When the Australian cricket legend Shane Warne died earlier this month, aged only 52, his words from the recent Amazon documentary on his life were quoted again and again: “I smoked. I drank. I bowled a bit. No regrets.”
His family, friends and fans clearly regretted his fatal heart attack. But they may have accepted that “no regrets” mantra as being typical of the uncompromising superstar figure that Warne was. Only losers have regrets, right? It is sad to look back; we should only look ahead.
Dan Pink has other ideas. His new book, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward grabs this “no regrets” cliché, gives it a good shake, and finds it wanting.
This is Pink’s seventh book. He is perhaps best known for one of his earlier works, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. In recent years Pink has become, along with other bestselling US authors such as Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant, one of the leading popularisers of psychological research put to a practical purpose. While he is visiting London, I meet with him to discuss the book.
“I was actually working on an entirely different book,” he tells me. But then attending his oldest child’s university graduation got him reflecting on the passing of time. “For whatever reason I just started thinking about my own regrets.” Friends were interested and supportive, and a first look at the research encouraged further digging. “I wrote an entirely new book proposal and sent it to my editor… this is not a book I would have written in my thirties,” he adds. “Now in my fifties it’s the ideal time. I can look back and look forward.”
At first sight this may not seem like an obvious subject for a useful book. Is this all about just looking backwards, sadly? But Pink is clear. “Regret is a great topic, because it’s one of those things where we’ve gotten it so wrong, maybe more so in America,” he says. “We’ve over-indexed on positivity, we think that not looking backward is a sign of strength, we think that not having regrets is a sign of strength, when in fact there’s 60 years of science saying that’s an exceptionally bad idea, it is not how we’re wired. Our brains are programmed for regret: don’t shut it out, but don’t wallow in it either.”
What Pink skillfully achieves in 200 pages is what he calls a “reclamation” project: reclaiming regret as a spur to action.
“We have this emotion which is negative,” he says, “which hurts, that is unpleasant, that is ubiquitous. That’s a riddle right there. Why do we have this emotion that makes us feel worse? Why has this not been flushed out through evolution? And the reason is obvious: because it’s useful!
“The only people without regrets are tiny little kids and people with neuro-degenerative disease, and sociopaths. Everybody else has regrets,” Pink explains. “It is an incredibly common emotion and we just haven’t learned how to deal with it.”
So what does he make of the “no regrets” stance? It’s “performative courage,” Pink says. “It is a display of apparent courage when real courage is looking your regrets in the eye and doing something about them.
“Regret clarifies what’s important to us,” he adds. “And it instructs us on how to do better. But it does it by making us uncomfortable. By injecting a little bit of pain. People want the instruction without any of the pain. And it doesn’t work that way.”
What about my favourite pasttime, I ask him: post hoc rationalisation?
“Post hoc rationalisations can make us feel better,” he says. “And feeling better is okay sometimes. They don’t make us do any better… it’s not going to lead to any kind of improvement.”
To gather material for the book, as well as exploring the academic research, Pink set up two online surveys inviting people to discuss their regrets. After analysing tens of thousands of responses, Pink concluded that there were four main types of regret: foundation regrets (“I should have done the work”); boldness regrets (“I should have taken that chance”); moral regrets (“I never should have done that”) and connection regrets (“If only I’d reached out.”)
There is also what Pink calls the “at least” response, which is a kind of consoling thought, similar to a post hoc rationalisation, which forms part of the story of a regret.
“You see ‘at leasts’ in the regrets I’ve gathered about bad marital choices,” Pink explains. These are mostly expressed by women, he tells me. “You see a lot of regrets that say, ‘I shouldn’t have married that idiot but at least I have these three kids.’”
Nostalgia can be another kind of regret—for a vanished past. “The psychologist Dan McAdams [at Northwestern University, Illinois] talks about our lives and personalities as narratives, and the two reigning kinds of narratives,” Pink says. “There’s a redemption narrative, where things go from bad to good, and there’s also a contamination narrative, where things go from good to bad.
“So if nostalgia is about a contamination narrative—‘Oh my God, things used to be great, and now they’ve completely gone to hell, and I want to go backward’—that’s dangerous, that’s not healthy for an individual or an organisation or a nation. But if the nostalgia is saying, ‘Wow, what an interesting time, and that helped me become who I am today and enabled some growth,’ then that’s not bad.”
Seen this way, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is a contamination narrative—“we used to be great so what we want to do is go backwards.” And Brexit, too, was (for some at least) a contamination narrative of unhealthy regret—“we used to be great, now we’re just a bit-part player,” and so on.
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee was, on the other hand, a kind of mechanism for managing regret, “a very healthy way of dealing with it,” Pink says.
Pink has pulled off something remarkable with his latest book. He has taken something ostensibly miserable and shown how we can use it to make things better.
“We’ve been sold a bill of goods about how we should never invite discomfort, we should always be positive, we should never look backwards,” he says. “And that’s an ineffective blueprint for living.
“Feeling isn’t for ignoring, or wallowing in, feeling is for thinking. These negative feelings are signals, they are information, they are data, they are telling us things.”
Another thing boldness regrets in particular are telling us, Pink suggests, is that life is short.
“Boldness regrets are people at some level reckoning with the fact that they are not here forever, that they have this vanishingly short amount of time on the planet, and you have to do something,” Pink says. “You can’t just sleepwalk through it.
“I think that many people have a sense of that, and when they look back and realise that they sleptwalk—‘what was I thinking? I squandered that time and I don’t have that much time left, I want to do something…’
“What are our lives about? They are about living and learning and growing and acting, and when we are thwarted that feels terrible,” he adds.
So it’s a good idea to realise this sooner rather than later?
“Exactly. This is why I’m not a huge fan of deathbed regret because what are you going to do?”
The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward by Daniel H Pink is out now with Canongate (£16.99)
