The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

by Daniel H. Pink

“It was truly as if we had known each other our whole lives,” Bruce told me recently. “And I have never felt that way again.” The train chugged on. The hours raced by. Just before midnight, as the train was approaching a station in Belgium, the woman stood up and told him, “I have to go.” “I’ll come with you!” Bruce said. “Oh, God,” she replied. “My father would kill me!” They walked through the train aisle to the door. They kissed. Bruce madly scribbled his name and his parents’ Texas address on a slip of paper and handed it to her. The train doors parted. She stepped off. The doors closed. “And I just stood there stunned,” said Bruce, who is now in his sixties and who asked that I not use his last name. When he returned to his seat, his fellow passengers asked why he hadn’t left the train with his girlfriend. “We just met!” Bruce told them. He didn’t even know her name. They hadn’t exchanged names, Bruce explained, because “it was almost as if we already knew.” The following day, having made it to Stockholm, Bruce boarded a flight back to the United States. Forty years later, when he completed the World Regret Survey, he relayed this tale and concluded, “I never saw her again, and I’ve always wished I stepped off that train.”