This Is Why You FEEL LOST, LAZY & UNMOTIVATED In Life | Daniel Pink

autonomy master and purpose are essentially renewable energy for motivation you have to actually establish mechanisms and habits to make that happen the point is the habit i do it every day it's hygienic it's like brushing my teeth a lot of times when we're not moving forward when we feel like nothing's happening when we're not making progress the reason for that is that we don't know why we're doing what we're doing we don't have a good purpose we don't have a north star we don't have a sense of what the mission is why it matters and as people ponder that that might be a way to get them out of that ditch yeah you mentioned purpose i know in that book drive yeah there was these three components around motivation that you spoke about mastery autonomy and purpose when you say those three things and you've just mentioned purpose could you briefly summarize what those sure things mean sure but also i'm interested a lot of that book from my recollection was about how that works in companies how you incentivize people right how you motivate them but how does it kind of play into us self-motivating and actually making positive changes in our lives sure sure okay so so let me take let me take two steps back and tell you the sort of the big idea of that particular book which was that i looked at about 50 years of research in motivation and what it said it's complicated but what it said is that we are we've gotten things a little bit off especially in organizations i'll move to individuals here in a moment that there's a certain kind of motivator that we use in organizations psychologists call it a controlling contingent motivator yeah too many syllables for me if then rewards i like to call it if then rewards if you do this then you get that if you do this then you get that um if then rewards the research shows are pretty good for simple tasks with short time horizons the reason for that is that human beings love rewards they get our attention you dangle a reward in front of somebody you you have their attention you have their attention like this you know when you mentioned coffee to me as a it wasn't a reward you had my attention you had my attention in this focused way that's very good if you know exactly what you need to do and you can see the finish line however the same body of research tells us that if then rewards are far less effective for complex tasks with longer time horizons and if you look at the workforce more and more work is complex creative conceptual and so what we have is a set of motivators that in some ways are 19th and 20th century motivators but not really 21st century motivators now what you what works better is paying people well and then offering now to your your question autonomy autonomy is a sense of self-direction do you have some sovereignty over what you do how you do it when you do it who you do it with second one is is mastery are you getting better at something that matters are you making progress and meaningful work third one purpose this one i've actually refined my thinking considerably since the book is out so apologies to all of you who read it um or apologies to both of you who read it the purpose is two things purpose is am i making a difference externally in the world um big transcendent kind of purpose but the other one is there's another kind of purpose which is am i just making a contribution am i helping my teammate am i helping a customer am i doing something that has an impact and those kinds of things actually lead to enduring motivation autonomy mastery and purpose now how do you get that at the individual level i think what you have to do is you have to actually establish mechanisms and habits to make that happen so autonomy um one way to think about autonomy is to think about i mean here's the thing let me let me take a step back on this just as a thinking exercise okay so sometimes when think about a word like autonomy it's a little abstract right which is why you asked that question all right so this is so this is this is important so so sometimes when you have concepts that are abstract one way that i try to get my wrap my mind around them is to think about what is the opposite okay so think about what's the opposite of autonomy and to me the opposite of autonomy is control the opposite of autonomy is control human beings have only two reactions to control they comply or they defy so if you feel like you're being completely compliant or you feel like you're being defiant that's a signal to you that you don't have sufficient autonomy in your in your work so um so what you can do there is you can look at the key aspects of your work and say do i have some autonomy over my time when i do things do i have autonomy over my task what i do do i have autonomy over my team who i work with do i have autonomy over my technique how i do my work and if you feel like those are low that's a warning sign that you might want to be doing something else so mastery i think one of the most important pieces of research and talent in the last 20 years was by teresa mobile who found that making progress in meaningful work was the single biggest motivator day-to-day so one of the things that you can do one of the things that i've done for many years is establish a progress ritual where you at the end of each day write down three things that you got done three ways you made progress this is this is i mean you're a physician so you understand this this is hygienic all right this is this is this is this is part of self-care this is part of overall physical and mental well-being and and and the trouble is is that we often don't know whether we're making progress how we're making progress because we're not getting information on what we're doing if i were to have driven up from london to here and not have an odometer and not have a kilometer marker yeah i would people i mean some of your patients might have bad dreams about that that kind of thing right so you establish your own progress ritual at the end of each day list three ways you made progress and then finally on purpose um one of the things that i do as a writer is try to actually convert my own self-talk and my own questions from how to why at least a couple of times a week so when i say if i'm struggling writing and you're a writer you understand this you're always struggling so yeah so if i'm struggling to write a chapter what i want to do is what i'll often do is say okay how do i finish this chapter how do i write this next section and what i try to do a couple of times a week is convert that how question to a why question why am i writing this chapter why does it matter so forgive that extraordinarily long-winded answer but what we know is that these kinds of things autonomy master and purpose are essentially renewable energy for motivation whereas the carrot and stick is is like it's like fossil fuels you just keep burning it up and burning it up and you need more and you need more and it has all kinds of externalities yeah now i love that and i think what you said about purpose there this ability to um sort of step back and zoom out on that bigger picture yeah i think that's really really important and i kind of feel if if someone is listening or watching this and they are struggling and they are feeling man what's happening to life like life is happening to me rather than me being in the driver's seat of life kind of i feel that those three things even if they can't change them immediately it's quite useful to look at your life through that lens where do i have mastery or where am i going for mastery yes where do i have or not have autonomy right and do i have a purpose even that self-awareness that's like a really important start thing but i mean we know from a pile of research not only in psychology but actually in you know in in psychiatry and in therapy that being able to name things is extraordinarily important it gives us a way to make sense of the world i mean it's it's fundamental to who human beings are and so i agree with you wrong and even having these these concepts is really useful so so i have so i have an idea of an autonomy audit where you basically audit yourself on your autonomy that's a way to get a there's a way to get a picture of that but i'm i'm a big believer in in small lightweight interventions to get a little bit better one of the things i've changed my mind on over the years is i used to be a fan of big hairy audacious goals and now i'm a fan of small wins i've converted small wins are everything small wins are everything the research points that way you know and if i reflect on my own career as a physician i didn't have that view in my first few years i thought we can do a big lifestyle overhaul and get on top of your health and certainly what i've learned in clinical experience is that some people can do that and generally in my experience the people who can do that have gone through a really significant life experience okay right divorce right right someone close to them has died or they've you know suddenly got angina in their 40s and they realized wow i don't want to die for my kids you know i want to be there right right so i found those people can sometimes overnight make the big change but for pretty much everyone else it's like the january new year's resolution that lasts for three weeks and then you go back to not only where you were before but probably even further back than where you were before right so me as well i'm a huge fan of small changes and i think that what's true and you're describing clinically for individuals i found it's true for organizations that that the way that organizations our theory of how organizations change is often misstated we have this theory that the way that organizations change is some grand heroic figure comes in and comes in with a strategy that she writes and then the strategy gets implemented and everything changes and that's not how it works it the the way that organizations change is small wins that cascade to small wins the exception to that is exactly as you say is what organizations themselves face the organizational equivalent of a near-death experience yeah and then that sometimes wakes them up and they get moving but you know i don't want to rely on near-death experiences for people to change that doesn't scale very well it doesn't scare very well exactly and uh yeah that near death might become death before right make those changes right right i don't like to get myself i'm not that keen to get that close to death i like to avoid it for a while in terms of this progress reports yeah you're obviously out of your home environment you're on tour at the moment for your new book in the uk yeah when was the last time you did your own progress report oh i do it every day did it yesterday yeah of course i do it every day it's hygienic it's like it's like brushing my teeth are you happy to share what was on it uh i'd have to i'd have to uh go into dropbox and see so uh so yesterday was um so here's what i do i'll tell you i'm gonna have to think about it the but i i can i can retrieve it from my head in a moment so the key thing here is to is to list three things because if i were to say list ten things i will most days get to six and be completely bummed out at myself so so yesterday was um okay so i remember i did a um photo shoot for a newspaper article but the what i made progress on on that one was that i actually okay i probably shouldn't admit this but i actually looked up did some research ahead of time because i stink at having my photograph taken so i looked up i looked up some guidance on how to pose better for photographs and so i did that all right the other so that was one thing that i did and i think it was a better photo shoot than usual amazing so anyway so forgive that vanity there because sometimes i look at photos of myself and i'm like oh my god can i just say weirdly enough i was sitting on that sofa last night looking through your book some online articles i thought wow dan's all the photos are always absolutely brilliant oh my god okay well you go i have a different perspective a different perspective yeah so the other thing that was on that progress report the list of progress was and again it's it's idiosyncratic but one of the things is that when i travel like i like to exercise exercise is extremely important to my overall well-being extremely important i can feel it in my body and my brain and if i have a soul in my soul when i don't exercise and it's often been very hard for me to exercise on the road because yeah you're going around a mile a minute it's sometimes you don't have access to it you're tired you'd much rather have a drink than go but yesterday i actually explicitly carved out time and i went for a run on the treadmill in the hotel where i was staying so i felt good about that i really felt good about that and then the third way that i made progress is that we had a good book event that morning at zoho house so those were those were the three things that i put on there and here's the thing i very rarely go back and look at it that's not the point the point is the habit the point is the memorializing it at the moment because it's a punctuation mark in your day yeah that allows you to see progress and you and i don't know wrong on whether you've done that well i'll ask you like do you ever have a to-do list in your day yeah okay so have you ever done this you've got a to-do list and then things unfold and you end up doing something that's not on your to-do list and then you write it on your to-do list only to cross it out yeah that's what i'm talking about that's what this thing is that's what this like three ways you make progress at the end of the day technique is i think that certainly is absolutely brilliant for multiple reasons it's a daily active kind of self-care yeah you know take it one step further it's a daily act of self-love right okay i never thought of it that way i think it's kind of showing you that's interesting that you know you're important and you're taking a bit of time each day no matter what's going on in the world to acknowledge yourself and you know we're going to talk about self-compassion listen in the new book but i think it's an act of self-compassion on many levels and it's also kind of like a daily gratitude practice to yourself oh that's interesting so certainly when i hear it through the lens i look at things i think i seriously have never thought about that in connection to self-compassion not once it never occurred to me and i think it's a good point and it never occurred to me i looked at it almost as a way of um quite like record keeping because i never look back at it it's the act itself to me it's it's simply that i'm convinced that making progress is an incredibly important motivator the thing is we often don't see it and so take a moment to see it and for me some of the most frustrating days are the days where and i feel less frustrated at the end of the day if i take that moment and i do this i mean again i don't want to overstate how complicated this is i do this in like yeah 30 seconds or a minute i do it now in a long document i used to do it like in an email i sort of like that approach a little bit better no i love it i hope people listening and i never called it a progress report i don't i don't remember i never really called it anything i just said three ways to make progress yeah and here's thing if you have a good day you can put four or five well what i love about that approach is something you know i had this practice with my wife called the five minute t ritual okay which i wrote about in my third book and what i said to people it's this daily practice typically when the kids are in bed before we do anything else we'll come down to the kitchen we'll make like i don't know some minty something non-caffeinated and for five minutes we'll sit there without any technology and ask each other about our days okay do you ask the same question no it's very unstructured it's just this daily acts where you know it's so easy to get caught up where you're living in the same house but you're like passing ships in the night you don't actually spending any meaningful time with each other and what i've always said to people is look we save five minutes but it's not as if there's a timer right hey hey babe listen um that's that's your five minutes i'm done now some days it becomes half an hour yeah but by making it so small we can never really justify that we don't have time exactly and that's what i love about what you just said i think it's hey if you want to put six things down on it on a brilliant day go for it go make three your minimum exactly exactly and also the other thing is that i have to say that aspiring to more than three can be demoralizing yeah usually i can summon three yeah and i actually very rarely go beyond that because again i it's hard to explain but the it's really just the the ritual of it yeah which is taking that punctuation i think of it as like a punctuation mark at that moment in the day that allows me to put up you know put a period at the end of that sentence yeah turn the page i love it i'm going to try it tonight do it i'll let you know how we get on yes so i love the new book the power of regret thank you my initial reaction when i think i got sent an email by your publicist uh saying hey look this book's coming out here it is and it said in the press release you know this whole idea of no regrets is nonsense yeah and my initial thought was well if you ask me i'd probably say i have no regrets so let's get into it yeah right let's get into regrets why they're so important why you think it's such a misunderstood emotion and i wanted to start off with this quote by bob dylan i don't believe in regrets you don't agree with bob do you um far be it for me to disagree with a nobel prize winner but i i profoundly disagree with that i don't know how you'd like the idea that one can't believe in regret is absurd and that's it's that's not a philosophical point of view that's a that's a scientific point of view scientists have been studying this emotion for 60 years and over 60 years and what they have determined is something that is very important to note at the top here which is that everybody has regrets everybody has regrets they're part of the human condition truly the only people who don't have regrets are five-year-olds because their brains haven't developed because regret requires this incredible cognitive dexterity people with certain kinds of brain lesions people with huntington's certain kinds of huntington's disease and sociopaths everybody else has everybody else has regrets not having regrets is a sign that you're a tiny child or you have a grave disorder and so the thing is is that regret feels bad and so there's a puzzle here which is that here there you have this emotion that everybody has there's it's arguably this the most common negative emotion that we experience one of the most common emotions of any kind that we experience it's ubiquitous and yet it's painful so what's the point what's going on here and the point is obvious if you think about evolution if you think about survival it's that it's useful it helps us if we treat it right the problem is is that we don't treat it right is that is that we we we have this absurd philosophy that we should never have regrets we should never look backward we should always be positive and that's just profoundly wrong it's unscientific and it's not an effective blueprint for living so sorry bob but you missed this one what do you think we as a society get wrong the most about regrets i guess probably it's probably worthwhile at this point defining regrets yes like what do you mean when you say regret so so that's a great question first of all let's start regret is an emotion it's an emotion it's a negative emotion it's an emotion that makes us feel bad because what we do is we look backward and we feel bad because of a decision we made or a decision we didn't make because of an action we took because of an action we didn't take in the past and we imagine that had we chosen differently the present would be a little bit better and it's different from disappointment because it's our fault disappointment is not our fault regret is our fault so we have agency and we've made a choice or not made a choice that actually has we think that has produced consequences in the present that are sub-optimal and it's our fault and it makes us feel bad so two days ago i was taking my son to the school bus stop in the car and we were in a bit of a rush and for whatever reason i didn't check that his belt was on his seatbelt and i had to suddenly break because the car was coming out in front of a parked car and he went forwards but thankfully nothing happened it was just a little minor sort of nothing happened he just you know his arm went forward and i think his chin yeah but i was like oh man that could have been yeah much worse thankfully it wasn't right since then you know we have never moved in the car without me checking everyone's seatbelt is on okay this literally happened two maybe three days ago i think was two days ago and i've been reading your book over the last few days have you really been thinking about mistakes disappointment regrets how these three things interplay together so what was going on there because i don't feel i regretted that i feel that i made a mistake by not checking thankfully we got away with it and i don't think i will ever make that mistake again had he been hurt there would have been a regret there i guess so help me understand that incident through the lens with which you look at regret i think there are two factors here one of them is more important one factor is outcome so there wasn't a cataclysmic outcome here so your son got bounced around a little bit but there is no major long-term outcome so what that does is that reduces the the overall psychic pain that you experience from that yeah so that's that's one thing but i think the more important thing is this is is endurance chances are you're not going to remember that incident in five years or ten years that's my guess so you made it so so so the difference between a mistake and a regret is that not every mistake triggers a regret okay you could make a mistake you correct it and then you never think about it again and so with with a regret it remains unresolved it lingers it sticks with us i think that's the big difference so it's a combination of endurance and endurance and outcome but the thing is here's the thing about regret it's because it sticks with us not every mistake triggers regret right mistakes are actions the other big distinction is mistakes are an action regret is a feeling right and so so so when we so there i made plenty of mistakes that i don't think about ever again maybe because i've corrected it maybe because i immediately learned something from it but when when when something sticks with us we have that stomach churning feeling that sticks with us over time when it endures that is a signal and it's a very important signal it's a signal about what we value and it's a signal about what we should do what got you interested in studying and writing about regrets i was dealing with regrets of my own and what i found is that when i was i sort of you know it's interesting because you know you've you've written different books you've written several books but a different person wrote each of those books yeah 100 okay 100 so so i've been writing books for 20 years to my astonishment and the me of 20 years ago would not have written this book because the me of 20 years ago didn't have enough mileage on him he didn't have enough mileage hadn't didn't have enough life experience didn't have enough room to look back the me of the me of my 50s this felt kind of inevitable because i was at a juncture in my life where i could look backward and there was mileage there but i could also look for hopefully look forward and have mileage there and so what i found is that when i started reflecting on my regrets and talking about them because i'm a big believer in when you have ideas the importance of socializing ideas like like yeah this idea that this notion that oh i have an idea but i'm not going to talk about it because someone's going to steal it that's nonsense okay yeah and so what you want to do is you want to get feedback on your ideas you want and i said god and i wasn't even thinking about it as a book my elder daughter graduated from university and i was at her graduation i just started thinking about my own regrets about university and so i came back and here's the thing i started talking to people about it it's like oh man that's like i was thinking about my sophia's graduation i came back and i was thinking about like what i regretted in college and i found that people leaned in okay into this conversation and what's interesting about that is that that's a for a writer that's a very good sign because here you have this this this word that i'm pointing to this word here on the track regret ah okay we don't want to deal with it we want to we want to hide under the couch and when i started bringing it up people engaged in a profound way and that's that's an interesting signal and then then i realized that i didn't know anything about it and i wanted to work it out myself and actually i put aside a totally different book uh and and i wrote this one in row this one is dead yeah yeah no i love it now when i was researching you online yesterday yes and you can believe everything you find online of course but this was your ted talk in 2009 okay and what's interesting you just told me that actually maybe early on in your life yeah this wasn't as relevant but of course at this point at this juncture yeah you know you can look back you can look forward yes it has real i guess poignancy and meaning at this point in your life what was interesting to me is that you opened your 2009 ted talk with something to this event i have a confession to make okay 20 years ago yeah i did something i regret oh did i say the word regret you said regret wow very good very good doctor very good psychoanalysis there yeah i didn't mean to i just thought it wasn't that interesting that that was what maybe 13 years ago yeah yeah that's fascinating i had no idea about that you can go watch it tonight i believe you i believe you um so yeah so um so so maybe at some other level i've been reckoning with regret ever since i also think the other reason it might have been in the back of my head is that you know i wrote a book about timing more broadly called when and about the science of timing and i find the temporal aspects of our lives really interesting like i became kind of obsessed with that about how you know we are these temporal creatures as you know as a physician you know we have biological clocks basically in every cell in our body and we're moving through time but if you think about this you and i began this conversation in the past that's gone okay yeah that's kind of freaky right and then and then you and i are gonna continue to have this conversation in the future but it hasn't happened yet that's crazy when you think about it right okay it's kind of whack and so and our lives are that way too and so our lives are about i think in some ways how do we integrate the past present and future and regret obviously is a an incredibly important part of that this world regret survey that you conducted yes maybe you could tell us a little bit about that sure how you came up with the idea what questions did you ask what did you find out because of course that underpins a lot yeah of what you've written about in the book sure well i mean i looked at what the academic science had said about regret i also did something called the american regret project which was a public opinion survey of american attitudes about regret to try to get demographic differences to see if they're demographic differences and regret it turned out to be far fewer than i expected which itself is kind of interesting so we so we did a pretty rigorous public opinion survey and then i also did this other thing which proved revelatory which is called the world regret survey which is actually really simple i put up a website put something in my newsletter made a few tweets and said hey you want to tell me your one big life regret and i put it up and within a blink we had 15 000 of them from over 100 countries we're now up to and i stopped publicizing it because i didn't want to break the database and i also didn't want to you know 15 000 is enough to read um and we're up to over 19 000 now from 109 countries so that itself tells you something the fact that people were so eager to share their regret and reveal their regret and disclose their regret and so that proved to be a very rich source for figuring out what people regret which ended up being i think a central part of what my understanding of regret yeah i love the way you came up with these four core categories of regrets because on the surface a lot of these regrets can seem quite different yes but i i thought it was brilliant the way you actually went back to first principles and thought well what is the structure and foundation of these particular regrets so i wonder if you could share what those categories are and you know some of your learnings sure so that was but this is this is again i went into this book and and actually most of my books without a very strong theory of the case i it wasn't like i had sort of a mission a philosophy that i was trying to i i went in saying regret it's super important i have them i don't understand it what's it about all right that that was that was basically my my business plan for the book and so i initially started wondering what people regret and in the academic research showed that people regret a lot of different things we have career regrets and education regrets and romance regrets then in my own quantitative survey i asked that same question and found the same thing the people's regrets were all over the place it's always kind of stymied it's like what's going on here but what i realized in reading through thousands upon thousands upon thousands of these regrets is that just exactly as you say that the domain of life mattered less than what was going on one layer down what do you mean by the domain of life domain of life meaning uh this is a regret about my career this is a regret about my education this is a great about finances i regret about health this is read about romance family okay and you started hearing the same language hearing sometimes identical language language like taking the chance speaking up um [Music] not confident believe it or not introverted those kinds of things as examples and it didn't matter what aspect of people's lives they were discussing those things and that language kept coming up over and over again this is the value of qualitative research if you go if you go for if you go into the words and the words convey the emotions of what people are talking about they tell you something really important so what i found and let me make this a little bit more concrete could you just explain that term qualities of research people who may not understand it qualitative so quantitative research is i ask people i did a poll i asked people a bunch of questions so things like um do you believe in god do you believe there's a god yeah yes no not sure okay and then people click whichever one and this is like a multiple choice type thing yeah yeah yeah and but what we know from what we know from that quantitative piece of research because we we put together a sample of four thousand four hundred eighty nine americans we weighted we i dht the sample meaning it's a statistical procedure to make sure that every aspect of american population is is represented there and so that allowed us to see oh do women are women more likely to believe in god than men are men more likely to believe in god than just one example i mean i i choose that example because in america overwhelming numbers of people believe in god like belief in god doesn't tell you anything because everybody believes in god so that ended up being because i wanted to see whether people's um belief in god affected their regrets okay but i i learned nothing because everybody believes in god all right so um so um so that's a quantitative thing so you and but with the qualitative is just people think of it as qualitative is a a fancy word story-based research what i'm getting is people simply submitting their regrets their own words their own words in their own words they submit their regrets and that's it and i just read through them so i have these little mini sagas these little stories of people's regrets i regret that i married too young and there and ended up getting divorced when i was young and that put me on a bad trajectory i regret that i never traveled when i was younger i regret that i didn't reach out to my friend and then he suddenly passed away so though so it's all these kinds of stories and things like that and that gives you some that that ended up being very revealing because what i found to your earlier point is that deep down there were four core regrets that people had and let me let me make this a little bit more concrete by giving you an example of that so here's the thing so i have plenty of regrets from people who it's quite amazing to me a lot of regrets are people who didn't travel at some point in their lives they went to university and had a chance to study abroad but they didn't do that and that's a surprising number of people um or i had a chance earlier in my life to travel but i was too scared to go do a gap year i was too scared to get on a train i was too scared to fly and i didn't do that and now i regret it okay so that's the thing about that's an education regret then i have lots of regrets in the career realm about not starting a business this is a very big regret that people really huge uh i always wanted to be an entrepreneur but i didn't have the guts to do it i always wanted to go out on my own but i didn't do it if i had if i had gone out on my own i might not be stuck in this terrible job that's a career regret then i have lots of regrets about romance that are essentially people wanted to ask out somebody on a date and they haven't tested and they never did and it bothers them 10 20 30 years later okay so that's a romance regret but all those regrets are the same all three of those regrets are the same even though they're in different domains of life it's a regret that says if only i'd taken the chance you're at a juncture in your life and a lot of these regrets as you know from the book begin at a juncture you're at a juncture in your life you can play it safe you can take the chance and when people don't take the chance not every time but way more often than i would have expected they regret it and it bothers them for years and years and years and years so that's one category of boldness regrets what i hear there is this idea that we regret more what we didn't do than what we did do is that what the research shows as well that is an overwhelming conclusion of the research both both the academic research there were not in the quantitative part the numbers part the polling part of my research there weren't a lot of like amazingly clear stark important conclusions there was a little bit murkier but one that was that stood out was exactly that and it has to do with age when we're young we have equal numbers of roughly equal numbers of regrets of action and inaction action regrets i regret what i did i hurt somebody i stole i you know whatever inaction regrets i didn't travel i didn't ask out that crush as we get older action regrets diminish inaction regrets increase and by the time we're in our 40s and 50s inaction regrets are probably double or double the action regrets what sticks with us are things we didn't do big time i'd be surprised if there's anyone listening or watching this now at this very moment can't think back to some aspects of their life where they wonder what would have happened yeah had i made that different decision yeah and what's interesting about that is that it's not only about the outcomes it's also just about actually doing something like like what i found which is sort of interesting is that when people who did take the chance and it failed a few of them reported that as a regret i started a business and it totally went it totally went under and i lost money and i wish i just stuck with my regular job but there weren't that many people like that they were outnumbered probably forty to one by the by by by the opposite of it and and and what's interesting is that even many of the people who think about the romance regrets the romance regrets the the the the boldness regrets in the realm of romance so i met um a woman and i really liked her and i wanted to ask her out and i never got around to it and i lost my chance the the people who are saying that are not saying oh had i only taken had i done that i would be living this blissful life today they're not saying that what they're what they're saying is that i had a chance in my life to step up and do something and i blew it it wasn't so much about the outcome it was about the act itself it was about having a moment in your life when you could do something and you didn't that's what really sticks with people it's and they're less they're they're less outcomes than i would have expected so tell us about the other three categories so we get that overarching kind of so so what we've got we've got what i call foundation regrets foundation regrets are if only i'd done the work these are regrets some of which you write about so they deal with health so things like i didn't take care of myself and now i'm 60 years old and i am woefully out of shape and and have chronic health problems because of decisions i made in nutrition and exercise earlier in my life other regrets and a lot of regrets about spending too much and saving too little there was nobody truly who had a regret oh i spent too little money not a single person had that all right as a regret but spending too much lots of people saving too little lots of people um i thought it was pretty interesting a lot of regrets about people not working hard enough in school or in university more than i would have expected wow because they you know it's like i should have listened to my parents and worked a little bit harder uh because what it did is that these foundation regrets i use the word foundation is that you make small decisions in your life that each one of no single one of which is cataclysmic but the accumulated force of them is massive so and you put you find yourself in a position later in life or like oh my god i totally messed up and i have a lot to undo here so that's foundation regrets i've only done the work moral regrets small category intensely felt if only i had done the right thing once again you're at a juncture you can do the right thing you can do the wrong thing you do the wrong thing most people regret it because most people when we can talk about this i think most people want to be good yeah i think most people are good actually i think most people are moral and want to be moral i think they want to be and i think most of us probably think we are you know or we'd like to think we are and i remember in that section about you you write a bit about jonathan hates research which i found super fascinating that we do not make moral decisions based upon reason oh my oh my god okay yeah yeah so i brought in that book has a book called the righteous mind i encourage everybody to read it that makes two very important points one of them has to do with what is morality and one of the things that you see around the world if i go to this world regret survey 109 countries um people in somebody in the uk and somebody in japan and somebody in amarillo texas in the united states will agree that asking somebody out on a date is bolder than not asking somebody out on a date all right starting a business is bolder than staying in a lackluster job okay consensus about that we have consensus about connection what you know should you you know uh uh reaching out to someone you care about all right we have we have consensus about that we have consensus about foundation take care of your body morality we don't have full consensus on we have consensus on some things according to heights research i think he's spot on there's certain kinds of morality that uh like basically harming other people yeah i bullied somebody around the world everybody thinks that's wrong political ideology everybody almost everybody thinks that's wrong uh harming and cheating people you almost not quite universal but very yeah widespread people pretty black and white for most people other things are not okay okay so things about like duty and sanctity and purity so if you have so i'll give you i'll give you one example it's a little bit of an american example but it is perplexing to some people i have people who say i i um regret not serving in the u.s military several people like that and it wasn't oh i missed it it wasn't a boldness regret it was because i missed the adventure they say i feel like i let down my country i had a duty to serve i had it because we don't have conscription in the united states i don't have you don't have it here either i had a duty to serve it was an act of patriotism to do that and i betrayed my duty now there's some people in america elsewhere who say what the hell are you talking about you don't have any moral duty and they say yes i do and the people who disagree with them are wrong it's like these are people who believe in the morality of duty and not all of us have as hype puts it that moral taste bud but it doesn't mean that it's a wrong taste bud at all it means that it's just another taste bud so it's things like that so moral regrets are highly individual i guess uh they're idiosyncratic some of them are more idiosyncratic than others so you're going to get a little bit more disagreement and basically what it is is that you have a traditionally conservative political philosophy has more moral taste buds than traditionally liberal philosophy liberals care about about care and harm and and conservatives care about duty and sanctity and purity so morality is a little bit more complicated now that said most of the regrets were in this the things about care and harm they were regrets about bullying people hurting people cheating people uh marital infidelity those kinds of things you know when i hear that i think of the term alignment in the sense that i've been working on a model of happiness over the last year or two for my upcoming book and i got this concept called core happiness which is what i think we are all wanting in our lives and it has three components alignment contentment and control alignment is when your actions match up with your values okay and i very much hear that as you talk about moral regrets i hear very much that this is when potentially we've done something that isn't really who we really are and actually there's this kind of disconnect and this kind of fault line and we you know it just eats away and erodes us from the inside because we regret it we're thinking about it because you can't really hide from yourself can you it's still there you know you lie in bed at night by yourself if you have done the wrong thing yeah according to your own morals right then yeah i could see why so many people would regret that oh yeah yeah yeah and it's also it's but this is this is it's it's directly related because one of the things that regret does when we experience regret remember it's a signal it's a signal okay the way we get where we get wrong is that we think of we think of regret as something that's meaningless something that we should ignore because feelings don't really matter and because you should always be positive and never look backward that's a bad idea what what's also a bad idea perhaps even a worse idea is ruminating on these regrets bathing in these regrets wallowing these regrets letting them capture you what we want to do is we want to think about them and when we think about them regrets do two things one they it to your point they clarify what we value and they instruct us on what to do and i think that's clear in all four categories but it's especially clear in the moral category i'll give you an example from my own experience so i have regrets about kindness especially when i was younger i was never a bully ever but as a younger person both in school and university as a young professional i was often in situations where people were being excluded people were not being treated right people were being left out i saw it happening i was right there i didn't say a word i didn't step in that bothers me all right and it's bothered me for years still to this day both this year well i've tried to repair it and i'll tell you um but it still bothers me it doesn't bother me as much it still bothers me it bothers me a little bit talking to you about it right now i mean i just like i feel like a little like prick of negativity in talking about this but here's the thing wrong that that's a signal okay that's telling me something the fact that this has been this bugs me for 10 years or 20 years that's a signal what's the signal of it's a signal of what i value it's a signal of what i value it's telling me you value kindness you value kindness perhaps more than you realize you value kindness more than perhaps you're consciously aware of all right and so if you think about that you don't you don't say oh it doesn't matter that was in the past i let i i let people be excluded in the past and to do anything out it doesn't matter no regrets or you can say oh my god i am the worst human being there ever was i am just so inherently flawed i don't deserve the sanctity of life there's something profoundly wrong with me that's a bad idea too what you should be doing is thinking about them and saying you value kindness what's also doing along with the clarification it's instructing me it's like you it's giving me like don't do that anymore yeah do better and so one of the things truly that i've done i mean it's modest i'm not trying to paint myself as some kind of saint here but if you see me in social gatherings what you'll find is that there might be clumps of people around and if there's somebody who is left out somebody who is kind of this unmoored from the other islands of connection there i will literally walk over and bring that person and always invite them into the into the scrum now again am i does that qualify me for sainthood no is that better than i was before yes is the reason i was better than before regret absolutely well this is one of the main cases i think you're making in the book that we can utilize regret we can utilize the past to help us inform and change our future behavior not only can we we must that that is an essential component of healthy living there's again go back to the you know go back to the brain why do human beings experience regret if it wasn't useful it would have likely evolved out of our out of our bodies and brains it's useful regret helps us learn and there's also so that's that's the sort of the evolutionary theory behind it but we also have evidence from social psychology showing that when we lean into our regrets we're better become better negotiators we become better problem solvers we become better parents we become better strategists we have more meaning in our life that regret again clarifies what's important to us and instructs us on how to do better and so this is why i don't like the no regrets view the no regrets for you which you know from the book is i got all these people with tattoos that say no regret all right all right it's nutty right so but but if you have a tattoo that says no regrets is it's like you might as well say a tattoo that says no growth no learning no doing better and i think the big problem here i'm realizing even more now that the book is out is that especially in secular society we don't do a very good job of helping people deal with negative emotions yeah i think that point about secular society is really key and i want to just yeah discuss for a moment this this idea of no regrets that does permeate through society because i kind of feel if i'm honest that prior to reading the book and and i'm i i love what's in the book i think it's i think it's absolutely brilliant but i think there's two different ways to interpret no regrets right so i think yes a lot of people are interpreting that as you know i'm not looking back just moving forward yeah staying positive right i have no regrets yeah when i think about myself and i feel that i have no regrets i feel that what i'm saying is actually i know my past mistakes i've spent time with them they've changed how i look at the world i'm not going to beat myself up about them i was making the best decision that i could at that time based upon what i knew and there's a real acceptance like for me i know i want to talk about self-compassion because i know it's it's part of the book and you know i'm a huge fan of kristen neff and her work as you are but i feel i guess more in this sort of spiritual uh non-secular space let's say that a lot of my growth since my dad died coming up to nine years ago is has been about looking at the past going into the past looking at why i get triggered at certain points why i have certain behaviors whether that be you know on my own or through some sort of therapy or whatever and i've got to say these days i feel so really quite calm and content with my life in a way that i didn't for much of my life and so when i say no regrets i'm not saying it with this uh with this kind of thing that i'm only looking forward no i have i feel that that's because mostly unless i'm kidding myself that i have processed yeah those regrets so then my question to you is because i've been really pondering this over the last few days i've been really excited about talking to you and i think well i totally buy the case that dan is making but regret seems to be a time related phenomena because let's say it's when you've not processed it so it's stuck in your body it's causing negativity you're still thinking about it it's making you tearful you're stuck in your life because of it and you're not looking at it i think that's a huge problem but if you go into it you make peace with it you understand why you did what you did and you then change going forward i feel that you no longer have that regret what you're describing is the power of regret i mean you're you're describing how to use regret as a force for progress and for good and for an evolved well-lived life you're not ignoring the regret you're actually taking it and using its power to instruct and to clarify now now the question is a metaphysical question about it does by doing that does that somehow extinguish the regret i don't know i actually actually don't think so but but that's not anything i want to litigate what i want to do is have people do what you did which is actually not say i never look backward that's a i only look forward i'm only positive because that's a sign of courage what i want is them to follow the path of courage that you're laying out here and saying you know what i'm going to do i'm going to look my regrets in the eye yeah and i'm going to do something about them because i know if i treat them right it's going to clarify what i value and it's going to instruct me how to do better in the future that's the power of regret right there what you're talking about no i i totally get that and i guess there's also this view that all of our past every single component of our past has made us who we are today that's true so therefore but you can still regret that here's the thing to me i i can keep both these ideas in my head let me give you a personal example of it so you mentioned the fact that i years ago said that i regret going to law school all right and i do but i also met my wife in law school so if you gave me if you if the devil if satan came here today and said i'm gonna make you a pact all right you can go back in time and avoid going to law school but the price you will pay for that is not meeting your wife i'm like i'm good i'll stick to it i think that's what's happening i'm stick to it because i'm because i'm actually so at some level i'm glad but i still regret the choice because it's the choice itself that was a mistake it's a choice itself that where where i made a decision without doing enough due diligence i made the decision because i was conforming made a decision because everybody else was doing it made a decision because i was uncertain made a decision because i wanted to do something nominally prestigious to fill the void of not knowing what i wanted to do all right that's i regret and so you can you can say you know what i'm i i would never under any circumstances want to turn back the clock and not meet my wife yeah but i can still regret the underlying decision because it was a bad decision and by looking that decision in the eye i can learn what matters to me and in that case what mattered to me is that i was over indexing on conformity i was over indexing on security and i was woefully woefully woefully overconfident in what i knew about the world well this is a really important point that i think about a lot and you particularly i certainly might see this in the educated middle classes i've heard before in an interview that you've given that you were a middle-class kid from middle america and you're not sure why you went to law school yeah and i kind of feel that there's many people of that kind of let's say upbringing in the uk all over the world who end up in these kind of jobs i know this in medicine the amount of doctors who are deeply unhappy with their jobs and their compensation for that is too much wine on a friday and saturday night to kind of numb the frustration because so many people sleepwalk into their careers bingo right it sounds like that potential and then if we go back to autonomy mastery and purpose i kind of feel yeah sleepwalking into your career choice well there's no autonomy there you're certainly probably not finding your purpose no way the purpose is in some ways is conformity the purpose is not disturbing yeah you're never going to get mastery harder to get it's harder to get mastery yeah because if you're not engaged with that right yeah i think this ability to hold these two conflicting things side by side is really important rather than saying all good or bad it's like no you know what yes it wasn't the right choice for my career but i met my wife that right right so so much in what you said there so one of the things is that our brains again our brains are amazing you know that is our brains are amazing we can do counter factual thinking that's requires a lot of dexterity can you explain counts of fact so we can envision things that run counter to the fact so we can conjure a world that didn't really happen okay okay so we're basically it's it's a form of storytelling so there are different kinds of counterfactuals that we can do we can do a downward counter factual imagine how things could have turned out worse all right that makes us feel better that's in at least i made a mistake in my higher education my graduate education path not cataclysmic but i made a mistake and and i regret a higher education choice but at least i met my wife right that makes me feel better about the choice it doesn't extinguish the regret and it doesn't it doesn't say therefore i have nothing to learn from that choice at all it just bombs that feeling a little bit uh the thing about downward counter factors at least is that they make us feel better but they don't on their own make us do any better upward counterfactuals if only make us feel worse but they help us do better and that's the king and the the thing is and what what makes this complex not complicated what makes this uncomfortable for people is that we want the instruction we want the clarity but we don't want the pain and discomfort and i'm sorry that's not the deal you're being offered the deal you're being offered is you're going to have to take some of that discomfort because that discomfort is going to lead you into clarity and instruction but you can't just have you can't have one it comes as part it comes as part of the package and there's a reason the thing is that if only's make us do better and regret is that ultimate if only if only upward counter factuals make us do better because they make us feel worse the feeling worse momentarily is central to it it acts as a spur to clarifying what we care about and doing things better in the future one other thing that i gotta get in here because you were talking about sleepwalking because it's so so important so let's go back to william james the father of modern psychology i quote him in this book this is his well-worn comment that what is thinking for what is thinking for thinking is for doing he says thinking is why do human beings think we think because we have to do right so the question then is what is feeling for and i don't think we fully answer that question some of us think feeling is for ignoring some of us think feeling is for feeling my view is feeling is for thinking feeling is for thinking because thinking is for doing and so if we think if we look at fee if so if we channel our william james feeling is for thinking feelings are signals feelings are data feelings are information if we personify feelings particularly negative feelings a negative feeling is not some stranger that walking down the street that you never have to think about again that's a bad idea but it's also not a a hanging judge passing final judgment on your worth as a human being it's someone who's delivering a newspaper to your house saying hey there's some information here you might want to take a look at it that's what that is and and so william feeling is for thinking because thinking is for doing as william james told us now one the reason i mentioned william james is your sleepwalking point william james said something that has haunted me my whole life and he said most of us go through life only half awake that has bugged me wrong in ever since i when i when i read that and i'm trying to remember what the i can't remember what the specific essay was when i read that most of us go through life only half a week it was like being jolted with electricity yeah it was like sticking my finger in a socket i'm like that is that me am i going through life only half awake and and i think that living in fear of going through life only half awake is not necessarily living in fear living with a consciousness that too many of us go through life only half awake is is is important and i think that going through life only half awake can be the consequence of not reckoning with our negative emotions particularly our most common negative emotion regret not having enough autonomy and self-direction in our life not making progress in achieving mastery and not having a purpose one of the most important things i do on a daily basis to help me with mental well-being with contentment frankly for my levels of happiness is a daily practice of solitude and i actually think solitude is very very much under racing i think it very much plays into what you've just said because what you're saying is you got to sit with that discomfort you gotta listen to the signal that your emotion that you're feeling that potential your regret is giving you rights but it's so easy now it's always been easy to distract ourselves it's probably easier now than ever before whether it's our phone or social media or whatever you know emails we can always go outward and and sort of basically not have to turn inwards so therefore we don't know what we're feeling we've never spent time sitting with that feeling so therefore we can't process it and you know i remember as a as a junior doctor i remember being at the i think it was in the royal infirmary in edinburgh and we got taught about early warning signs and i remember being really mesmerized as a kind of straight out of medical school that this idea that actually if we do certain observations heart rate respiratory rates oxygen saturations at regular intervals and you can put them into different zones and you can predict with reasonable certainty who is going to end up in high dependency units or intensive care in four hours or five hours and by doing that we can take aversive action so they don't end up needing that high dependency or intensive care beds and i personally and i've written about this in in my new book that i find daily practice solitude for me allows me to tap into my own early warning signs right so oh is something bothering me that i do something that actually is gnawing away at me am i feeling a tension in my body in some way that actually if i just keep distracting myself i'm not aware of it so sometimes it can be simple like oh i've got tightness in my right back that generally happens when my stress load is mounting by being aware of that i can go okay maybe i need to ease off my work the next few days maybe i need to go to bed early for a few nights or maybe it's a thought like in that time if i journal i'm like oh man that thing's really bothering me for me i think and i've seen that with patients it's so helpful and i kind of feel regrets plays in here because if you're always so busy that you can never sit with your thoughts and your feelings and your emotions how on earth are you going to start processing it and we don't like to do that because it's slightly uncomfortable yeah and this is this is the problem that that is comfort is never and i understand that comfort is never the path to growth comfort is never the path to progress now extreme discomfort is not that either yeah it's this kind of mild discomfort this mild perturbation we know this from physical exercise imagine if you did physical exercise in which there's no strain is not helpful all right the physical exercise is about bringing on some kind of desirable difficulty bringing on some kind of exertion that actually wears you out a little bit that's how you grow that's how you get better the thing is we don't do that with our emotions because no one ever tells us how that's the problem we almost need like a gymnasium for emotions you know to help us to help us deal with that we and to some extent you know i never thought about it this way is that to some extent therapists are like uh personal trainers yeah for for emotions now the thing about it is is that i think in some ways with negative emotions we go these two different paths we ignore them which is dangerous but i think sometimes we get so captured by them that we inevitably medicalize them and they don't necessarily need to be medicalized in the same way that if we can avert diabetes in advance we don't have to treat diabetes medically we can actually avert it in the first place by treating it through behavior yeah 100 107 agree with that and there's there's loads of science gabriel mata's written a lot about this in one of his books he wrote a lot about the research between holding on to negative emotions and not processing them so when we feel you know resentment and hostility and anger and we don't do anything with them we hold on to it and it is associated with higher risks of cancer heart disease autoimmune disease heart you know strokes you know it's really really profound so actually on the surface i'll regret you know whatever no actually this actually not dealing not not owning up to our negative emotions not being honest with ourselves and not taking steps to actually move through them yes it affects you mentally but it also affects you physically absolutely absolutely and as i said nobody teaches us how to do that it might even be more true in america than here is that we are so obsessed and over indexed on positivity but that hurts people it hurts people in the sense that if if you have people who feel negative emotions and they look around and think everybody else is feeling positive that can be debilitating yeah but what you what you're seeing there is performative positivity what you're seeing there are people essentially acting as their own pr agents and showing how wonderful their lives are when in fact they're as vulnerable and flawed and struggling as all of us i think that's one of the real gifts of your new book to the world is that you're talking about it you're sharing all of these stories that people have shared with you on that survey and you're making people feel less alone and go oh wow absolutely what for me what i did as an experiment yesterday i thought ah okay i'm talking to dan tomorrow about regrets and he's done this survey so yeah i'm just going to put it out on my own channels you know for people to share their regrets and what was really interesting i did it on instagram stories okay i did it on twitter okay now of course they're different audiences yeah on instagram i probably had over 200 replies in just a few hours right i printed off some over here yeah with you on twitter i didn't get a single reply now interesting why i would be thinking about this all morning and on instagram the way i set up on the poll you are replying privately to me so not everybody sees what your regret is and on twitter it's all there in the public now this is not a scientific experiment there are different audiences i have i have more people who follow me on instagram than twitter so there's all kinds of reasons but it made me think is there something about that they can share it with me or with you on your survey anonymously but people still feel slightly reticent about sharing it in public do you think there's something there i think there is something there although sharing it privately is sometimes the first step to sharing sharing your publication my survey was completely anonymous yeah it was totally anonymous but here's the thing that's surprising is that i gave people the option of of i said your service is anonymous all i wanted was the the location the gender identity and the age and but otherwise i had no idea who they were however i said if you would like to be contacted for a follow-up interview you please you leave your email address and we had more people than i would have expected willing to to offer up their email address now it wasn't the majority anywhere close but two out of three people remained anonymous but one out of three is a decent number of people who are willing to to do that and what's interesting about this is that the willingness of people to share their regret with a with a complete stranger is it self-telling the volume that you are getting the volume that i were getting is telling what it says is that there's this pent-up demand for people who want to talk about it why because it's an unburdening and very important it's a way to make sense of it it is it is it is a part of the essential process of dealing with these negative emotions of sitting with it whether it's you know of having this having that that moment of discomfort and instead of fleeing from it by by scrolling down your phone as like a as like a digital narcotic to to relieve a little bit of that psychic discomfort you actually sit with it and recognize that discomfort is part of life and discomfort is a desirable part of life it's the same thing wrong and like think about something like stress chronic stress terrible for you yeah all right acute stress occasionally not that bad gets you moving gets you to do things motivates you imagine if we never felt any kind of stress we would never get anything done yeah imagine if we've never felt any kind of fear imagine we just just eliminated other negative emotions and we eliminate the negative emotion of fear all right gee i wonder if i should cross the street in front of ronan's house when all this traffic is going going well i'm not scared of anything all right imagine if we if we didn't experience grief imagine if you didn't experience grief at the loss of your father that would be horrible because your experience of grief is an expression of love the reason you grieve is because you love and so again negative emotions listen you know this i just want to make sure it's clear we want positive emotions we want a lot of positive emotions positive emotions are great you should have more positive emotions and negative emotions but negative emotions are part of our lives and they are useful if they don't terrify us and mortify us and make us dive under the couch if we look at them like grown-ups look them in the eye and say wow i'm scared right now what is this telling me i feel grief right now what is this telling me or the the granddaddy of all these negative emotions regret wow i'm experiencing regret right now what is this telling me about what i value what is this telling me about what i should do next yeah it's about paying attention to the signals and then i guess like with stress it's trying to find that sweet spot exactly you're looking at for the sweet spot you don't want the negative emotions to weigh you down so you're stuck in your bed all day you can't move you're paralyzed you don't know what to do but you don't also want to pretend that actually they're not there and you know for me when i hear that people shared with you anonymously at least initially like it makes me think of something that's become really really clear to me in my clinical practice is that awareness is the first step in any significant change i know that sounds really obvious but actually i just don't feel like sometimes people say okay i'm aware what do i do it's like okay well hey i want to get to you i want to talk to you about what we do with that regrets and there's there's loads of practical exercises in the book that i think will help people but i think we sometimes undervalue even just that first step of awareness right so i think many people who replied to you now that i'm thinking about it the hundreds who've replied to me on instagram i would imagine since sending that little message i imagine they're thinking about it today absolutely right right there's no question about it exactly so maybe they were getting on with their life and then they suddenly saw this question in my insta stories and they're like oh man and let me let me read you some of these okay so regrets that i found that okay so this is this is not part of your regret sir no no no this is just uh a non-scientific experiment yes thinking that i always need a plan for life interesting leaving my first husband ah not taking opportunities that were in front of me because i felt afraid boldness regret moving school in the middle of my a levels oh that's interesting i wonder whether that's a regret or whether that's just disappointment because well go ahead yeah not sending my toxic emotionally abusive ex on his way earlier what a waste of three years yeah where would you put that one oh i think that's a version of a connection regret it's a bad k it's a bad connection it's not about reaching out but it's about actually recognizing that connection belonging and love is essential and that you're being betrayed on that i find the language used in that quite telling as well actually you know not sending my toxic emotionally abusive ex on this way earlier what a waste of three years and of course it's just you know you'd love to speak to someone and understand it a bit more but on first impression that would indicate to me that that person hasn't or maybe potentially hasn't moved on from the regrets it's still locked in that what a waste of three years that kind of that's certainly what it says to me i could be wrong of course i don't think that that person has processed it a way to do that is to look back on who you were at that moment do a post-mortem on the decision itself yeah what was wrong did i not know myself well enough was i too rash um this is self-compassion isn't it well in some ways it's it's like potentially forgiving yourself for what you perceive yourself to have done let's say wrong that's important you've got to forgive yourself okay so let's let's talk about self-compassion with i like this can i look at this please so she was saying not sending my toxic emotionally abusive ex on his way earlier what a waste of three years okay so this is a really interesting one for for self-compassion so what she said to you is probably a somewhat sanitized version of what she's saying to herself if you think about her self-talk she's probably saying i'm an idiot i've wasted three years what a fool i'm such a what is wrong with me all right she's probably when it went through the public translation of it or the the the conveyance to somebody else it probably was de-harshified all right okay so what we see is that when we talk to ourselves we are cruel that if we if we if you were to somehow get into my brain the language center of my brain and put like an amplifier to amplify it out into the world so that people could hear myself talk you would think i was an abusive nut the way i treat myself all right that's a bad that's really bad though yeah so what self-compassion says is don't do that instead treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt so what she's saying here if that's what she's if that's actually a milder version of what you're saying to herself she's treating yourself with contempt yeah rather than with kindness don't do that treat yourself with kindness that's what self-compassion teaches us recognize that your mistakes are part of the human condition and there are so many regrets like this yeah so many regrets like you like i'm so i mean i'm sorry whatever this person is you're not that special like a lot of people have this regret it's not like you you're the only person who's made this mistake um and then also recognize that it's just a moment in your life so i don't know how old this person is but it's a moment in your life it doesn't fully define your life and when you do that you can begin the sense-making process you can treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt recognize that it's part of the human condition and then recognize that it's a moment in your life rather than the full definition of your life some of the regrets are things that people potentially can't do anything about because that situation has now changed right and so the last one i wrote down and this one definitely connected with me deeply this one is not expressing my gratitude to my father before he passed away first of all i'd love you to explain which of the four core regrets might that fall into and it connects with me not because i feel the same myself i don't actually one of the things i do not regret in life is that pretty much all my adult life until i was in my early mid 30s was spent caring for dad that's why i moved back here you know i didn't do a lot of the things that all my buddies were doing because i actually was a carer and now that dad's not here i'm glad i spent so much time with him but what what it has done and again i'm probably not looking it through a lens of regret more as a teacher to me is there's things that i wish i could have asked dad about his life story you know as i get you know i'm sure you're a little bit older than me but as a parent you know as your kids go through a certain milestone do you think oh man you think about so what your parents might have been thinking when you were going through them and i think wow i'd love to have spoken to dad about this so what i am doing is i'm talking to my mum yeah about all the problems that's it do you know what i mean i've learned from it and i'm changing it but that what can people do what kind of regret is that so that is like that is a classic it's not expressing my gratitude to my father before he passed away that is a classic connection regret because it's basically regret about not reaching out did we cover connection regrets oh we didn't do that one yeah yeah that's okay no no yeah so this is a perfect segue in here uh very artfully done it's a connection it's a connection regret connection regrets are about relationships sorry interrupts if you are enjoying this content there's loads more just like it on my channel so please do take a moment to press subscribe hit the notification bell and now back to the conversation they're about relationships that have come apart usually through some kind of drift and this is a classic example of that what typically happens if relationships drift apart and what's interesting these relationships are usually not romantic relationships the relationships like this one here the relationships parents and children children and parents siblings other relatives friends colleagues what happens is that the relationships drift apart this person is not suggesting any kind of massive rift between her and father it's more of a drift which is the classic thing that happens in a lot of these relationships the way that these relationships sometimes come apart is not very dramatic and so what happens is people get to the juncture okay regrets begin at a juncture should i reach out should i not reach out should i express my gratitude in the form of reaching out should i not and she's going to say or he is going to say you know what it's going to be kind of awkward if i just like say just one day walk up to my father and say oh dad i love you and i'm so grateful for everything you've done that's going to be so awkward for me it's going to be so awkward for me to say something like that and you know what he's not going to he's not going to really care one way or another he's going to find it a little creepy um and so we don't do it and so more time goes on and then in this case so much time goes on that you don't have a chance and here's where we're wrong it's not awkward it's way less awkward than we think we so over predict our feelings of awkwardness the second is that there is a form of pluralistic ignorance here in that there's no question that her father would have said very little question if her father would have loved to hear that i can't imagine a father who wouldn't want to hear that and so we think it's going to be awkward and we think the other side's not going to care and the answer is is that it's very rarely awkward and the other side always cares so for me as a personal lesson from this material as someone who hasn't been in his life that great about reaching out is that if you're at a juncture in your life and you're wondering should i reach out or should i not reach out should i express my gratitude or should i not express my gratitude should i say something or should i not say something if you've reached that juncture you've answered the question always reach out always reach out what a powerful powerful we can even rhyme it to make it even stickier when in doubt reach out love it love it definitely from america coming it's punchy i love it i love it but you know i'm really hoping dan that there's there's a world right with a lot of negativity going on at the moment and i'm hoping that this podcast this conversation is going to spread a bit of love i hope so around the world and i'm hoping everyone who listens or watches literally now take a break or at the end of the conversation do you know what reach out to someone maybe tell your mum or your dad how much you value them wouldn't that be amazing that would be that would be everyone did that honestly i'm not joking that would be extraordinary like that would that would keep if people actually did that that might keep me in the writing business for a couple more weeks but i think that that's the lesson and that's the lesson for me and we were talking before about how if you do certain professions for long enough you know you've written a few books and i've written a few books but the person who's writing them is different the person who started writing this book about regret is different from the person you're talking to now because this person you're talking to now has been affected by the work that i've done and this is one area where it's absolutely true you always reach out you always reach out i'll give you another always go to the funeral always go to a funeral this has a personal relevance for you doesn't say oh it does yeah yeah but but i but it's also it's also what these people told me if i just go into the database and search the word funeral what you will see is you'll see a lot of people who regret missing funerals of people they cared about and i i did that i i a few years ago i had a friend who i worked with um older than i um he died it was sad i wasn't super close with him but i was friendly with him and he had a funeral and and i was going to go and i was just really busy that day and i didn't go it's i'm i'm i'm i'm kind of i'm almost to the point on this one where i'm risk tipping from regret to shame um because i feel kind of ashamed of myself for that and this this and because i'm one reason a reason i'm ashamed is that hey i didn't do it and b like the funeral was like walking distance from my house and i was like you know too busy i can't undo that i can't make a mess but you can change going forward absolutely and that's again a key theme right it's like you can't do that but you can absolutely always yeah so always reach out always go to the funeral the other thing okay so let's we can just keep dispensing we can be a vending machine for for quick life advice like here's the thing honestly i really believe this if there is somebody who you're interested in romantically just ask the person out seriously the worst thing that can happen is the person's going to say no they might say no they might say no but at least you extinguish the what if yeah there are too many people here who haven't stepped up i heard your talk from a couple of nights ago and i think you mentioned was that a brian who got on a train once and oh yeah did you tell that story oh my gosh okay so that's uh that's an interesting boldness degree there's this guy um it's an american guy his name is bruce um one of the very few people who i wrote about in this book who didn't want me to use their full name so which suggests that not only do people want to talk about it but not everybody needs to do things anonymously yeah that that once they get past that initial discomfort they're willing to be more public with it but bruce was an american guy he's in his early 60s now he graduated from university in the states in the early 1980s he goes to europe to work on a farm in sweden and final week there he's traveling around europe and he's on this train there's a seat open next to him on the train and this woman sits down next to him about his age she's belgian she speaks english so they're talking riding the train just chit-chatting but then they start having this kind of connection where they're laughing and then they're playing word games on paper and then they're like leaning into each other and then they're holding hands you know and bruce is like oh my god this is like a movie it's like this like this instant sort of like almost feelings i don't want to overstate it but feelings of being in love almost that happen instantly and they're rumbling along she's an au pair working in france and she's going back to visit her parents in belgium for the weekend and the train finally gets to belgium and somewhere in belgium wherever she is and she says this is my stop i have to get off and he's like oh i'll come with you and she says ah you know my father would kill me i can't i can't bring you home and so he doesn't know what to do he's completely stymied and he again this is before cell phones you know and so he doesn't he can't say oh here's my text just text me um he he takes a piece of paper and he writes his mother's postal address on a piece of paper his mother lives in texas postal address on a piece of paper rips this piece of paper hands it to her they kiss she exits and then 40 years later bruce fills out the world regret survey and says i'd always wish i stepped off the train and so i think there are a lot of lessons in bruce's story yeah but there is a meta lesson which is step up the train what people what what people regret we were talking about this earlier what people regret didn't they did what they didn't do particularly when it comes to boldness and let's go back to this point about outcomes with bruce bruce who i talked to he's a lovely guy and i talked to him interviewed him several times just to get the full texture of his the full texture of his story and what bruce never once said in all these conversations if i had stepped off the train i would have this blissful life he never said that that he didn't he didn't sort of he didn't conjure some some alternative life that he could have led had he stepped off the train it was at that moment the 22 or 23 year old bruce had a chance to do something that was that was that was bold that would have led to growth that was an expression of who he was and he didn't do it and 40 years later 62 year old bruce is still bugged by that and that tells us something step off the train yeah i mean i don't know the the state of bruce's life today if he's married if he's married yeah he's married yeah but what's interesting for me is that that stayed with him for 40 years that for me that is like you're holding that in your body emotionally physically you're holding on to that and actually that is having an impact in some way unless you are open with it and and this speaks to the wider point that sometimes we try and shut out and we pretend this stuff isn't happening and you know another big theme i get from you is honesty be honest with yourself yeah like if you're feeling it yeah okay even if you don't know what to do with it yet be honest write it down do something well absolutely but but writing it down is actually powerful for other reasons writing it down or even talking about it is one of the most important things that we can do with our regrets for a whole host of reasons one of them is this honesty it's a it's a form of self-confrontation but the other thing about it which i i found the research quite fascinating is is this is that when we experi so emotions almost by their nature are abstract right so so so something like like love or joy it's it's kind it's an abstraction right you could give me the chemical properties for the caffeine in here right we can we can make sense of what caffeine is in this coffee right we can draw the molecular structure of caffeine and identify it perfectly right but there's no molecular structure of joy or or bliss or love or anything like that okay it's abstract same thing with fear and regret and so forth so emotions are abstract that's what makes positive emotions so great is that they're abstract they're vaporous it's like you're in a fog of of joy but it's also what makes negative emotions so menacing because they're amorphous and so writing it down talking about it writing about it converts that abstraction into words words are concrete things that are concrete are less fearsome and that's an essential part of the sense making process i mean going back to the start of our conversation your daily progress report right that's the same thing you're writing yeah you're writing it down you're instead of it just being out there you know did it have a good day that have a bad day how's life going actually no these are three things where i made progress right exactly it makes it real exactly the other thing that comes to me was i look through these responses people have given over certain topics you have regrets on both sides right so there's a lot of people who've said not leaving a toxic relationship earlier not leaving my husband not breaking a body staying too long but there's one here at the top of the page which is i regret leaving my first husband yeah right so some people regret staying too long some people absolutely believe they think there's something better out on the other side of like man i wish i'd never done that so i find that fascinating but then i also i thought i want to talk to you about sexual regrets oh okay and the reason is is that well the the reason is is it comes up a lot it's it's reader's favorite footnote in this book oh really yeah well that a lot of people are that i've read from your survey that whether it's you putting on twitter or or hearing the book is i regret cheating on my partner oh okay that's sexual regret oh yeah you could talk about the other one in a minute because i don't know what that is because i'm not sure whether that's i'm not sure whether the the infidelity is a sexual regret i actually think it's a it's a it's a betrayal of trust yeah well i actually this is this where i was going so most of the ones i've read are saying i wish i hadn't cheated what was i thinking it wasn't worth the as you say the portrayal of trust that came i was weak in that moment i've read loads of those but there's one here on i think page 188 of your book 71 year old female from michigan oh i regret not being more sexually active right and i thought god that's fascinating yeah right the majority of the regrets i'm reading are saying i wish i hadn't cheated yeah and of course i don't know if she's single right exactly exactly being sexually active and cheating on your spouse are two different things yeah so you mean on the face of it where do those two regrets fit in you mentioned that cheating one is a it's a moral regression a moral regret yeah okay you're betraying a trust yeah and i guess not being more sexually active is that a boldness it might be boldness it might be bothersome every single regret i mean i got you know 19 000 of these things not every single one fits perfectly in each of the in each of the in each of the categories but that strikes me as a that's a very interesting one that's why i put it in there because it's a 71 year old woman who regrets not being more sexually active so it sounds like a boldness regret but also you got to figure a 71 year old woman was born in 1951 all right and so we don't know what her family background was but it could have been the kind of thing where she was raised in a extremely religious household and so she's 18 years old and it's 1969 and she's in a community that is missing out on the whole sexual revolution and you know and the reason i raise that is that a lot of times with certain kinds of regrets we ascribe too much agency to ourselves that is the context matters also let me give you an example that you often see this with foundation regrets but this is an example where it might it might just be that the regret that jordan's sexually active could have been a reflection of her time or her circumstance and her environment rather than the choices that she made i don't know i don't know enough about her to do that but you see this but you have to factor that in with things like let's let's say that someone is 40 years old and says i regret that i haven't saved any money and we find out that that person was was the first person in their family to go to university and that person was maybe supporting their parents or supporting siblings or something like that that's not totally on them that they haven't saved money like that's you know that's context and situation and environment so i probably would have uh contacted her my guess is that she didn't leave her email address yeah because that's a that's a super interesting one yeah for sure there was another woman i she didn't leave it either but i i wanted to use this one she said she was i think about the same age she says her rugrat was not marrying joe schmidt like you named the guy one of joe's listening to this yeah yeah well what happened with okay so so just to follow up this not not to spoil the plot in any of this but what happened with bruce um and one of the things that's so interesting and i think very revelatory is that i so i interviewed all these people about their regrets and what was both revelatory and annoying was that in response to our conversations they started changing their behavior yeah you guys you know and but which so so with bruce it's like okay i got this incredible story about this guy who didn't get off the train and he's a very he's a very compelling character because he's such a nice guy and he he's married but he's unhappily married and there's something about this has been sticking with him for 40 years and he hasn't done anything about it and then after a conversation he decides to do something about it so he starts did he find that he did how it to my knowledge he hasn't found her yet but he started posting on like craigslist miss connections oh yeah like he started taking instead you know there's another woman in the book who had this friendship that had drifted apart and she didn't want to reach out to her friend and the reason she didn't want to reach out to her friend was that she thought it was going to be her words that her friend would find it creepy if she reached out after 25 years and she thought it was going to be really kind of awkward and i didn't reach out and then so i write as i write this part of the book and then you know maybe a month later i get an email guess what i did and i'm like no you didn't please i have to rewrite it now um so uh so that happened with bruce it happened with some of the other characters which suggests that when people start actually confronting these things they changed their behavior but to my knowledge bruce has not found this woman but if we know her name we do know her name let's put it out there go let's find her yeah actually that's a great point i assume she's still in europe and this is a popular podcast in europe so if your name is sondra and you're belgian and you worked as an au pair in in france in the early 1980s and one evening we're on a train with an american guy named bruce holding hands and playing word puzzles he's looking for you he lives in spokane washington he's been thinking about you for 40 years he's looking for you go to my website danpink.com and go to the contact form and and email me and we can make this oh man this is this one made my yeah a decade of this happens can you imagine like but if if there is a reunion we're going to bring all these cameras we have here yeah you and i it's our new show we're going to pitch this as a show reunions reunions we're with rongan and dan oh yeah man that i can't i think that's got a punch to it yeah it's got a certain punch to it yeah when i mentioned sexual regrets before your mind went to a different kind of regret yeah apparently a lot of your readers are super interested yeah unsurprisingly so what did you well i didn't write i didn't write much about it but there's a footnote in here that people are like why'd you put that in a footnote um because it's so interesting it has to do with uh i had to do with sexual it had to do with sorry i've all the scribbles yeah yeah yeah yeah well read so there weren't that many gender differences and regrets yeah and i was able to make reasonable i can't make any claims about gender differences based on the qualitative portion the story portion of the uh that the research but on the quantitative portion the public opinion poll was able to crunch the numbers and see some mild gender differences men tend to have more regrets about careers women more regrets about family but not by a wide margin it's that's actually not even that interesting i think um but there's other research not mine that shows a gender difference in regret in that men tend to regret the people they didn't sleep with and women tend to regret the people they did sleep with i'm oversimplifying but not by much that is so interesting isn't it yeah i should have yeah so that's what everybody said and and i didn't i didn't make a big deal of it and i put it in a footnote um i put it in a footnote that's your next book deal surely you think i think so that's a global battle i have to say you know like the marketer in me sort of blew it by by um there it is i think i see it right here yeah here it is uh for those of you those of you reading along at home it's on page it's on page 155 uh footnote on page 155 yeah telling that difference but the marketer and me sort of blew it because i could i should have had a chapter called sexual regrets actually i should have called the book that sexual regrets how looking backward moves you forward um to start bringing this to a close you've very powerfully made the case for regrets obviously we've spoken about disclosure awareness being the first step in a change but for people who this is really connected with and they're like man you know what i've got some regrets in my life maybe even hearing these other regrets other people has brought up for them yeah what kind of advice would you give them as to how they can you know start that process of dealing with it processing it and then ultimately moving on from it sure so as we were talking about start with self-compassion treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt very important treat yourself with the same kind as you treat somebody else recognize that your missteps are just like anybody else's disclosure that sense making process that writing about it talking about it is extremely important i think the first step doing it privately as people did on your instagram feed but don't discount disclosing it publicly because we're making we make another error here in that we think that when we disclose our vulnerabilities people think less of us they think more of us not in every time but but often then the final step here and this is the key you have to extract a lesson from it so if you treat yourself with kindness and you do the sense making you got to find a lesson and the thing is is that we're terrible problem solvers when it comes to our own problems so what you want to do is you want to do self-distancing and there are all kinds of techniques for self-distancing to extract the lesson from you can talk to yourself in the third person so instead of saying what should i do say what should dan do you can you can do things like um um a great decision making tool which is ask yourself what what i tell my best friend to do so let's take one of these over here not traveling when i had more time before kids let's say that's a regret okay so if your best friend came to you with that regret what would you tell him or her to do um i i i what i would tell him so this person probably doesn't know what to do he or she is stymied but if i were to ask him or her what would you tell your best friend to do they would probably say oh well i would tell my best friend to look for a three-day weekend where you can go on a trip in the next couple of months okay yeah you know and it's like oh okay but you don't think about that for yourself so ask yourself what would you tell your best friend to do and then i think my final the the final thing i think it's a really powerful technique is is some is again use our incredible abilities of time travel to sort of reach out and talk to the u of 10 years from now the u of 10 years from now knows what's best and and we can make based on this research we can make reasonable predictions about what the you have 10 years from now is going to care about so let's think about you the year 10 years from now is not going to care about whether um you wore a black t-shirt today or a green t-shirt today absolutely not the you of 10 years from now i was not going to care what you had for lunch today but what the you of 10 years now is going to care about is did you reach out when you had a chance you had a relationship and it drifted apart did you reach out because in 10 years it might be too late the year of 10 years from now is did you it's going to care did you do the right thing the you of 10 years from now is going to is going to say did i act boldly when i had when i had the chance and so this is the way that actually these four regrets give us some clarity about the future and so that's another way to make sense of our regrets is that if we're unsure what to do make a phone call to the of you of 2032 because he or she knows what to do they we we we you can make a very strong prediction what that u of 2032 is going to care about and it's not very much it's stability and love and boldness and morality i love that part the end of the book where you talk about these anticipation regrets yes and i thought it was just a beautiful way of using regret from the past as a way to inform what you do in the present right but it's also about using that mental time travel of going to the future and going actually i'm not going to care about this and i think a lot about bronicae's five regrets of the dying you know palace of cairnus spends lots of time caring for people at the end of their life five common regrets you know things like i wish i'd work less i wish i spent more time with my friends and family i wish i'd led my life not someone else's life that makes me think of your boldness you know i have this if i might try on you now if you're open to it there's a i tried it on a few guests recently and so far it's gone pretty well but there's an exercise that's going to come to a halt right now there's an exercise in in my next book yeah i guess it's a little bit related to this and i do want to finish off talking about regret and happiness and what it can teach us about happiness because i think there's a real there's quite a bit of crossover in certain areas which i find absolutely fascinating but you know i think sometimes we confuse success and happiness in life yeah and it's a common thing particularly in the west and that's a good point and it's a very simple exercise it's basically the first part of it is what are three things that you could do this week that you think would truly make you happy such an interesting three things that i could do this week to really make myself happy um or even say last week when you're at home because obviously i appreciate you on a book tour at the moment in a foreign country oh yeah because if it was this week i would say that the first thing that would make me happy would be coming on your podcast that would always be number one um let's say next week that's a brilliant question i would say um yeah i think i know i mean one of them would be um talk to my kids because my kids are out of the house now and so i don't see them every day so talk to my kids no question about that second one would be um maybe i'm nuts but exercise because exercise always makes me happy uh and the third would be to create something i don't even know what it is just to create something that i that the world didn't know it was missing this week but that is my unique contribution to the world i love that the second part of the exercise is imagine now you're on your deathbed mm-hmm looking back and this really fits in with what we've just been you're on your deathbed looking back on your life what are three things you will want to have done i mean i think it would be knowing that i left the world and there were people who i loved and who loved me i think that's the most important thing and i think that's a small group of people a very very small group of people and i think that's the most important thing to me it's horrifying to think about breathing my final breath and thinking there's no one here who loves me and there's no one i love that that is that's a chilling concept to me so that'd be the first thing second thing would be did i make some kind of contribution to the world and i'm not saying solving the climate crisis or anything like that i just like is the world slightly better for my being here even on the margins even a peppercorn better because of my being here and i might not even need a third yeah if i have those two but i mean if it was a third i would say you know what i actually learned something like at each stage of my life i became smarter and better and more more informed and more creative because i recognized that that was an essential part of healthy living but that's but that's totally the bronze medalist the top two are are did i have people who love me and who i loved and did i make even a tiny modest contribution to the world and then the next part really which and and this really doesn't surprise me at all is to look at those two answers and go are they aligned wow right and immediately as you were saying your first year i'm like this guy of course having read having sold millions of books all over the world talking about human behavior of course you understand human behavior you understand what's important and you know that that whole thing you know spending time talking to your kids well that if you could do that next week and you do that week after week then yeah at the end of your life on your debt exactly you will have met that first most important one about exactly spending time with loved ones having people who care about you right one of the ones that you want to do each week is can i create something something that the world maybe doesn't know it needs and in some way make a difference that is what you also want to have done at the end of your life made a contribution right and i don't think anyone can argue that you haven't already done that in bucket loads with all the books all the impact you've had so for some people though they do that and they go oh there's a there's a pretty big mismatch here right there's a mismatch here for what i know i'm gonna want on my deathbeds to what i'm doing and often that comes to work or things like um you know on my dad i will want to spend a lot of time with my family and friends and then they realize they're working way too hard they'd never have time for their friends they have a connection regrets as it as you know through your lens do you know and i and i find i i put this out on instagram a few days ago and i've had such wonderful responses like are people are people aligned or misaligned or all over some people are saying i'm delighted that i'm aligned other people are saying oh wow an easter egg a cold hard look at my life these things are completely different and again it's not about beating ourselves up it's about exercising a bit of self-compassion and going i might at least i know now right at least i brought some intention to it that i can now start to make small changes i'd have to have a life over but maybe it's a couple more dinners with my wife and kids this week and not working through do you know what i mean but let me let me let me let's pretend we're playing poker i'm gonna see you and raise you all right okay and i'm going to see you and raise you the notion of courage all right and and i think that in some ways what we're what we a lot of what we're doing externally is is performative courage and what i think what really is courage is doing that exercise that it takes courage to do that exercise because you have to you have to stare your imperfections and your reality in the eye and you can't sanitize it on social media you can't bomb it by with a few glasses of wine you have to actually confront it and it and and confrontation is inherently uncomfortable but we can push past the we can push past the discomfort and i and i really think that so much of our lives and it's interesting because i might feel this i think i believe this more deeply because of our conversation is that so much of our lives are spent avoiding discomfort when maybe what we should be doing is actually welcoming discomfort more affirmatively that's what i'm trying to do with regret but i think in general too much of our lives are spent trying to bypass discomfort rather than just simply recognizing that in a more like almost like zen-like state hey discomfort is part of the human condition let me welcome it into my life because the more i do that the less likely i'm going to be to have that discomfort metastasized into some into something that's destructive super super powerful dan um i think you know a huge fan of your books thank you this one is another classic people are going to love it this podcast is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of life right you have studied human behavior you've you've written so many books on different aspects of human behavior putting it all together now for people who are listening people who are watching how can they feel better and get more out their lives oh my gosh uh it's a big question yeah so i can speak for my own life which is um i care way less about what other people think than you do because the dirty little secret because i i know what other people think of me and you know what they're not thinking of me they're thinking about themselves they couldn't give two wits about me all right so get out of that narcissism and stop caring what other people think of you because they're not thinking about you once you do that you have a sense of liberation for me there was so stop thinking about what other people care about you i'm a firm believer that showing up is much more important than having talent just show up and do you if you want to get stuff done if you want to make a contribution to the world show up and do your work do it the next day do it the next day do it the next day do it the next day persistence trump's talent i believe that very firmly i also believe that you are better off in every dimension of your life if you begin from a position of generosity not from a position of sort of personal scarcity but of a position of personal generosity that generousness is healthy you feel better but it's actually a surprisingly effective professional tool as well that's not why you do it but it has that knock on effect generally so begin with generosity i'll give you one more um i'll give you two more one more it would be maybe have a bias for action uh and the reason for that is that sometimes we have the one way i look at things is that is almost like an economist which is like what do we value what what what's the proper price on things okay i think we value planning too much in action too little and one of the things that i've learned is that action is a form of learning that sometimes instead of planning and then deciding to act just try stuff and learn from that so um so and then and then finally is um um [Music] your mileage may vary be generously skeptical with advice from people like me dan it's been such a joy talking to you i've really enjoyed it and i and i and i i appreciate the coffee too my pleasure we can make another one now if you want but i really appreciate all the work you've done thank you i appreciate the new book i appreciate the old books and i honestly appreciate on a very short trip to the uk you've taken time to come up north of the studio i think the conversation was better because of it totally and i look forward to the next time we get together thank you thanks for having me thank you if that conversation resonated with you i think you are really going to enjoy this one about the things that you can do to stop procrastination so many people get stopped by procrastination you know what you need to do the issue is how do you make yourself take actions

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 32,151

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: p6Nv_fbUx2s

Length: 110min 15sec (6615 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2022