The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

by Daniel H. Pink

Take, for example, the education level of respondents. People with college degrees were more likely to have career regrets than people without college degrees. At first that might seem surprising. Having a college degree generally affords people a wider set of professional options. But that could be precisely why college graduates have more career regrets. Their lives presented more opportunities—and therefore a larger universe of foregone opportunities. Income presented a similar pattern. Regrets about finance, not surprisingly, correlated tightly with household income—the lower the household income, the more likely someone was to have a finance-related regret. But regrets about careers ran in the reverse direction. That is, the higher the income, the more likely it was that someone had a career regret. Again, more opportunities could beget more regrets about unrealized opportunities.