was in school, I was, you know, I was very compliant. I was very good at performance goals. It's why I got an A on basically on every single test in six years of French in school and can't speak French. Bonjour. Bonjour. Ça va. How do you screen for these things when you interview people? When you hire them? Interesting question. I don't know because in general we're pretty bad at hiring across the board. Forget about these criteria. In general we don't hire. We're still doing, for instance, unstructured job interviews when there's no evidence those have any predictive value.

25:14And so I'm not sure how you screen for it. I think that the way you screen for it would be to look at past performance and give people sample assignments on how good they are. I mean, I think that's one of the, what we see in some of the research on interviewing is that structured interviews, which are boring for the interviewers, and giving people test assignments that match what they're actually going to do on the job have some predictive value. And I would probably just go with those. and chances are the people who do well on those are people who have a propensity for a sense of autonomy, for a sense of mastery, and for some sense of purpose.

25:55Do CEOs have stronger drives than others? I don't know. I mean, it probably depends on the CEO. If you pressed me to the wall and said, and I had to offer a yes-no answer to that, I would say no. I just think CEOs could be CEOs, not because they have a stronger drive, because they're wilier, they're better at politics, they're tall, they're male, they're more conformist. So that could be why they're CEOs too, rather than they have some kind of innate drive that separates them from the great unwashed who aren't CEOs. So when you look at the cohort of CEOs, what do you think? It depends. I mean, it's varied.

26:40I think there's a big difference between a CEO who comes up through the ranks and a CEO who is a founder, first of all. I think those are two, they both have the same name CEO, but I think that they're different species. In what ways? Just in terms of the skills they had to use to get to where they are. And at some level, their approach to their, just the skill, I guess, to simplify that, I just think the skills that you need to become a CEO of a publicly held company that you've worked at for 35 years and to become the CEO of a venture-funded startup that has a new idea or a new technology, those are different skills.

27:19There's some overlap, but those are different skills. And I think that different people are attracted to those kinds of things. Absolutely. Now, how does personal energy levels come into play here? Interesting. I'm not sure. What is energy? I don't know. You know, it can neither be created nor destroyed, I guess, is what the physicists would tell us. It's an interesting question, and I don't know enough about it. I wonder if it is a metaphor for something else. It's possible that it's a metaphor for different notions of intelligence. It's possible for different aspects of personality. I'm skeptical.

27:56I don't know. Again, just to be clear on that. I'm skeptical that it's a thing in itself. I'm skeptical that energy, the sense that we're talking about, is a thing in itself. I'm convinced it is a metaphor for something important, though. And it could be ambition. It could be intellectual capacity. It could be some other kind of personality trait. Extroverts are probably perceived as more energetic than other people. Perceived, yes. You think they are? I don't know. It could be. It could be that they are. So they're certainly perceived that way. You know, here's the thing. People who are manic have very high energy levels.

28:37So the idea that a high energy level is inherently a good thing and produces good results is something that we have to question. Oh, and I guess ADHD is just trying to medicate them. Absolutely. And there could be downsides to that. I do think it's an interesting question, though. And I don't think it's, I don't think Jim Lohr and Barry, and what's his name, Tony Schwartz wrote a book about this maybe 20 years ago about how we should not manage our time, but we should manage our energy as a personal matter. But I don't think that there is either, I don't think there is much in the way of good quality research on what you and I are, you and I know what we're talking about.

29:18I think that's what's so interesting. You and I know what we're talking about. We can have a conversation about energy and we understand what we mean. But if I press, how would you define energy? I mean, it's something you radiate. It's something that keeps you going when you're tired. It's something that makes you wake up early. It's something, some kind of inferiority complex that makes you work very hard. I mean, there's just lots of things. Right, exactly. So I think it's like a proxy. It's a metaphor for something else. And it could be a mix of things. Yeah, yeah. Do you think that you have a high energy level?

29:52Well, I wake up early for sure. Do you? But part of that is biological. No, I know. Yeah, yeah. And we are moving on. Well, how about that for a segue?

30:06Segue into your next book. When? Why is timing important? What is it with timing which is important? Well, there's so many aspects of timing that are important. I think the error that we make in navigating our lives is thinking that timing is an art when it's actually closer to a science. There's incredible, this is one of my favorite, I mean, I love all my children, like all the books I found are fascinating. This book, When, I wrote largely because I wanted to read it. I realized I was making all these when decisions and I didn't know how to do it. And when I started looking at the research, there's a massive amount of research out there on when to do things, but it's splattered across all different domains.

30:46So there's some in economics and biology. As we hinted at, there's a whole field called chronobiology. And so I think the lesson of that is that we should make our timing decisions based on science rather than on intuition. And how would that work? What do you do when? So there are different dimensions of that. One of them is what do you do on a given day? And I think to me, one of the most powerful stats that I came across in that research is that time of day explains 20 % of the variance in performance. When you think about that, that's incredible. And that's based on scientific data that you had from lots of tests, for instance, in Denmark.

31:29Exactly. Not just in one particular place, but throughout. Many, many studies showing that time of day explains 20 % of the variance. Now, if you think about that, let's just unpack that for a second because even saying it, it's like, wow, God, that's kind of incredible. When we think about what explains variance in performance, some of it is energy, perhaps. Some of it is ambition. Some of it is social advantage. Some of it is innate intelligence. Innate intelligence, social advantage, those are hard. If there's deficit, that's hard to remedy. Time of day, that's really easy to remedy. So I think there's a lot of power in all of that.

32:06So what it suggests is that there are, in general, guidelines for what sorts of tasks to do at different times of day, based in part on the task and based in part on the chronotype. Chronotype is, do you wake up early and go to sleep early naturally? Do you wake up late and go to sleep late? Or are you somewhere in between? Now, you say you wake up early. Do you go to sleep early? Yeah, I'm like 9.30. Yeah, great. Until 5. Perfect. So you're kind of a lark. You're someone who has a much more of a morning chronotype. There are a lot of advantages. And you're in between. I'm in between, yeah. I'm not a night owl.

32:42I'm not an early morning person. And that's what most people are. Most people are kind of in the middle. There's a lot of advantages to that. So how do you structure these? So you should do what in the morning? Okay. So for the 80 % of us who are not night owls, we have an outlier here, the people who are the opposite of you, who naturally wake up late and go to sleep late, who we think are lazy and... The night clubbers. Exactly. We think that those people are dilettantes and not serious. They just have a different chronotype. Many of them just have a different chronotype. Let's take the 80 % of us who are either like you or like me.

33:17Here's what you should do. Early in the day, that's when we should do our analytic work. And analytic work is work that requires heads down, focus, and attention. Writing is a good example of that. analyzing data, figuring out a strategy, something that requires heads-down focus. The reason for that is that during this peak period that we have, mostly early in the day for most of us, we're more vigilant. We're able to bat away distractions. So do your analytic work early in the day. The middle of the day, early afternoon, mid-afternoon, it's generally a terrible time of day. And we see incredible research on health care, like errors in health care in the afternoon.

33:58lack of hand washing in the house, the healthcare data. You don't want to have an operation in the afternoon. You absolutely do not. Nobody in my family is permitted. I mean, if you get hit by a bus and there's no other choice, yeah. But a discretionary, there is nobody in my family who is permitted to have a medical procedure in the afternoon. I'm not joking around. How much worse is it? It depends. But you have anesthesia errors four times more likely. Oh, wow. You have doctors and nurses and other big drop-off in hand-washing. If you look at, there's some fascinating research on both the prescribed, even just regular doctor's appointments, the prescribing of unnecessary antibiotics and even opioids, much greater in the afternoon than in the morning.

34:42Wow. Yeah. And so that trough period of the day, where you can, you want to do some of your administrative work. And then in the evening, what do you do? Well, later in the day, it's kind of interesting. So what you have is you move through the day. Basically, your mood moves through the day, sort of a peak, a trough, and a recovery. Your vigilance is highest here. So if you look at later in the day, late afternoon, early evening, what you see for most of us, we'll talk about the night owls in a moment. What you see for most of us is a rising mood but lower vigilance. That makes it good for creativity, for things that don't require inhibition.

35:19So brainstorming is a great example of that. brainstorm in the afternoon not in the morning people too vigilant in the morning most of us so they're gonna knock down the good ideas they're not down the outlandish ideas here so do your more creative iterative work and so where you can push your analytic work early your administrative work in the middle and your iterative creative work later in the day now if you're a night owl the world is on those case yeah you know what it's I don't put it on the night I'll put it on the people who employ night owls let your night owls do their thing. If they want to work in the middle of the night, let them work in the middle of the night.

35:54Don't make them go to an eight o 'clock staff meeting and when they can barely open their eyes, think that they're somehow lazy. What we see with night owls, though, is interesting. Night owls, okay, more likely to have addiction problems, more likely to go to jail. But we also see night owls testing higher on both creativity and general intelligence. Well, they're probably more likely to be musicians and artists and painters. It could be that people who, and I I think there is some interesting, I don't think we know it very well, that there is some interesting ways that our chronotype can steer us to certain kinds of professions.

36:28So, for instance, there are people who, anecdotally, who say, I want to be a school teacher. But they don't have an early, they have like a night owl chronotype. You've got to be with 28 seven-year-olds at 7.30 in the morning. That's miserable for a night owl. And so they don't last as that. Dan, what's the key to good breaks? The conceptual key to breaks, and this is important, is thinking of breaks as part of your work rather than a deviation from your work. Not thinking of breaks as a concession, as a weakness, but thinking of them as integral to your work. Number one, something is better than nothing.

37:04So even a short break is better than no break at all. Second, social is better than solo. So that breaks with other people are more restorative than breaks on your own, even for introverts. We know, not a surprise, moving is better than stationary. So a break, by having a break here, sitting, staring into space, not as good as just going out for a walk. Very interesting for, I think, around the world is outside is better than inside. And this, to me, is one of those insights in science that is underappreciated. The advantage of being outside, the advantage of being, and I don't mean in a national park.

37:39I mean, you and I are talking here in Washington, D.C., taking a walk outside in Washington, D.C. and seeing the trees. um and then finally uh the the importance of breaks being fully detached people what does that mean it means that hey i'm going to take a break now and go off for a walk and you spend your whole walk looking at your phone that's not fully detached does it mean that taking a break at your desk and looking at the screen is a good thing it's probably not a good thing because it violates the outside and the in motion uh and the social side of it so uh it's probably that's That's probably a suboptimal kind of break.

38:13The optimal kind of break is in the afternoon, go out for a walk, 15, 20 minutes, with someone you like, leaving your phone behind, talking about something other than work. That's a good break. Good. Naps. Naps. This is one of those cases where the science changed my position, my political position. I was politically opposed to naps because I thought they were a sign of laziness. and I always felt terrible. I didn't take naps very often. If I took a nap, I always felt terrible. I would wake up really groggy, sort of ashamed of myself. What it shows is that... My head was that every time I took a break, my boss came in and thought I was...

38:52It was so bad. But now, the reason why I want to talk about it now is so that everybody understands that I'm taking a nap for a reason, a good reason. It's a sign. If you walk into Nikolai's office and he's taking a break, it's just another marker that he's an extremely high performer. That's how you should interpret that. Thank you. Yeah, naps are okay. They're not for everybody, but there's some pretty good evidence that they can smooth things out, particularly short naps, which really surprised me. So naps under 20 minutes are incredibly restorative. You nap longer than that, you begin to develop what biologists call sleep inertia, which is essentially like the kind of groggy, boggy feeling you get.

39:32But a very short nap is powerful. What is a napocino? That is the scientifically optimal nap where you, I've done this on bad days. I'm not a huge napper, but I will. And this is what I do is I sit in a chair in my office. I drink a cup of coffee. I don't even enjoy it. I actually just put ice cubes in hot coffee, guzzle it, okay? 25 minutes. And I set my timer on my phone for 25 minutes. I close my eyes. I put in noise-canceling headphones. I close my eyes. I put my feet on an ottoman and I can usually fall asleep in, it depends, you know, seven, eight minutes. Okay. So, so seven, eight minutes, let's say it's eight minutes.

40:16That means I have, and then my, I set my alarm and it goes off 25 minutes later. So let's say that means I have a 17 minute. If I sleep, if it takes me eight minutes to fall asleep, that's a 17 minute nap. Perfect. All right. Right in that 10 to 20 minute window. But here's the key. So I've already won right there but it takes about 25 minutes for caffeine to enter your bloodstream and so when i wake up not only do i have the restorative smoke power of the nap but i have the added caffeine

40:48dan two things at the end here first thing how do you get a pay rise um i mean it there are all kinds of ways i mean one of them what we know from economics is switch jobs quit your job and get a new job and on average you get a hike in salary. I think if you're going to go ask for it, the key is to, and this is true from some of the persuasion research, is that if you're going to ask for a higher salary, always put it in your boss's interests. Not in your own interest, but always in the boss's interest. And how do you do that? Why is it in his interest that you should get a pay rise? Because you're going to be less likely to look for another job.

41:25You're going to be happier where you are. The boss is going to have a reputation for fairness. And lastly, we've got tens of thousands of young people listening to this. What is your advice to young people? All kinds of advice, but I think the first one is that there's this notion among many young people, particularly kind of high-achieving young people, that they need to have a very distinct plan. That the way to navigate a career, the way to get navigated a life, is almost to move this piece here, which will lead to this thing here, which will lead to this thing here, which will lead to this thing here.

41:59This very meticulous kind of planning. And I think that's a big mistake. I always tell people, find somebody you admire and ask them how they got to where they are. And invariably, 95 times out of 100, the answer to that question will be, it's a long story. Because the path was not linear. It was chaotic. It was backward and forward and up and down and so forth. It wasn't this carefully created set of moves. And so that's the thing that I would tell them is make your decisions for fundamental reasons more than for instrumental reasons. Make your decisions. I see so many young people, particularly high achieving young people who take a job and the reason they take the job is they think it's going to lead to another job.

42:45And when in fact you have no idea what it's going to lead to. And do you enjoy the job? Are you contributing in the job? Is it a good use of your skills and your talents? That's the thing. Are you working with great people? And you do that, you're better off with the uncertainty of not knowing what's next than you are with the false certainty of saying, this job will lead to that job and this job will lead to that job. It doesn't work that way. Well, Dan, this has been tremendous. Love your books. Thank you. And I'm very interested in where you will take us next. You don't have to tell us now, but we cannot wait to see it.

43:16You'll be the first I tell. Thank you so much.