HIGHLIGHTS: Daniel Pink

0:00Hi everybody, tune in to this short version of the podcast which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi everyone, I'm Nikolaj Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian So-and-Welt 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, behaviors, 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. So your latest book, The Power of Regret, explores that we should kind of learn from our regrets.

0:35Now, my philosophy has always been to kind of try to learn from it and move on. But you think a bit differently. No, 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. Okay, you mentioned that there are several types of regrets. I think you divide them into four. And one is the foundation regret, right?

1:09Right. The fact that you didn't work harder. Yeah. Well, you work hard. You did a law degree at Yale, so you must have worked very hard. But, 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. I 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.

1:44It'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. 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, a more important reason than simply the unburdening. And it's this. There's a sense-making function.

2:15We have a lot of evidence about this. When 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.

2:55And 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. 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. What's that about? Well, it's interesting. This is a really interesting piece of social. 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.

3:32So 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. Downward 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.

4:03So 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. Do 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.

4:55So 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. I 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. So how do you structure today? So you should do what in the morning? Okay, so for the 80 % of us who are not night owls, now 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.

5:39Exactly. 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, here'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.

6:14We'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 like health care, like errors in health care in the afternoon, lack of hand washing in the, the health care 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.

6:50I'm not, I'm not joking around. 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. Number one, something is better than nothing. So 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.

7:26Very 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, I mean you and I are talking here in Washington, D.C., taking a walk outside in Washington, D.C. and seeing the trees. and then finally the importance of breaks being 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 and the social side of it.

8:02So that's probably a suboptimal kind of break. The 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. 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...

8:41In my head, it was that every time I took a break, my boss came in and thought I was... It was so bad. But now, the reason why I want to talk about it now is so that everybody understands that I'm taking it out 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.