Daniel Pink: The Power Of Regret

Regrets, I've had a few. But then again, too few to mention. These lines from the Frank Sinatra hit 'My Way' can often be heard at funerals across the Western world. And according to one study of the common emotions that people feel each day, the two mentioned most often were love and regret. So it's surprising that while there are over 200,000 books on Amazon with love in the title there are only 30,000 with the word regret. So what is this thing called regret and how can looking backward in our lives help us move forward. That's what our guest today will help us explore. Daniel Pink is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books including Drive, To Sell Is Human, A Whole New Mind, and his latest, THE POWER OF REGRET. These books have sold millions of copies around the world, been translated into forty-two languages, and have won multiple awards. His ability to combine deep research and inspire audiences has led Daniel Pink to become one of the top keynote speakers and foremost business minds of our day. Welcome to the show Daniel Pink.

1. You call the idea of one having 'no regrets' as 'a delightful but dangerous doctrine'. Why do you believe this?
2. You have a background in politics and before we came on the call today I was watching a politician apologize for something he claimed he had no knowledge of happening and wasn't responsible for. So can we only truly feel regret for those situations that we are directly responsible for? For example, can I feel regret for actions my great-great-grandfather took?
3. I was reading a blog post recently written by a palliative care nurse. She was recounting the most common regrets that patients share with her in their final days. In your book you describe the four most common categories of regrets, we have in our lives. What are those?
4. Someone was telling me the other day that elephants, dogs, and rats display emotions of regret. For example, elephants cover those animals and humans with branches that they have killed in rage. Do you think that other non-humans, like machines with artificial intelligence, could learn to regret their decisions? I'm thinking here of the concept of 'reinforcement learning' in where a computer uses feedback from its actions and experiences to improve its algorithms.
5. In your book 'A Whole New Mind' you explored creativity. Which ideas and techniques in that book did you use when writing 'The Power of Regret'.
6. In creativity, we often hear of the concept of creative pairs. Jobs & Wozniak, Lennon & McCartney. In your creative work who is that person that helps you take your work to a higher level and how do they do that?
7. For the Power of Regret, you undertook extensive research and I'm assuming this required a team of people. Can you tell me what regrets you have had when it comes to creating with a team, and how reflecting on this has improved your decision-making in future projects?
8. How do you keep your thinking fresh? What influences do you try to surround yourself with?
9. Do you use technology in any ways that either free up your time for creativity or help you to augment your creativity? How so?

 

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The Power of Regret: Daniel Pink

Daniel Pink  1:12  

James, great to be with you. Thanks for that lovely introduction.

James Taylor  1:15  

So in the book, you call the idea of one having no regrets this thing that people get tattooed on them or shout out loud on stages, as a delightful but dangerous doctrine. What do you why do you believe this?

No Regrets As A Delightful But Dangerous Doctrine

Daniel Pink  1:31  

Well, I believe for two reasons, James, number one, everybody has regrets. Okay, this is important to understand. Truly, the only people without regrets are five-year-olds, people with brain damage, and sociopaths, the rest of us have regrets that make us human. They are part of our cognitive machinery. And the reason they're part of our cognitive machinery is that if we treat them right, they can make us better regrets tell us things, they give us signals, they instruct, they clarify. And if we get past this idea that we should just don't have any regrets. And also, you know, the opposite of it, which is that I'm going to wallow in all my regrets and think about our regrets. They offer an incredible pathway to working smarter and living better.

James Taylor  2:22  

So before we came on today, I was watching some clips from the British Parliament, and you have a background in politics being a speechwriter. So this politician was apologizing for something he claimed he had no knowledge of happening and wasn't responsible for. So can we only truly feel regret for those situations that we are directly responsible for? For example? Can I feel regret for my great, great grandfather's actions that he may have taken?

Regret VS Disappointment

Daniel Pink  2:54  

That's a very interesting question. I think there are two questions there. So let me pop them apart. I want to separate your grandfather here for a moment. On the first one. You're right, that regret requires agency. Okay, so let's see, let me contrast here. The difference between regret and disappointment, regret and disappointment and Janet Landman of the University of Michigan has, I think a lovely example of this. So let's say there's a little girl, and she's three years old, and she loses a tooth one night, and so she's excited. She goes to sleep that night, she puts the tooth under her pillow to wait for the Tooth Fairy coming to give her you know, a prize. She wakes up in the morning. The tooth is still there, the girl is disappointed. But the parents have regret because they forgot to replace the tooth with a prize. All right. So there has to be some agency there. Now in the case of that parliament member he is I guess, expressing regret because of his inaction rather than his action. And it turns out that inaction regrets outnumber action regret so so. So I guess he is expressing regret because he is saying I had agency and I didn't use my agency properly. Now, but again, regret is not a disappointment. So I'm a sports fan. And you know, I live in Washington, DC here on the east coast of the United States. And I'm a sports fan. And, you know, our, you know, except for one exception. Recently, two exceptions, our sports teams haven't done that. Well. And I'm disappointed when our sports teams lose, but I can't feel regret because I'm not playing now for your grandfather. Very, very interesting question. Can you feel regret about that? I'm not sure. I think you can extract a lesson from that. And I think that the question you're asking is, embodies an interesting point about societal regret, and you know, can society's broader societies feel regret and learn something from them? And I think the answer is Yes on that one. And so a close analogy would be what happened in South Africa with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. So South Africa emerges from decades of apartheid, shameful, violent, horrible, unjust. And, and the way to deal with that the people who were responsible, who certainly had regret or should have had regret, was to begin a process of disclosure and sensemaking. And, and lesson drawing. And so I think it's so so it's possible that you could do something like that for your grandfather, your great grandfather, what did your grandfather do?

James Taylor  5:39  

My great grandfather was a big-fist boxer. So hopefully, he was in sports. I guess that was a style he

Daniel Pink  5:47  

so he probably used that for choosing a profession, because you can get hurt. Yeah.

James Taylor  5:53  

So talking about getting hurt. I was, as I was reading your book, I was also reading some other work by a nurse that was a palliative care nurse. And she was recounting the regrets that people describe in those final hours and days of their life. And it's interesting because what she was saying, she said it in one form, but you not just you did the kind of deep research of, of doing it more qualitatively. And then you broke down almost at these four different categories of the types of regrets that we might have. Can you describe what

4 Types Of Regrets

Daniel Pink  6:32  

Sure thing? Yeah, thanks for mentioning that. Because this was pretty massive, this is a pretty massive project here. So what I did is I collected 16,000 regrets from people in 105 countries. I mean, it's crazy. It's a massive trove of human longing and aspiration. And as I went through them, I realized that the way that we had been thinking about regret was a little bit off. We've often thought about regret about the domains of our life. So Oh, I wish I'd worked hard enough harder in school. That's an education regret. I wish I had started a business to career regret or healthy regret. And what I found is that underneath all of those, those domains of life were four core regrets that I was amazing, James, how often over and over and over again, throughout the world, I kept hearing those kinds of regrets. And so I can tell you very quickly what they are. The first one is foundation regrets. Foundation regrets are if only I'd done the work. So it's regrets about not taking care of your body smoking, not saving enough money, not working hard enough in school and university. Second, what are boldness regrets, huge category, huge category? Something that, that so the entrepreneurs in your audience are probably acting on is his bonus regrets are if only I have taken the chance. And what that means is that you're at a juncture in your life, you can play it safe and take the chance. And it doesn't matter the domain, it could be an opportunity to travel, it could be asking somebody out on a date, it could be starting a business, but you choose to play it safe. And over and over again, people regret playing it safe. So that's a bonus. Third, regret moral regrets. If only I'd done the right thing. People have regrets about infidelity regrets about stealing regrets about bullying, that sticks with them for decades. So that's more regret in the final regret or is disconnection regret, which is if only I reached out. And those are regrets about relationships of all kinds, not just romantic relationships, but relationships between parents and children, relationships between siblings, huge numbers of regrets about grifted relationships among friends. And so my view is that these four core regrets are revealing, in the sense that if we know what people regret the most, we understand in some sense, what they value the most. And so these four regrets, give us a sense of like, what do people want out of life? And I think it's a clear Foundation, right? We want some stability, right? We don't want to have a wobbly platform for our life. The second bonus, we want to do something we want to like try stuff and grow and lead psychologically rich lives. Moral regrets. I'm convinced that most people want to do the right thing. And when they don't, it kind of bugs them. And then finally, connection regrets we want to love. And so in a weird way, this negative emotion of regret gives us a very clear path to a good life.

James Taylor  9:35  

And I should say now I'm almost thinking I hope a filmmaker read your book because as you're describing it in that way, I can almost imagine a little short film you know where there are ones where he talks about four different characters over 24 hours. I can almost imagine a little mini-movie about regrets these, these four different people talking about you know, experiencing these different parts regrets and how they are their lives kind of intertwined with everyone as well. So as you have got that's a great idea. So anyone listening,

Daniel Pink  10:08  

any filmmakers out there listening just you know what to do? Get me and James as an executive producer,

James Taylor  10:15  

maybe we have a Brian Koppelman watching just now maybe that could be the new succession, there's a new thing. Someone was telling me the other day that animals can experience a sense of regret this emotion of regret elephants, dogs, even rats can experience it, there was something I saw, I think it was a David Attenborough aware when an elephant kills another animal or even a human, they will put leaves over covering over the body and kind of if they've killed him in an act of rage, for example. So as I was thinking about the animals, we have a lot of people listening to the show who are involved in machine learning artificial intelligence. And I was thinking, well, if an AI we have things like reinforcement learning, where machines play against each other to improve to develop this way of learning, can you see can you foresee a time when machines can almost have this sense of regret built into their algorithms?

Regret A Functional Part Of AI

Daniel Pink  11:14  

Yes, I don't know a huge amount about this. But it's pretty clear, it's happening right now. Because one way to think about regret in a very economic a very reductive code, like way is to think about regret as the difference between an optimal decision and an actual decision. And that way of thinking about regret is, is, to my knowledge already being used to enable you to know, it's being used in programs in AI programs to help poker players. So So I think that's, I think it's inevitable that that regret is going to become a function of AI. Because and it's a fascinating question, because here's the thing about what we know about regret from 50 years of social science on regret, even neuroscience is that regret is functional. Okay? That regret is functional. It's not it serves a purpose and you mentioned the animals I don't know about animals regret the animal regrets or some interesting work on animal emotions by fronts Deval and I think that's a really interesting, really interesting area. But what we know is that we human beings feel regret for a reason it there's a reason it is one of the most common negative emotions that we experience and one of the most common emotions of any kind that we experience, because it is functional. And if you think about AI, it is, it's entirely functional. That is like maybe AI can experience the beauty and joy of listening to a symphony or looking at a beautiful painting or a sunset but AI right now is about problem-solving. Making decisions doing things that are functional in regret is a functional part of our brain so it seems inevitable that it will be a functional part of AI.

James Taylor  13:16  

As you're saying I'm almost thinking a lot of AI that's happening now is human plus machine is using AI almost as prompts to help us to be more human. We had a guest on a while ago now Mishra guy who is a bit like that psychiatrist, character and billions she worked with these top CEOs these top performance and helps them kind of get through those things, those emotions to get to the other side to do better work in their case to do bigger trades or whatever the thing is, I'm guessing regrets probably quite a big psychological thing that's hangover for a lot of people.

Daniel Pink  13:52  

It could be if we deal with it, right? That's the thing that's it. That's the interesting thing about your line of inquiry, James is that like you're sort of presuming that we're going to be sensible and rational and grown-up about how we deal with the regrets and I'm not sure everybody is I mean, you have a credo all over the world, especially here in the United States, but a credo all over the world about how you should have no regrets that you should never look backward. That regrets are debilitating that, you know, I have people who I wrote about who have tattoos that say no regrets. You have songs by everybody from elephants Jerell, to Eminem about no regrets. And and and I think that that is misguided. Like, I don't mean and I think your AI analogy is kind of revealing. It's like, imagine an AI program that didn't have regrets. All right. Like, like, like, like, that's not I mean, regret essentially, you know, think about machine learning. Let's talk about the word learning in there, right? We have to learn from them. So if you have a machine learning program that says oh, we're good Aren't I had an actual decision, there's a big difference between the actual decision the optimal decision, but that doesn't matter, I don't have any regrets, you're gonna have a crappy piece of machine learning software. And so what we have to do is, we have to do a better job of contending with negative emotions in general. And we have to triangulate between the two extremes. One extreme is to ignore negative emotions to always think positive. That's a bad idea. That is not a functional idea. The other side is that inevitably happens is that we wallow in our negative emotions, we luxuriate in them, we bathe in them, we use them as a way to exonerate ourselves from taking action, that's a bad idea to what we shouldn't be doing is using our negative emotions, including our most prominent negative emotion, regret, as a signal for thinking, it's telling us something, it's telling us something, receive that signal, think about it, and then begin a process to extract the lesson from it in the way that machine learning software would,

James Taylor  16:04  

that can be a middle way to things or It almost reminds me there was a book I was reading a while ago, by a gem from Seattle, who became a very famous Buddhist monk in Thailand and actually opened lots of Buddhist monasteries. Theravadan Buddhist monk and he talks a lot about attachment, how not to become attached. So with any emotion, whether it's lust, passion, despair, he said, there's nothing wrong with these emotions. It's just as you were, is kind of not becoming attached and to be able to think and to kind of look, oh, this is interesting. I wonder what this is about, I wonder how this can work?

Negative Emotions

Daniel Pink  16:42  

Yeah, that's exactly right. So so on one extreme is batting away all negative emotions, which is a bad idea. But the other one is not becoming attached to it, as you say, in a third way is emotions of all kinds, particularly negative emotions. Because negative and positive emotions are different. Negative emotions are signals they are in the world is when we feel the spirit of negative emotion, especially negative emotion like regret, it is a signal, the world is trying to teach us something right there. And if we're open to that, if we neither ignore it nor get debilitated by it, we can use that signal as a way to move forward.

James Taylor  17:24  

So that's that signal. I mean, I think a lot of great art has been created from the artist having some sense of regret of something that they did do, or they didn't do a decision you did or didn't make. And you wrote a book. A few years ago, A Whole New Mind explored creativity and ideas. So I'm interested in from that book, which ideas and techniques did you use in the writing of the power of regret?

Daniel Pink  17:51  

Hmm, interesting question. So So one of the thank you for remembering that that long-forgotten book, that's a book that makes the case for the vast majority, the 99.99% of your listeners who haven't seen that book, that book makes the case that in labor markets around the world, a certain set of abilities, the logical linear kind of spreadsheet abilities are still necessary, but they're no longer sufficient because they're easy to automate and easy to outsource. And that a different kind of abilities, abilities that we traditionally in, in western industrialized countries have overlooked and undervalued things like artistry and empathy and inventiveness have become more important. And I lay out, I lay out some of the particular capabilities that are necessary there. And I think that one of them in terms of writing this book, I think there are two of the abilities that I mentioned, that I think are relevant. One of them is, is the ability of Symphony, which is a bit which is big picture thinking. And I think it was really important for me to, you know, to write this book, to zoom out and get some kind of broader perspective on this topic. One of the things that you see if because I spent, you know, looked at all the 50 years of research, in the academic literature, and, you know, academically, academics are playing a different game. They're making these tiny, minuscule, little incremental moves forward, and they're not seeing the big picture. So for me, I always want to step back and see the big picture. What is regret? What do we regret how to how to, is it possible to reclaim it is something forward and so what I would always do, just to give you if you want to see how the sausage is made is that I'm talking to you from my office in Washington, DC. I have a whiteboard, a big whiteboard right there. I always like mapping stuff out on the whiteboard, just putting the various ideas out there and looking for connections among them. That's symphonic thinking. I also use a program, a computer program called scapple. It's a very simple program called scapple. It's a mind mapping ish program and I Laid out every single chapter multiple times on scaffold because there was this wealth of information out there on this topic. And I wanted to be able to see the connection. So the at's symphony. The other one was this. You know, again, I collected the 60,000 regrets from people around the world. And I ended up doing follow-up interviews with a few 100 of them. And for them, the other ability that was necessary was empathy. Because people were telling me things that were upsetting, I had people breaking into tears, I had people talking about their big mistakes, I had people, divulging, you know, bad behavior, like infidelity or bullying and things like that. And so it was really important for me to be able to demonstrate empathy in order to get to the heart of this issue.

James Taylor  20:45  

One thing of interest just as a speaker, myself, as well. And we're often told by, say, Bureau partners or the med, okay, you need to become the expert in this one thing and be the expert on this one topic. You've kind of chosen a different path, because, you know, regret is is not a topic I would have thought about as something to build a book and a speech and everything around. But now if I think about regret, I'm gonna think of Daniel Pink. So in your obviously written other books, like, your mind is about creativity. So what you do even think of yourself as being an expert on something? Or are you just curious, and you just say, Okay, I'm going to go into this five-year chapter of my life researching, writing, thinking, speaking about this thing, and then close that chapter and move on?

Daniel Pink  21:39  

It's the ladder definitely, I just, for me, I feel like writing a book is so unbelievably difficult. You know, at least for me, because I do a lot of research, do a lot of interviews, I'm a very slow writer, it is an arduous process for me. And so I only pick topics that I'm deeply, deeply, deeply interested in, I have to be really, really interested in a topic to write a book about it. And my view on that is that if I'm deeply interested in something other people will be too because I'm not that special. And so I don't spend honestly a lot of time sort of gaming out like what the next move is, I just said, I just, I just I really, to me, the test is really exactly as you say, is like, is this a topic that I want to be death writing about thinking about talking about for a very long time, not for a year, or two years or five years, but for a long time? For instance, just case in point, you mentioned a book called that book called A Whole New Mind, that book came out in 2005. So 17 years later, I'm still talking about that. And that's cool, because I believe very deeply in that book, and I still find what I wrote about quite interesting. But it one has to be, I think, extraordinarily successful. It's selective about what one chooses to explore.

James Taylor  23:04  

You've almost like a gun, you've always got so many bullets in the gun, so much time that you have this, you have to be very precise in deciding what those things are. You mentioned the kind of idea of symphonic and sometimes when we think about creativity, we think about this idea of creative pairs like Lennon and McCartney, Jobs and Wozniak, in your own work. Is there a creative pair? Is there a yin to the yang of Daniel Pink?

Daniel Pink  23:30  

Well, my wife actually reads every syllable that comes out of his office before it goes out into the world. And so I think that she would, I think that she would serve that role. Again, I am a laborious tortoise-like, pain in the neck in terms of the way that I work. And so my wife will, I mean, is, I think I've mentioned this before, but I mean, it's probably horrifying most of the people listening is that one of the things that I like to do with my writing, is I like to read it aloud. And then I also like to have it read to me aloud. So my wife for this book, and others, literally, multiple times, listen to me read aloud chapters. And then in addition to that, they also, herself sat in the chair right over there, and read chapters aloud to me. And, and, and here's the thing, just to be perfectly candid, I'm a giant pain to be read to because I like things to be read in a certain way. And so I'm always interrupting and saying, No, the act, the act, they the emphasis should be here and it's like, oh, no, no, no, no, you gotta, you know, she's still withstoodhstands that. So. So I guess the answer to the question is that Jessica is the yin to the Yang here and my creative output.

James Taylor  24:58  

So that's also the speechwriter in you knowing about language and how language, how it the cadence and how it moves as well. So you're hearing someone repeat back your words that you've written, which I'm sure you've been, you've done for many, many years in your previous life as well. What are you listening for what you're looking for in that speech?

Daniel Pink  25:22  

Yeah, I'm not sure I'm listening for anything, in particular, it's just to me, I process it differently when I hear it versus when I read it. And when I hear it in another person's literal voice, it's different. And it just helps me get a new angle on it like I'll give you like, like, it's not as dramatic, like, I'll give you a smaller version, of that is something that I do sometimes is that sometimes what I will do, I mean, I'm crazy, okay, I'm just admitting it here. Sometimes what I will do is, when I'm writing something, and I'm struggling, is I will convert the entire document into a totally different font, and print it out and read it in that font, because that's a smaller version of it, because, okay, it's like maybe, maybe it forces me to think about it a little bit differently. I think that reading it aloud, is much more powerful than that. But for me, I process it differently when the words go in my ear versus when they go in my eye. I mean, both of them make their way to my brain. But one goes in the side door, and one goes in the front door. And, and for me, that's a little bit different. And I will actually detect things that I didn't in, in hearing that I didn't detect in just reading it silently.

James Taylor  26:36  

Fascinating. In the power of regret, you mentioned the 16,000 people that you looked at the regrets that they had in their life as well. I'm assuming this required a team of people. So can you maybe tell me what regrets you personally have, when it comes to creating with a team and how reflecting on those years of doing this research, working with other people, editors, publishers, all the people around you for that team? How that the reflection on those regrets, helps you make better decisions in the future?

Daniel Pink  27:14  

Sure, I mean, I do think that one of the lessons from my work life for forever, is that especially in earlier positions that I took is actually not paying enough attention to who was there on you know, who are the Who are you going to be working with, you end up looking at like the job title and the job description, which doesn't really tell you that much. But who you go in and sit next to every single day and collaborate with every single day and talk to every single day makes a huge, huge difference. And, and I regret that I didn't know that earlier in my life. So I so on that I try to be pretty intentional about who I work with. Another sort of related regret of mine on this is that I never really had anybody in my life when I was younger, who was like I was like a mentor. And I sort of regret not like just even knowing that was a thing or knowing that was important. And when I look at other people, and I see that sometimes like having a mentor has been really helpful to them and finding their way I think about Wow, that would have been, that would have been really useful. I sort of regret not doing that. And as a consequence, I think because I didn't have that myself, I'm not that great of a mentor. And so you know, so so that's another regret that I have about working with people is that I was too, I just didn't know. And I was probably too arrogant to even accept a mentor. But in retrospect, I realize that's something that I definitely could have used. And if I had a good mentor, I would have been able to actually pay it forward by doing some mentoring better mentoring myself.

James Taylor  28:58  

So when it comes to your writing and your ideas, have you had to form almost like your own little mini-symposium salons in person, virtual or whatever, to be able to have a group of people who there's a trust is an intimacy, you can bounce back off ideas, they're gonna say to you, yep, you need to push that one further or follow up questions or you say, Daniel, that is a truly terrible idea. You should not go down this route, stop it now. Don't have that group created for yourself.

Daniel Pink  29:28  

I do have people in my life who are willing to do that, and I'm grateful for them. I probably could be doing it more robustly, though, I have to say, but I do have people who are I do have people who are willing to say that and that's as important as anything else in anybody's life, but certainly writers life.

Tools

James Taylor  29:48  

And you mentioned some of these tools. scapel, I think was the name of the one. Yeah is so I'll put links to that on the show notes as well. Are there any tools that you use that really can help? The kind of creative work you do as a writer and as a researcher as well, because there must be that there's a huge amount of research that goes into your writing, whether any other tools you use.

Daniel Pink  30:12  

Well, I use, I still use a fair amount of paper, if you can believe that. So I have giant paper files that I keep over here, I can show you a few here. I have giant paper files. Bear with me here for a moment. So I still, you know, do a lot of stuff on paper. I also. And in even, like just files, like, even files like this, so I still end up using a lot of that for 2022. I don't rely on that exclusively. But I do that and like our, like David Allen, who has been on your show, I always use a labeler to label all of my files. But I also I'm big, but I'm a big user of Dropbox. As a, I rely on Dropbox, I don't know, probably 25 times a day. And so and I have a very elaborate filing system in Dropbox that paired with the search function is, is absolutely essential to me,

James Taylor  31:27  

as your online brain. And I'm imagining now, with all those bits of paper, you're doing this kind of carry from homeland with lots of bits of paper on the floor, playing abstract jazz and random connections coming to you as well.

Daniel Pink  31:39  

Absolutely, but I'm not stopping terrorists, I'm just trying to figure stuff out. But that is a way that I do that because, for me, it's helpful to see stuff. So I use so it's multimodal, you know. So there is paper, there is a whiteboard, there is the software scapple There is Dropbox, I will also do things like when I go out for a walk, I mean, just to give you guys some tools, I use this, this app here called a wreck up, which is it's a it's like a voice recorder app, but but it takes a voice recorder and puts the sound image in the sound file immediately into a Dropbox file. And then I also use something called otter.ai, which is a transcription program. So I use that a lot for interviews and things like that. So I'm not I'm not totally analog. But for me, the visual side of it is actually really important. And so seeing stuff on paper is really useful to me. Oh, so I keep

James Taylor  32:37  

getting a lot of those interviews, you mentioned those in-depth interviews, something like an otter, being able to quickly transcribe a lot of those

Daniel Pink  32:45  

times daily, It's unbelievable because I'm old enough where I would actually have cassette tapes that I would listen to and try to transcribe myself, which is just excruciating. And, and an otter is very good. It is, it so I use that a lot. And so you know, it's it's a, it's a suite of different, it's a suite of tools, I'll give you something even more rudimentary that I use, it's like sometimes on days when I'm stuck, I will use a Pomodoro app, which is we know what you're meant, you know, which is where you set a timer. And you just say, Okay, I'm just going to work for whatever, 25 consecutive minutes. That's it, and then I find that is a good way to get me going. So I like to, you know, just sort of, I think it's true for all of us who we got to try to figure out what works for us and what doesn't work for us. And mine is a mix of, you know, mine is a mix of old-fashioned tools like paper and folders and labelers but also some newer stuff like scapple and otter, and Dropbox. So I'm

James Taylor  33:46  

gonna ask you to fast forward a final question here for you. Fast forward in 30 minutes, what is the one thing you think you'll regret not sharing with our audience? The one thing you'd maybe like to share? When you weigh out that,

Remake your regrets into forces for good.

Daniel Pink  34:03  

I think it's that, you know, in this in this book I talked to I talked about a pretty systematic way that you can remake your regrets into forces for good. And so you know that this idea that regrets are helpful and functional for us is is accurate, but it doesn't happen automatically. The benefits don't just arrive on your doorstep. What you have to do is you have to take a certain approach that involves reframing the regret disclosing the regret and extracting a lesson from it. But it's something that all of us can do. And I really do think that especially at this moment in our time, you know, we're coming out of this pandemic we hope that that in a lot of us have had time to reflect on the last two years that we can use this indispensable motion as a force for good.

James Taylor  34:50  

The Power Of Regret is out now we're going to put links people can go there from the usual places, Amazon, please go to your local bookstore, preferably and try and buy it. Keep giving bookstores going as well. Daniel, if people want to learn more about your other work, your other books, your speeches, or other things you've got going on just now. Where's the best place to go and do that?

Daniel Pink  35:10  

The best place is on my website, which is Danpink.com 

James Taylor  35:16  

Daniel lovely speaking with you today have great success with the books a fantastic read. And thank you for something coming on the Super creativity podcast.

Daniel Pink  35:23  

Thanks for having me. I enjoyed the conversation.

James Taylor  35:26  

You can subscribe to the super creativity podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts while you're there. Please leave us a review. I would appreciate it. I'm James Taylor, and you've been listening to the super creativity podcast.

-Daniel Pink The Power Of Regret