The Power of Regret by Daniel Pink.
BOOK REVIEWS BY BINOD
BINOD’S RATING: 8/10
Top 20 points:
1. People don’t like talking about regret as they want to project this image of perfection to the world. And regret says, “It isn’t.”
2. Regret is not dangerous or abnormal. It is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human.
3. The only people without regrets are five-year-olds, people with brain damage, and sociopaths.
4. By making us feel worse today, regret helps us do better tomorrow.
5. Foundation regrets arise from our failures of foresight and conscientiousness and sound like this: If only I’d done the work. This is because our brains play a double trick on us. They entice us into valuing the now too much and the later too little.
6. Boldness regrets to sound like this: If only I’d taken that risk. Many boldness regrets reflect a desire to grow not for any instrumental reasons but because of the inherent value of growth itself.
7. Moral regrets sound like this: If only I’d done the right thing.
8. Connection regrets arise from relationships that have come undone or that remain incomplete. Connection regrets sound like this: If only I’d reached out.
9. These four regrets give us a sense of what do people want out of life. if we know what people regret the most, we understand what they value the most.
10. The more education and income you have, the more regrets you have about your career.
11. We regret foregone opportunities more often than unfulfilled obligations.
12. The sequence of self-disclosure, self-compassion, and self-distancing can transform regret into a powerful force for stability, achievement, and purpose.
13. Self-disclosure can lighten our burden, make abstract negative emotions more concrete etc. For example, write about your regret for fifteen minutes for three consecutive days.
14. Self-compassion begins by replacing searing judgment with basic kindness. It recognizes that “being imperfect, making mistakes, and encountering life difficulties is part of the human experience”.
15. Self-distance through A) space, B) time, and C) language. A is reviewing past behavior “from the perspective of a neutral observer. B is looking at the problem retrospectively. C is abandoning first person pronouns & using the third person.
16.If we think about regret like this—looking backward to move forward, seizing what we can control and putting aside what we cannot, crafting our own redemption stories—it can be liberating.
17.Framing regret as a judgment of our underlying character—who we are—can be destructive. Framing it as an evaluation of a particular behavior in a particular situation—what we did—can be instructive.
18.Create a failure résumé. You may realize that you’ve repeatedly made variations of the same mistakes, and that knowledge can help you avoid a repetition of those mistakes.
19.Individual leaders can reveal their regrets to their teams. There’s overwhelming evidence that’s a winning leadership strategy.
20.The best advice is not to avoid all regrets, but rather to optimize them. People tend to regret the same 4 things, so anticipate those regrets. Build your foundation. Take sensible risks. Do the right thing. Reach out. But for other regrets, chill. Good enough is often good enough.