The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

by Daniel H. Pink

Maximizers regretted everything at every stage. Before they made their choices. After they made their choices. While they made their choices. Whatever the situation, they always imagined the possibilities of something better if only they had acted differently.[35] But these upward counterfactuals didn’t uncork productive “feeling is for thinking” regret. They trapped people in ruminating “feeling is for feeling” regret. In their effort to maximize happiness on all things, they were pulverizing it on most things. And herein lies a problem. The wobbly beam in Bezos’s Regret Minimization Framework is that constantly trying to anticipate and minimize our regrets can become a form of unhealthy maximizing. Applying this framework at all times and in all realms is a recipe for despair. How, then, to reconcile these countervailing currents—to gain the benefits of anticipated regret without becoming caught in its downdraft? The solution is to focus our aspirations.